Sun Microsystems is the latest company to become a patron of the Free Software Foundation. The FSF's corporate patron program allows companies to provide financial sponsorship for the FSF in return for free license consulting services. High-profile FSF patron affiliates include prominent technology companies like Google, Nokia, IBM, Cisco, and Intel. FSF involvement represents Sun's latest attempt to take a more active role in the open-source software community.

A hacker from Malaysia has used the game-centric PPL programming language for PocketPCs and has created a replacement of the "Today" PPC screen that closely resembles that of the iPhone's. His clone is still under development, although it is already impressive what he was able to do with a few lines of code. He was even able to recreate the iPhone's scrolling effect. Nevertheless, a nice toy.

Two more articles on Beryl. The first one is on drag and drop in Beryl: "What does Beryl add to the drag and drop picture? Well, for a start, if you've got a lot of windows open, it's easier to find the target if you can see all the windows at once. Also, if you want to drop a file/text on an application on another desktop, you can do this much more easily. This is a cool little feature that allows you to drag and drop files between applications on the same desktop, or different desktops." The second one is a performance tweak for Beryl.

During FOSDEM 2007, a live CD using the Etoile desktop environment was demonstrated, and this live CD can now be downloaded (screenshots inside the link, boys and girls). Etoile is a desktop environment based on GNUstep. "This is the 0.2 prerelease that we worked on at FOSDEM 2007. There's still quite a lot of problems on it (check the bugtracker), so we expect the final 0.2 release in about a month. In the meantime, feel free to download the iso and to play with it."

Parallels has released an update to its Parallels Desktop software. The biggest update to the new version is Coherence, a feature that enables Mac users running Parallels to run and access Windows applications from their Mac desktops via virtualization rather than switching between operating systems.

"Except for a financial analysts event in July, Microsoft's incoming chief software architect has been decidedly quite. His last blog post was April Fool's Day. This morning, Ray Ozzie finally broke his silence. Ozzie answered questions, many of them leading, at the Goldman Sachs Technology Investment Symposium. There's a saying about talking much but saying little. While Ozzie shed some light on Microsoft's services - or software-as-a-service - strategy, he offered more vagaries than specifics. Still, by piecing together the little he said with the much we know about Microsoft, the hour-long Q&A illuminates Microsoft's services direction."

Lyx is an open source, structured document creation system. Conceptually, it falls somewhere between a markup editor and a word processor. The creators of Lyx have coined the term WYSIWYM (what you see is what you mean) to summarise the approach that Lyx takes to document creation.

Tom's Hardware has benchmarked Windows Vista, but somehow we missed it (we're a month late). Our apologies. "We are sure that mainstream users will appreciate the improved usability of Windows Vista, and the average office/multimedia user will likely never notice the lack of OpenGL. However, a chapter on the overall performance of Windows Vista requires more dedication."

Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2.0 share a logic flaw. The issue is actually more severe, as the two versions of the Microsoft and Mozilla browsers are not the only ones affected. In this regard, the vulnerability impacts Internet Explorer 5.01, Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 7 but also Firefox 1.5.0.9. Microsoft has stressed the fact that IE7 on Windows Vista is not affected in any manner.

WPA2, the wireless security thing, is not available on Windows XP x64, and for the 32bit version, it is not a mandatory download. "We know Microsoft is serious about security and they don't appreciate the lack of it on Windows any more than we do, but it's things like this that make people wonder. How hard would it be to label this as a recommended download via Windows Update for all x86 users - and to roll out a version with x64 support before Windows XP x64 SP2 comes out, years from now?"

"With the release of Microsoft's new Windows operating system (Vista), more and more people are looking for alternatives to Windows for various reasons. This tutorial is the second in a series of articles where I will show people who are willing to switch to Linux how they can set up a Linux desktop (Mandriva Free 2007 in this article) that fully replaces their Windows desktop, i.e. that has all software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge."

"On Friday, the KDE Project released the third in a series of development previews for the upcoming KDE 4.0 release. Dubbed 'Kludge', the 3.80.3 release includes the Sonnet language library, the new Dolphin file manager, and the Solid hardware library." Read on for an overview.

Can you ignore DDE as a programmer on Windows? "While it was a reasonable solution back in the cooperatively-multitasked world of 16-bit Windows where it was invented, the transition to 32-bit Windows was not a nice one for DDE. Specifically, the reliance on broadcasts to establish the initial DDE conversation means that unresponsive programs can jam up the entire DDE initiation process. The last shell interface to employ DDE was the communication with Program Manager to create program groups and items inside those groups. This was replaced with Explorer and the Start menu back in Windows 95. DDE has been dead as a shell interface for over ten years."

"Asus has produced the first laptop in the world that makes use of Windows Vista SideShow to support a secondary screen in the lid. This is a 2.8in screen with a QVGA resolution of 320x240, just like any number of mobile phones that are on the market. The lid of the Asus also holds 1GB of flash memory which stores a cut-down Operating System that powers SideShow and which also links to the main Vista Operating System."