On December 28th, 2005 - a day which will live in anonymity - OSNews published an editorial of mine urging hobby and research operating system developers to implement Project UDI, because otherwise we (the small/ non-mainstream/ hobby/research OS community) would always wind up stuck with mutually incompatible sets of drivers for doing the same exact things. I also proclaimed that I would implement UDI for my own operating system kernel. Bad decision.

"Microsoft finally launches the long-awaited Windows Vista today, promising better security and improved search and claiming it will be the fastest ever adopted operating system it has released. But some users have already questioned the business benefits of upgrading to Vista, citing the relative stability and security of Windows XP and a lack of compelling features in Vista. Based on using the second beta version of Vista here are the five things to get excited about Vista for - and the five things you'll hate it for."

"The ImageIO framework, introduced in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, allows applications to read and write popular image file formats. ImageIO works in conjunction with Quartz and is designed for maximum performance, convienient metadata access, and color management. As the definitive way to access image data on Mac OS X, you should consider using ImageIO in your application as a high-performance substitute for Image Importers or other image handling libraries. This article gets you started working with ImageIO, shows how to read and write data to and from Quartz, and points to some of the capabilities in working with Core Image that you can explore further on your own."

"A comprehensive feature-by-feature guide to Windows Vista. With contributions from people who actually worked on the product, this is the definitive resource to learn about Windows Vista. The Windows Vista Product Guide is available in the new Microsoft Word 2007 or the new XPS format."

El Reg has reviewed the Shuttle x100. "The Shuttle X100 is an unusual Windows PC that stands out thanks to its tiny size and stylish looks. It thoroughly deserves to reclaim the many receptionists' desks that are currently occupied by iMacs across the nation and it's ideal for duties in your living room where a noisy beige tower simply won't be tolerated."

It got little notice at the time, but Richard Stallman, the leader of the FSF, said at the fifth international GPLv3 conference in Tokyo on Nov. 21 that the Novell/Microsoft patent agreement is not in violation of the GPL version 2. Stallman said, according to a transcript published by the FSF Europe, "What has happened is, Microsoft has not given Novell a patent license, and thus, section 7 of GPL version 2 does not come into play. Instead, Microsoft offered a patent license that is rather limited to Novell's customers alone."

Not necessarily what you expect from the top managers: Halamka judged three operating systems according to a variety of criteria including their performance, user interfaces and enterprise management capabilities, such as the ability to configure applications, easily organize file systems, and establish granular security control. CIO.org followed Halamka's progress, and now they have his conclusions.

ReactOS, the open source implementation of a Windows XP/2003 compatible operating system, just published a new interview in their series of interviews with ReactOS developers. Today's interview features the main DirectX implementation developer Magnus Olsen.

Punters wondering what the RISC OS Open lads are up to may be relieved by the following sliver of news. The project to open source Castle's RISC OS 5 is awaiting the dotting of eyes and crossing of tees on its licensing paperwork, it would appear.

The third NetBSD Hackathon was held on Saturday and Sunday, November 25th and 26th, 2006, where NetBSD users and developers met on IRC to prepare NetBSD for the upcoming re-branching of NetBSD 4.0. Approximately thirty NetBSD developers and more than 140 NetBSD users joined in on the two days, paying particular attention to improving install documentation and ensure build stability. A Wiki page as a TODO list was used for the first time, an approach that is likely to be used in future hackathons. All in all, over 200 bugs have been worked on in those two days and while not all of the critical showstoppers could be fixed, valuable progress was made in identifying root causes.

The One Laptop Per Child project yesterday received its first shipment of the low-cost Linux laptops that are intended for children in emerging-economy nations, project member Chris Blizzard reports on his blog. And it runs Doom.

In a posting to the Hula mailing list, Novell has stated that it is no longer providing full-time developers to work on Hula. Hula was unleashed in February 2005 to much fanfare. Things seem to have been quite recently, despite the news that iFolder and Hula would be combined into something called Maui.

Linux Tech Daily reviews Arch64 and finds it to be a solid and fast system. Arch64 is committed to staying truly 64bit.

Opera Mini 3.0 was released today (get it here). Major new features include camera support, RSS feed reader, SSL and https support, content folding, and speed improvements. Screenshot here. Today we also celebrate here at OSNews the first hits of the Opera-based Wii browser (via a proxy hack to allow generic web browsing) and the Sony PS3 browser. We would be grateful if you could snap a picture of your TV with your gaming console rendering OSNews and send us an email with it or post a link below.