"The last piece of the openSUSE 10.2 distribution got released today. The Live DVD image has a size of 1.7 GB and can be used on every x86 compatible system with at least 512 MB of memory. It contains a base desktop system (KDE and Gnome) with applications for office, multimedia and internet usage."

Microsoft's quest to closely control the way Windows Vista can be used on PCs has taken a turn for the worse, as new information indicates that the company is breaking tradition when it comes to Windows Vista upgrades. With Windows Vista, users will not be able to use upgrade keys to initiate completely new installations. It is a change that will affect few users, but enthusiasts will certainly be amongst those pinched.

KDevelop 3.4 has been released, bringing many new features to KDE's Integrated Development Environment. The first major release in over a year closes more than 500 bugs. There is an impressive list of additional features including improved Qt 4 support, new debugging abilities, more attractive default user interface layout, and improvements for C++, Ruby, and PHP support. The developers have put together a slideshow to showcase the new features.

Bungled branding of the new Windows Live Internet services has hurt Microsoft and could affect its chance to play catch-up with Google, analysts said on Friday. On Thursday, Microsoft lowered its sales forecast for its Internet services business for the full year from 11 percent to between 3 percent and 8 percent. It also acknowledged that its search market share has dropped. Windows Live Search saw its searches drop nearly 10 percent from a year ago, while Google's rose more than 22 percent, according to figures released this week from Nielsen/NetRatings. Google has 50.8 percent market share, followed by Yahoo at 23.6 percent and Microsoft with only 8.4 percent.

The Yarra engine was designed to be a cross platform C++ gaming engine, using OpenGL for 3D graphics and OpenAL for positional sound. Unlike existing engines, Yarra was primarily designed to allow dynamic adding of programmable objects to a scene graph with handlers to control game flow. This design doesn't suite a majority of software out there, but works great for games. But the article isn't about Yarra, it's about the developers personal experiences working with Windows, MacOSX and BeOS. The article discusses the pro's and con's of each environment, and give sa very subjective opinion about the merits of each.

"So, which really is better for the desktop: Vista or Linux? I've been working with Vista since its beta days, and I started using Linux in the mid-90s. There may be other people who have worked with both more than I have, but there can't be many of them. Along the way, I've formed a strong opinion: Linux is the better of the two. But, now that Vista is on the brink of becoming widely available, I thought it was time to take a comprehensive look at how the two really compare. To do this, I decided to take one machine, install both of them on it, and then see what life was like with both operating systems on a completely even playing field."

In dueling announcements, Intel and IBM separately say they have solved a puzzle perplexing the semiconductor industry about how to reduce energy loss in microchip transistors as the technology shrinks to the atomic scale. Each company said it has devised a way to replace problematic but vital materials in the transistors of computer chips that have begun leaking too much electric current as the circuitry on those chips gets smaller. Technology experts said it is the most dramatic overhaul of transistor technology for computer chips since the 1960s and is crucial in allowing semiconductor companies to continue making ever-smaller devices that are also energy-efficient.

A report from wireless industry analyst firm ABI Research released today proclaims that the new Apple iPhone does not fall within the firm's standard definition of a smartphone, due to restrictions Apple has placed on the phone against the inclusion of third-party applications.

"Last year the Italian FreeBSD user group, GUFI, rekindled the FreeSBIE project to develop a live CD based on the FreeBSD operating system. After more than four months of development, and an equal number of beta releases, the project released FreesBIE 2.0 this month. Codenamed Clint Eastwood, the live CD is based on the recent FreeBSD 6.2 release, and is an ideal platform to experience BSD and learn how things are done in BSD land."

Six of the world's largest telecommunications companies have officially launched a non-profit organization dedicated to creating a common mobile Linux software platform. Founded by Motorola, NEC, NTT DoCoMo, Panasonic Mobile Communications, Samsung Electronics, and Vodafone, the LiMo Foundation is inviting membership and participation from application and middleware developers.

PC-BSD 1.3 was released on New Year's Eve. Dru Lavigne interviewed Kris Moore, Andrei Kolu, and Charles Landemaine of the PC-BSD release engineering team regarding the new release and their involvement within the PC-BSD community.

"The Dunc-Tank project has been the topic of much debate in the Debian community since it was launched in September last year. Aimed at overcoming Debian's notorious delays in meeting its scheduled releases, Dunc-Tank collected donations to test the effect of funding on open-source software development. It has now been more than a month since the scheduled release of Debian 4.0, codenamed etch. However, even with Dunc-Tank's funding, etch is yet to be seen. Liz Tay speaks with Debian Project Leader and Dunc-Tank mastermind Anthony Towns to find out what happened."

With holiday PC sales apparently unscathed by the lack of Windows Vista, Microsoft reported quarterly earnings Thursday that topped expectations and its own forecast. The software giant said it earned USD 2.63 billion, or 26 cents per share, on revenue of USD 12.54 billion, for the three months ended December 31. That compares with earnings of USD 3.65 billion, or 34 cents per share, on revenue of USD 11.83 billion for the same quarter a year ago.

"There have been some comments on the blog recently suggesting that the UAC dialog boxes in Windows Vista are not accessible and I just wanted to clear up the confusion here. First, to set the scene though. When a user attempts to access an application or setting that requires elevated privileges to run, they are presented with a UAC prompt, the appearance of which will vary depending on the type of user they are or the type of application that is trying to run."