There are two drawbacks to being a company that has a virtual monopoly in its biggest markets. For starters: where do you find growth? And there is always the nagging worry that someone out there is working on a rival product that just might blow you out of the water. As Andrew Grove, one of the founders of computer chip giant Intel, once put it: "Only the paranoid survive!" Software giant Microsoft is working hard to address both problems.

After my previous short first impressions 'review' of Windows Vista Build 6000, the final build, I promised you a full review which would look a bit deeper into the system, focussing on less obvious matters than appearance alone. Since there are so many new features in Windows Vista, it is very easy to lose track of them. Hence, this review will follow (where possible) a much linked-to page on Wikipedia: Features new to Windows Vista.

Yesterday morning on the openSUSE-announce list, Andreas Jaeger declared openSUSE beta5 the gold master for openSUSE 10.2. In his words "CD production is starting now and I hope to see some shiny green openSUSE 10.2 boxes on the shelves before Christmas."

Speaking to an analyst this month, executives for Apple Computer maintained that the company has no plans to incorporate virtualization technology into the final version of its Boot Camp software that will ship as part of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard next spring. "Apple indicated that it is very pleased with Parallels software and didn't feel the need to compete with its own version of embedded virtualization," Bear Stearns analyst Andy Neff wrote in a research note to clients this week.

"It's quite a challenge really: how does the Number 1 search engine on the web rewrite its search algorithm and test its effectiveness without hurting its current results and user-experience during the testing process? Sergey Brin and Larry Page seem to have figured it out: create a new search engine, and do your testing there! SearchMash.com is the evolution of Google, and should things go right, what Google will (soon enough) become. It tests a range of new features and methods of bringing information to the users' fingertips in more ways than immediately obvious to the eyes."

"There are many different methods to encrypt data using various encryption algorithms (ciphers). In this document I describe in short how to encrypt a device with one of the most contemporary methods, using dm-crypt and LUKS. Actually, devices cannot be encrypted. It's the block devices which are volumes that can be. This means that you can encrypt a hard disk partition, a ZIP disk, a usb flash stick, or even a volume within a file."

The Iyonix-only version 2 of the RISC OS Firefox port was released this weekend. Developer Peter Naulls made the open source web browser available for free download after generous punters donated a grand in cash to the project in little over a fortnight. A second release could be posted online in time for Christmas day if Peter secures more funding. Version 2 has no RISC OS-style menus, the iconbar icon has been removed, and the while browser does support secure 'https' websites, users will have to manually verify the identity of certain sites. Peter also hopes to use the NetSurf Unicode engine in a future release to display non-Latin characters.

"A federal judge on Thursday gutted SCO Group's USD 5 billion, Linux-related lawsuit against IBM - renewing debate about the Utah company's future. Concluding a six-week review, US District Judge Dale Kimball upheld federal Magistrate Brooke Wells' June decision to strike down two-thirds of SCO's allegations. The Lindon-based software company contends IBM violated its contract and copyrights when it allegedly leaked SCO-owned Unix code into the freely-distributed Linux operating system.

"Today welcomes Vista to market, at least to the businesses that have early access to Vista. While Vista brings promises for better security – IPv6 kernel, whole disk encryption and more – it only marks the client phase for Microsoft Network Access Protection. Network Access Protection requires support for both client and server which means enterprises will have to write until the end of 2007 when Windows Longhorn Server is available to fully deploy NAP. Many companies need NAC now and can't wait another year, as evidenced by a recent Infonetics Research study that suggests 60 percent of North American large enterprises will have NAC deployed by the end of 2008."

Linux users have been salivating over Trolltech's promised Greenphone for the better part of a year. The "open" Linux phone platform, powered by Trolltech's Qtopia 4 embedded software stack, is bundled with a Qtopia software development kit (SDK) designed to kick-start mobile Linux application development. The first batch of devices has now shipped, and I spent a couple of weeks with a review unit. While it's an interesting package, it's only a first step and in no way a finished product.

Microsoft announced the availability of Windows Vista, Office 2007 and Exchange 2007 for businesses on Nov. 30, an event company CEO Steve Ballmer said was the "biggest launch we've ever done." After delivering a media address at the Nasdaq Stock Exchange in New York to celebrate the product availability, Ballmer sat down with eWEEK Senior Editor Peter Galli to talk about why he feels this is a new day for Microsoft, developers and its customers. CNet has more.

"DirectX 10 is probably the most important revolution in games development, at least since the introduction of the programmable shader in DirectX 8.0. Because of the way that Microsoft has designed the new driver model, DirectX 10 will only be available for Windows Vista users and there will not be a version released for Windows XP. Along with DirectX 10, Windows Vista will come with DirectX 9.0Ex - this is because pre-DirectX 10 hardware will not work under the new API due to the complete overhaul."

"Last month, I thought I left RISC OS. After 19 years of using Acorn or Acorn-derived computers, my love affair is no longer. I sit here writing this on my Mac Mini, and very happy I am with it too. My Iyonix lies abandoned - still sitting under the desk here, but not connected. And not actually used for some time. And it's weird - because, in some strange way, I thought I would be using RISC OS forever. In January 2005, I said: 'There's people who annoy me on the RISC OS scene, and I still wouldn't think of leaving. The nice people more than cancel it out, and besides - I just couldn't really do without using RISC OS.' So what changed?"

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.