Underground hackers are hawking zero-day exploits for Microsoft's new Windows Vista operating system at USD 50000 a pop, according to computer security researchers at Trend Micro. The Windows Vista exploit - which has not been independently verified - was just one of many zero-days available for sale at an auction-style marketplace infiltrated by the Tokyo-based anti-virus vendor.

"Microsoft has a problem. Vista, its long-awaited update to the Windows operating system, can't run the current version of SQL Server. The company is working on a SQL upgrade that is compatible with Vista - called SQL Server 2005 Express Service Pack 2 - but it's in beta and can be licensed only for testing purposes. Microsoft hasn't set a release date for the new SQL program. So companies looking to install Vista, which went on sale to corporate customers Nov. 30, are going to have to get their database management software someplace else."

A French user has discovered that ZFS is now 'officially' supported in Leopard , while testing the latest build of Apple's upcoming operating system. Indeed it is now possible to create disk images or partitions formated in ZFS (screen capture included). However, it seems that it is not possible yet to install the OS on a ZFS partition.

eWeek's Peter Coffee has compiled his idea of the 25 killer applications of all time. "Microsoft's Vista has widely inspired the 'Why do I need that?' question, which past 'killer applications' have answered in different ways for different platforms during three decades of personal computing."

As Apple and Dell continue wrestling with the degree of false value unreported options grants gave their respective companies, both announced they would be delaying their quarterly earnings filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

The Linux kernel has been updated with several serviceability improvements, chiefly around the kdump and SystemTap features. The kdump enhancements should improve the ability to reliably and quickly create crash dumps that can be analysed offline. The new SystemTap features enable IT professionals to debug a running system in real-time without affecting performance or recompiling.

"All too often people talk about the disadvantages of the Windows operating system: it has too many security flaws, it is not properly patched, it is not security oriented… Until the much talked about Vista system finally reaches our computers, there will still be plenty of time to protest. However, with the new malware dynamic, the idea that malware is restricted to specific operating systems is becoming anachronistic. It no longer matters whether the victim is a home-user or a company employee. It is now irrelevant whether the system administrator is just someone who lives round the corner or a highly qualified IT manager."

GNU Classpath 0.93 'Dreamland', a core class library for the Java programming language, has been released with lots of enhancements (free swing, html, corba, new i/o, graphics2d/cairo support). The release announcement also details pointers to supported applications and screenshots, the status and future of the 1.4 and 1.5 generics branches. An update on the Summer of Code student work. Plus some prelimenary ideas on cooperating with the Sun GPL OpenJDK Java project. And the GNU Classpath commitments to the Free Software community for the future of various projects around GNU Classpath, the users and GNU/Linux distros relying on GNU Classpath.

Google has added another piece of search software to its arsenal, with the launch of Google Patent Search. The patent search site, launched as a beta on Wednesday night, is designed to sift through the approximately 7 million U.S. patents by a variety of parameters including filing date, issue date, patent number and inventor.

"It doesn't matter what you (or tech reviewers) think of Windows Vista; sooner or later, it's what most people will have on their PCs. In that light, it's fortunate that Vista is better looking, better designed and better insulated against the annoyances of the Internet. At the very least, it's well equipped to pull the world's PCs along for the next five years - or whenever the next version of Windows drops down the chimney." More here. Free registration might be required.

"There are probably a lot of features and functions that Apple could -- and probably will -- add to OS X. But we're not pointing out missing features; we're focusing on 15 of the little things already in OS X that need refinement or rethinking based on our everyday use of Macs." More here.

"Chapter 5 of the FreeBSD Handbook provides an excellent overview for understanding and configuring the X Window system. Today's article goes beyond the Handbook to demonstrate some of the cool things you can do with your FreeBSD system and other systems running X."

"There has been a lot of discussion in the past few months about RPM - its present state, its future plans, and its leadership team. In particular, the Fedora Project has received numerous requests asking us, "what are you guys doing about RPM?" Here is our answer: The Fedora Project is leading the creation of a new community around RPM. One in which the leaders can come from Fedora, from Red Hat, from Novell, from Mandriva, or from anywhere. Job #1 is to take the current RPM codebase and clean it up, and in doing so work with all the other people and groups who rely on RPM to build a first-rate upstream project."

Microsoft has released to manufacturing Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1, which features fixes for user-reported issues. Service Pack 1 of the development platform also includes more than 70 improvements for common development scenarios, including new processor support for code generation and profiling, as well as performance and scale improvements in Microsoft's Team Foundation Server.