"It's out love for Ubuntu that I'm being so harsh in this review. Look where we're at -- 7.04, a number of significant releases since 4.10 Warty three years ago -- and it still can't manage the display properly. I had great expectations for 7.04, and unfortunately they're not all met. If you're a fanboy, don't read on, because I'll shatter your fragile world." More at APCMag.

More information is trickling out about the new Amiga hardware. In an email to Amiga dealers, Bill McEwen, CEO of Amiga, Inc., writes: "As mentioned in the press release we are in the final stages with the design of new hardware and getting them into production. Something that will be different than what happened with the AmigaOne is that we will be purchasing these new machines in the more than 1,000 units per order. This will allow us to get better pricing and quality for all of you. The specs for the sub 500.00 machines will be out on Monday and the more expensive machine the following week. Production will begin soon and they will be ready this summer."

"Wireless networking on Linux is entering a new era. An era of bliss and ease; where users and network administrators have abundant time for relaxing lie-abouts on sunny warm hills because their wireless systems are humming along contentedly, instead of being vexing and unreliable. OK, so maybe it's not going to be quite that Utopian, but things are definitely looking up, thanks to a lot of hard work by a lot of talented developers. So what's going to be different? A brand-new wireless LAN kernel stack, which is going to reduce the current WLAN herd-of-cats approach to a single unified subsystem that supports all wireless drivers."

George Ou compares Microsoft Office 2007 to OpenOffice 2.2 in memory and CPU usage using the OOXML and ODF file formats. The conclusion according to Ou: "We can see that the OpenOffice.org ODF XML parser (while vastly improved) is still about 5 times slower than Microsoft's OOXML parser. OpenOffice.org also seems to consume nearly 4 times the amount of RAM to hold the same data. While OpenOffice.org continues to have fewer features than Microsoft Office, it continues to consume far more resources than Microsoft."

This article describes techniques you can use to create new levels of usefulness in your dynamically generated charts with Perl and GD. Cook up some automatically generated graphs for your organizational meetings or live enterprise directory data. Annotate the charts with readable text that delivers more information than the standard pie chart. Using the power of GD and Perl, you can link various data and images together to create sophisticated charts that will help bring visual interest to your applications.

"At APC we've been running the Beta 2 edition of Windows Home Server for the past two months and it's acquitted itself surprisingly well - no doubt a reflection on the time this 'server for the rest of us' spent in the Redmond skunkworks. There's still some 'fit and finish' to appear before it hits the Release Candidate milestone around Q3, prior to the platform's debut towards the end of this year - but from what we've seen so far, we'd rate Windows Home Server as one of Microsoft's most polished and most impressive 1.0 releases to date. Here's a walkthrough gallery of screenshots from the Beta 2 build of Windows Home Server." There's also a screenshot gallery for Longhorn Server Beta 3.

"One of the oldest virtualization products, Win4Lin, is starting to show signs of aging. Win4Lin flourished in 2000, when competition was sparse and expensive. But seven years on, not only are there several virtualization products, but almost half a dozen are available for free. With no visible improvements over its previous version, Win4Lin Pro Desktop 4.0 is now outdated and outclassed."

"After looking around and playing with Ubuntu 7, it's safe to say that the features, ease of use and stability of this distro may be enough to edge Linux desktops into corporate offices. Given that Ubuntu supports a VMWare-like environment, you can bet that Ubuntu will crop up in many test labs as well." More at EarthWeb.

"RISC OS is said to be used in set top boxes scattered across the world, and a mobile phone developer reportedly bought up a load of RISC OS 5 kit. But some applications of ROS are much closer to home. Martin Hansen reports on the growing use of RISC OS in the timber frame housing industry."

From time to time, we like take a break from technology news to query our readers to find out details about our community. Previously, we asked you to show us your desktop. This time, we ask "What's your favorite movie?" Is it sci-fi or comedy? Action or maybe drama? Share your favorites so we can check them out! I'll start: while I'm tempted to say The Red Violin, I'm not sure there's a better screenplay than The Usual Suspects.

"An increasing number of people get interested in the progress of Haiku USB and they start to ask questions about the completeness and usability of the stack. Also whether and how to use the Haiku USB stack under R5 is an interesting question. Instead of telling the story individually it probably makes more sense to sum everything up in a post for everyone to read."

AfterStep 2.2.5 has been released. The AfterStep team released the following changelog: "Everything got touched. It's all good." You can get the latest release from the download page; if you have 2.1.0 or later already installed you can use a smaller upgrade package.

Despite all the anti-malware roadblocks built into Windows Vista, a senior Microsoft official is lowering the security expectations, warning that viruses, password-stealing Trojans and rootkits will continue to thrive as malware authors adapt to the new operating system. "There is no guarantee that malware can't hijack the elevation process or compromise an elevated application," Russinovich said after providing a blow-by-blow description of how UAC works in tandem with Internet Explorer (with Protected Mode) to limit the damage from malicious files. Even in a standard user world, he stressed that malware can still read all the user's data; can still hide with user-mode rootkits; and can still control which applications (anti-virus scanners) the user can access.

"It's amazing how many people who have Microsoft Windows everywhere look flummoxed when asked whether Windows is their "standard" for desktop computing. The reason they are thrown by this question is typically because they haven't thought about it that way before. In all likelihood, they never actually made a proactive decision to select Windows, in the sense of looking at alternatives and making a conscious objective choice. So how did they end up with it?"