"Francois Revol, a.k.a. mmu_man, commited this Saturday to the Haiku's source tree his GoogleFS, a project he started working on about 2 to 3 years ago. GoogleFS is basically a queries bookmark, meaning you can search Google right from your Desktop, be it Haiku or ZETA, and the results are displayed like a regular query you run nowadays."

"It's all too easy to get caught up in the million dollar marketing engine as we approach the consumer release of Windows Vista, so lets not forget that it isn't the second coming, and by all counts is an upgrade you can do without. There are many lists out there on why to get Vista, so here's ours on why not to." Update: I have written a rebuttal on my weblog. Update II: Another rebuttal.

The Alloy Analyzer is a tool developed by MIT for analyzing models written in Alloy, a simple structural modeling language based on first-order logic. Alloy can be used to detect conceptual mistakes in the model before the coding starts. Scientific American has published an article about it.

"A conversation has cropped up since the recent publication of a paper scrutinizing how Windows handles digital rights management, especially for HD video. I've since looped back with Dave Marsh, a Lead Program Manager responsible for Windows' handling of video, to learn from him the implications involved and to learn to what extent the paper's assertions are accurate. The following is an article Dave has put together to address the misconceptions in the paper, followed by answers to what we expect will be the most frequent questions in the minds of our customers."

Work by Microsoft's R&D group played a part in revamping Windows, a researcher said Friday, but not all the toil made it into Vista. Microsoft Research contributed to the SuperFetch effort, a feature within Vista that predicts which applications are used when, then pre-loads them so that they're instantly available. "As part of a long term set of projects, we want to teach the computer to learn from users to make the machine more proactive," says Eric Horvitz, a principal researcher with Microsoft's R&D as well as the president-elect of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence. "We want to use the system's idle time to make things punchier."

"openSUSE 10.2 is the latest release of the community project, after the somewhat disappointing 10.1 release, where you were liable to not have package management actually working. Hopefully, we'll discover no such flaw this time." More here.

"SeaMonkey 1.1 is now available. Powered by the same engine as Firefox 2 and the upcoming Thunderbird 2, SeaMonkey 1.1 includes numerous enhancements including more visible security indicators in the browser and enhanced phishing detection for e-mail, a new tagging system for e-mail that supersedes labels, support for multi-line tooltips in web pages, and previews images in tab tooltips. Other changes include inline spell checking in the browser, an updated version of ChatZilla, and a significantly improved startup script on Linux. See the release notes for a complete list of changes."

A store owner in a bad neighborhood must balance safety against commerce. Too many locks and bars will keep away customers with the crooks. Based on Microsoft Watch reader feedback, Internet Explorer 7 sacrifices too much usability in the interest of safety.

For independent software vendors, one of the major problems in supporting GNU/Linux is the variety of package management systems. However, if the Free Standards Group has its way, the next version of the Linux Standard Base will solve that problem by providing an application programming interface that acts as a bridge between the major package systems and software installers. Ian Murdock, CTO of the Free Standards Group, says the solution could be included in the most widely used distributions by early 2008.

"On January 30th Microsoft releases to consumers the newest version of its operating system, called Windows Vista. Although the company said on January 17th that it would make Vista available for sale and download online, most people will buy the upgrade in old-fashioned boxes, just as they did back in 1995. But this time, despite plenty of razzmatazz, few customers will be queuing up to buy a copy."

"Bitrock's InstallBuilder and Macrovision's Install Anywhere Enterprise edition are tools for building third-party software installers. InstallBuilder uses Qt widgets, while Install Anywhere requires a Java Virtual Machine, but both are cross-platform, multi-lingual, proprietary tools that are available in downloadable demos. Both, too require minimal expertise to use. When run in wizard mode, Install Anywhere is more basic than InstallBuilder and suffers in comparison, but, when run in Advanced Designer mode, it eclipses its rival with a huge set of options."

With the imminent release of Windows Vista to consumers this month, Linus Torvalds, the father of Linux, has claimed Microsoft's latest desktop effort is over-hyped and not a revolutionary advancement. "I don't actually think that something like Vista will change how people work that much," Torvalds told Computerworld. "I think it, to some degree, has been over-hyped as being something completely new and I don't actually think it is."

"Did the Microsoft-Novell deal really have anything in it to promote interoperability? What's next for Samba? Should we call it "GNU/Solaris"? What's the first rule of Google? And what goes in your .burritorc file? We ask the only person who can answer all." Note that the first linked page starts playing the podcast immediately.

"Rails 1.2 is finally available in all it's glory. We got the RESTful flavor with new encouragement for resource-oriented architectures. We're taking mime types, HTTP status codes, and multiple representations of the same resource serious. And of course there's the international pizzazz of multibyte-safe UTF-8 wrangling."