Microsoft has announced that it will not be releasing any new versions of its Visual FoxPro development software past Version 9.0, but the company will continue to support the technology through 2015. Instead of releasing new versions of FoxPro, Microsoft will release core portions of the FoxPro software to its CodePlex community development site, said Alan Griver, a group manager within the Microsoft Visual Studio team, which leads the FoxPro team.

"Stardock released WindowBlinds 5.5 today. WindowBlinds is a program that enables users to customize the look and feel of the graphical user interface of Microsoft Windows. WindowBlinds 5.5 is a major update in that it is the first program to allow users to change the look and feel of Windows Vista. For Windows Vista users, WindowBlinds 5.5 makes use of the new hardware accelerated Desktop Window Manager to ensure the highest level of performance."

With an absence of fanfare, but otherwise on schedule, Microsoft opened up its download page for Service Pack 2 of Windows Server 2003, both 32-bit and 64-bit editions. Perhaps most importantly, enterprises won't have to wait until Longhorn to be able to utilize Windows Deployment Services, the company's new image-based system for pre-composed, remote Windows installations.

"Triggered by recent examples of bad behavior and dissatisfaction among developers and users alike, the Gentoo Council has drafted a new Code of Conduct that will be enforced for both developers and users. The draft of the Code of Conduct is currently being discussed on the Gentoo-dev mailing list."

"When Bill Hilf came from IBM to join Microsoft three years ago, the company's stance on open source vacillated wildly. It would swing from outright indifference to overt nastiness. Today, something else is unfolding: Microsoft is striking a surprising balance. It has stopped dismissing open source licensing and community development as dangerous folly or evil foe, and is looking for a way to both compete and co-exist."

When Windows Vista was released in early 2007, a significant amount of attention was given to the new user interface called Aero, that sets out to give Windows a slicker look and feel and promises more fluid operation. But eye-candy aside, how does the new Aero interface stack up compared to Windows XP and Mac OS X in terms of low-level user interface efficiency? "Windows Vista increases the amount of user interface friction of the operating system. Windows XP and particularly Mac OS X performed better than Windows Vista in these benchmarks."

While the US courts recently reaffirmed Microsoft's FAT patents, the German Patent Federal Court has just dismissed the patent for use in Germany. According to a report in the German news publication Heise Online, the court has denied the protection that the European Patent Office granted to Microsoft under EP 0618540 for a "common namespace for long and short filenames". This was based on Microsoft's U.S. Patent No. 5,758,352. The German Patent Court stated that the patent claims Microsoft made are "not based on inventive activity".

"The CentOS development team is pleased to announce the release of CentOS 5 (Beta) for i386 and x86_64. It is available via beta.CentOS.org mirrors and bittorrent. This release corresponds to the upstream vendor EL5 beta2 release."

"One of the biggest complaints about Linux, particularly from developers, is the speed with which Linux boots. By default, Linux is a general-purpose operating system that can serve as a client desktop or server right out of the box. Because of this flexibility, Linux serves a wide base but is suboptimal for any particular configuration. This article shows you options to increase the speed with which Linux boots, including two options for parallelizing the initialization process. It also shows you how to visualize graphically the performance of the boot process."

After yesterday's trip down memory lane with OS/2 2.1, I will today take you even further back. With the help of the recently released Apple Lisa emulator, ToastyTech (another invaluable tool for (G)UI fanatics such as myself) updated its set of screenshots from the Lisa Office System (version 3), the first commercially available graphical user interface for home use. "This Lisa emulator tries to give you the full experience of using an Apple Lisa. The backdrop is a photo of a Lisa that changes as the power light comes on and when you 'insert' a disk. It even plays the sound of the Lisa disk drive running as you access the disk. To start the emulator you must press the 'Power button' just as you would start a real Lisa." Read more for a few notes.

I have been both a Windows and Linux user for a long time (I started with Windows 3.1 and RedHat 5.1 kernel 2.0.x if I recall correctly) and have stuck with both for various reasons. I'm writing this article not as a DIY lofty vantage platform by which I can bash MS nor as a 'Why you should switched' flame bate piece, but have tried to keep an open mind and reflect the actually experience that I have had with Vista so far, regardless of OS political propaganda. Please keep in mind this is still an opinion piece and most probably to be taken with a pinch of salt.

Haiku has its first distribution, but it's not coming from the Haiku development team. Pingwinek has just released GNU/Haiku 0.1.0, what is claimed to be (probably?) the first distribution of the Haiku operating system, coming from Poland. According to the Pingwinek home page, GNU/Haiku consists of the base Haiku system plus 40 packages ported from the Pingwinek GNU/Linux distribution, and it includes the GCC 2.95.3 compiler, several simple games, SDL, Midnight Commander, and ncurses. GNU/Haiku can be run from a HDD, in QEMU and VMWare or as a Live CD. Screenshots are available, and the images can be download from this page.

Hi-Mobile.net sent us in a review unit of Panasonic's flagship point-n-shoot camera, the LX2. This camera kept the first place among other similar products in the past year with its two unique features: HD video recording and wide-angle for landscape shooting.

While browsing some OS/2 news websites, I stumbled upon the usage tutorial included in OS/2 2.1 at GUIdebook (an invaluable website for (G)UI fanatics such as myself). To set the mood: "This tutorial describes how you work with the objects (small pictures) on your screen. Some objects are folders, which contain other objects. Your screen is called your desktop (pictured on the right), which is a folder itself." Have fun, boys and girls, in 1993-style.