Microsoft will end support for Windows XP Service Pack 1 and SP 1a on 10 October, leaving users no option but to upgrade to SP2 if they wish to continue to receive support for crucial components, including security software. The move to drop support for SP1 is in line with Microsoft's stated strategy for support. According to its guidelines, Microsoft guarantees to provide 'mainstream support' for a full product for five years, but will only guarantee to support a Service Pack for 12 months after the launch of the next version of that pack.

Ars reviews Firefox 2 RC2, and concludes: "I personally never managed to get any of the third party spellcheck extensions to work right, and the availability of spellcheck support alone was enough to convince me to use 2.0 pre-releases rather than the 1.5.0.7 build that comes with Ubuntu. All things considered, RC2 adequately meets most of my needs, but doesn't exceed my expectations as major releases have in the past. Hopefully, development on the Places system and other delayed features will make future releases more interesting."

Blogger Kiyoshi Saruwatari claims that Nintendo's upcoming Wii console runs on the open source Linux operating system. According to Saruwatari, who claims to be a Nintendo insider, the company reduced development costs by leveraging open source software and incorporating a Linux kernel into the Wii software platform. A wide variety of additional features like web browsing, video playback, file management, and emulation all run on Nintendo's custom Linux operating system, which uses a proprietary interface. Unlike the other specialized software components, the actual games will not run under the Linux platform, and can be played without booting Linux if the user holds down the "A" button while the Wii is starting up.

Learn about the GNU Project Debugger macro capability that allows you to personalize and customize GDB to have just the tools you need. The previous article, 'Fun with strace and GDB', covered the basics of using these tools to explore your system and attach to programs that are already running to see what they were doing.

A declaration by SCO's backer, BayStar has revealed that the software Giant Microsoft had more links to the anti-Linux bad-boy. The declaration made by from BayStar general partner Larry Goldfarb has turned up as part of IBM's evidence to the court. Goldfarb says that Baystar had been chucking USD 50 million at SCO despite concerns that it had a high cash burn rate. He also claims that former Microsoft senior VP for corporate development and strategy Richard Emerson discussed "a variety of investment structures wherein Microsoft would 'backstop', or guarantee in some way, BayStar's investment". Thanks to The Inq for the summary.

This article deals with various Windows XP-related myths, grouped in four sections: requirements, reliability, optimisation, and security. I do miss Adam and Jamie, though. This is actually the first webpage I have ever seen that actually includes a changelog. A surprisingly simple yet handy idea.

Most people haven't heard of QNX Software, though they've likely come in contact with it. The real-time operating system is used where software failure can lead to catastrophic consequences, even death - from high-speed trains to air traffic control towers to highway toll systems. It's also used in more than 100 different types of cars on the road.

So, Windows is no longer cutting the mustard and you need a more scalable, reliable and higher performing environment. You may be running Oracle Financials, PeopleSoft or any of a number of ERP applications. Or you may be looking to deploy a new Web portal with something like IBM WebSphere with a DB2 backend or WebLogic and Oracle.

"I've read many articles about Internet Explorer 7's new security features and coupled with the imminent release of Vista this got me interested. I recall seeing a rather funny screenshot (which I found on the internet), which showed Internet Explorer 6 in Windows XP stuffed full of spyware/toolbars/etc. I wanted to see if IE7 was any better than that screenshot of IE6, how would it cope with a user that simply clicked 'yes/allow/next/accept' to everything that was presented to them. In addition, I wanted to see how the User Account Control reacted to this, and in the end, could I restore IE7 to it's former glory."

"This tutorial describes how to set up MySQL master-master replication. We need to replicate MySQL servers to achieve high-availability. In my case I need two masters that are synchronized with each other so that if one of them drops down, other could take over and no data is lost. Similarly when the first one goes up again, it will still be used as slave for the live one. Here is a basic step by step tutorial, that will cover the mysql master and slave replication and also will describe the mysql master and master replication."

A lot has been said about the new user interface for Windows Vista. In this chapter from his latest book, Paul McFedries runs through the foundation, functions, and eye candy for Vista's latest UI.

As your projects become more sophisticated, you will need a better way to reuse and customize existing software. To facilitate code reuse, especially the reuse of algorithms, C# includes a feature called generics. Mark Michaelis discusses generics in C# in this sample chapter.

Amiga Inc, thought to be dead after stopping all communication with the Amiga community, have reappeared. The long spell of silence was broken when they answered 25 questions from the readers at Amiga.org. In the answers, the CEO of Amiga Inc, Bill McEwen revealed some information that once again brought back some hope in the Amiga community. Hyperion Entertainment and their partners have been busy working on Amiga OS4, which has been in available in pre-release form since April 2004. The final release is held back by the lack of suitable PPC motherboards to run OS4 on, but this seems to be finally resolved, and a final release is expected this year. The Amiga.org interview left a lot of questions unanswered, especially with regards to Amiga Inc's plans for OS5. So to get a clearer picture of where they are headed, I asked Bill McEwen to answer some questions."

"We regret to announce a slip of the Fedora Core 6 release schedule. A few issues are still present that we would like to see fixed before we release: a possible ext3 corruption bug; package ordering issues on multilib platforms (x86_64, ppc64); SELinux issue with updating kernels on ppc platforms; and iSCSI based installations are not functional. There are obviously other issues and bugs still open, but these are the ones that are really 'blocking' the release. To give enough time to fix these issues, we've extended the release date 6 days to Tuesday, Oct 17th. Freezes are still in place (even more so now)."