"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."

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".

"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."

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.

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.

"Magnussoft launched this week their new online hardware database, which is open to everyone using ZETA to add their own workinig (or not) piece of hardware to the database. They also hope it'll be a valuable tool and resource for anyone wanting to try ZETA out on their machines, but aren't sure if their equipment will work on ZETA or not." Thanks to IsComputerOn for pointing this out.