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."

LinuxLookup reviews the Qtopia Greenphone, and concludes: Trolltech is attempting to 'ride on the shoulders' of such a community, hoping that their new platform will take off. Some of the steps they are taking are very good, such as providing a downloadable Community SDK (with licensing limitation), so that a budding software developer can write and test code without having to invest the whopping USD 700 for the hardware. In my opinion, the platform definitely has potential, but as far as being a truly hacker friendly device, I think the above license agreement says it all." Elsewhere, Penang is readying a Linux-based dual-mode WiFi GSM/GPRS phone.

Microsoft has released a list of 800 applications that should run properly on its new Windows Vista operating system. As expected, virtually all of Microsoft's own offerings are on the list - including the latest Office 2007 products. Also included are a host of business and security applications from vendors ranging from Intuit to Trend Micro. And desktop applications from Google, which ramped up its rivalry with Microsoft earlier this week with the introduction of online business applications, made the cut. However, noticeable by their absence are applications from a number of the world's biggest software companies, including Adobe Systems, IBM, and Symantec.

"At Macworld 2007, the Apple Developer Connection hosted 48 developers in the ADC Developer Pavilion. Located just next to the Apple booth, these developers were able to present their products at the biggest Mac customer event of the year. Thousands of attendees flowed through the ADC Developer Pavilion, talked with the developers, and test drove the products. To find out more about the developers in the pavilion, we interviewed nine of them." There's also a set of pictures. In one of the pictures, the banner uses Comic Sans.

It's been a long road to recovery, but after years of mediocre releases, and months of delays in the development process, FreeBSD is finally back on its feet with 6.2-RELEASE. Though it is an excellent operating system, even this latest version offers few or no competitive advantages over Solaris or the other BSDs in a server role, and can never hope to compete with commercial GNU/Linux distributions for desktop computers. FreeBSD 6.2 is what FreeBSD 5.0 needed to be, and for those who have already switched to other operating systems, there are few or no compelling reasons to go back. More here.

Apparently, Matt Dillion has decided to roll his own filesystem for DragonFly. "Here is my initial outline of the filesystem design. It is open for discussion. Please feel to ask questions for anything you do not understand. I do not intend to start coding anything for at least two weeks. There are currently two rough spots in the design. First, how to handle segment overflows in a multi-master environment. Such overflows can occur when the individual masters or slaves have different historical data retention policies. Second, where to store the regeneratable indexes."