As the final runup to Vista RTM continues, Microsoft has announced that the .NET Framework 3.0 (formerly WinFX) has RTMed and is available on Microsoft Downloads. This is a significant milestone for the Developer Division, and delivers on some of the promises of Windows Vista programmability on earlier platforms.

Lots of Haiku and Zeta news this weekend. Firstly, the latest Haiku image is now making use of the new, improved Deskbar and Tracker with support for scalable vector graphics. Also Stephan Assmus' award winning icon set, Stippi, has been included. Secondly, better support for Japanese is now available on Zeta. Thirdly, there is now a driver for Intel Extreme chipsets for both Zeta and Haiku. Lastly, BeOSNews.com has a guide on using Aspell on BeOS.

"The Debian project is pleased to announce the fourth update of its stable distribution Debian GNU/Linux 3.1. This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the stable release, along with a few adjustment to serious problems. Those who frequently update from security.debian.org won't have to update many packages and most updates from security.debian.org are included in this update."

If there's one machine that shaped the future of the computer business more than any other, it is almost certainly the Apple I. And what do you get when you bring together four of the team - including Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak - behind that groundbreaking computer? A lovefest .

Microsoft said Monday it has finalized the code for Office 2007, marking the completion of the first of two key projects for the software giant. Both Windows Vista and Office are slated for release to big businesses on Nov. 30. Microsoft has issued near-final test releases of Vista, but has not yet completed the final, or 'gold', code for the new operating system.

"Someone just asked me whether, now that Novell's become buddies with Microsoft, I'll be turning away from Novell/SUSE as one of my favorite Linux distributions. My answer is no. I'm sticking with SUSE Linux on both my desktops and servers. Here's why."

On BBRV's blog: "The PegasosPPC will be on sale this week for $399. Neither the board nor an upgrade card will be produced again by Genesi or bplan. It is the end of an era for us. It has been a great experience."

In this article there is an introductionary look into the vDSP and vecLib libraries which are part of the Accelerate framework on Mac OS X. By using properly aligned arrays and manually vectorized code you can increase the performance (5-10 times) of your hot loops by large amounts.

Get inside the Solaris FS by looking at physical I/O, latency, top end activity, caches, and statistics.

David Chisnall takes a look behind the scenes at Apple's upcoming revamp of the Objective-C language. As with any new language, some things are good, some are ugly, and some are both.

"This guide describes how to install and use xen-tools, xen-shell, and Argo on a Debian system. All three packages provide useful tools for the administration of virtual Xen machines. Xen-tools is a collection of Perl scripts that allow you to easily create, update, and delete Xen guest domains. The xen-shell provides a command-line interface to owners of Xen domains so that they can manage their Xen domains without the help of the server administrator. And with Argo, you can control Xen domains through a web interface or through a menu on the command line. All three packages were developed for Debian systems, but might work on other distributions as well."

Some interesting bits of his blog entry in which De Icaza replies to emails he has received concerning the Novell-Microsoft deal: "I do not know of any patents which Mono infringes. (...) Although I did not take part of the actual negotiations, and was only told about this deal less than a week before the announcement, I had been calling for a long time for a collaboration between Microsoft and Open Source and Microsoft and Novell. (...) Similar deals have been done in the past, in 1997 Microsoft signed a similar deal with Apple, and Apple used that agreement and the incoming monies to turn the company around. Sun signed a similar agreement with Microsoft in 2004, which at the time I realized enabled Sun to ship Mono on Solaris (which we already supported at that time)."

"I am a linguist by training. Long before I delved into free software and was snagged by the quagmire of marketing, I pondered the marvels of morphology, the grimness of grammar and the splendor of semantics. It is only natural then that my wrangling criticism of industry-speak, in both technical and literary modes, is informed by ingrained linguistic sensibilities, descriptive and proscriptive. Given my background, I find it vexing when open source is used as a verb."

NetBSD 3.0.2 and 3.1 have been released simultaneously. NetBSD 3.0.2 is a critical/security-only update for NetBSD 3.0, while NetBSD 3.1 brings much broader fixes and improvements, including: Xen3 domU support, LFS stability improvements, Postfix 2.2.11, BIND 9.3.2, msdosfs write optimization, addition of scan_ffs/scan_lfs tools, driver updates, and many, many other bug fixes and enhancements. Binaries and ISO's for both releases are available via FTP and BitTorrent.