Microsoft is at a crossroads, and the operating system that follows Vista will likely mark a serious break from the past. That is, if Microsoft can figure out how to do things differently. Also, the 'MEDX' team shares desks, ideas on the look Microsoft wants.

"Jon Ellch was one of the presenters of the now infamous 'faux disclosure' at Black Hat and DEFCON last month. Ellch and co-presenter Dave Maynor have gone silent since then, fueling speculation that the entire presentation may have been a hoax. Ellch finally broke the silence in an email to the Daily Dave security mailing list over the weekend, and one thing is clear: he is chafing under the cone of silence which has been placed over the two of them."

RISC OS cannot be saved by simply open sourcing it, said RISCOS Ltd boss Paul Middleton. He added that Castle's wish to open source RISC OS "would have no effect on RISCOS Ltd's products". Paul told subscribers over the weekend: "Making RISC OS open source, or free as some people want, is not the panacea for suddenly taking RISC OS forward. No operating system can be developed solely for free."

DistroWatch has brought to light an apparant fraud by Freespire. "Several readers have emailed us to let us know that Linspire has launched what can only be classified as an attempt to tamper with our page hit ranking statistics by trying to artificially inflate the page hit ranking figures for its new community distribution - Freespire. Upon investigation, it turned out that both linspire.com and nvu.com had been deceivingly redirecting visitors to the Freespire page on DistroWatch and that the default home page of Firefox in the latest build of Freespire had also been set to the same page." A thread on the Freespire forums about this issue is quite heated.

The SkyOS team has released build 6179 of SkyOS. Highlights: "Mono 1.1.13.8 and updated MWF (System.Windows.Forms) port; embedded Gecko widget; remote command interface for applications; binary image caching; inital DDK [ed. note: trust me, Robert's making a lot of people happy with this one)." This new build also includes new ports, such as Quake III, Python, SDL with OpenGL support, and much more. You can find details in the changelog.

12 years after the project was conceived, and after a long period in which it was useable though incomplete, FreeDOS has reached version 1.0. The ISO is downloadable at SourceForge. Versions with more extras should be available soon, as should a mail-order option.

Paul Thurrott has posted the first two parts of his review of Windows Vista build 5600 (RC1) along with a list of five of his favorite features. Update: Vista has a long way to go to be finished, blogger says. RC1 is good, but it's not perfect, and NeoSmart lists the reasons. Plus, it still can't synchronize with mobile devices, even though it's supposed to be code-complete.

The Xfce development team is pleased to announce that the first release candiate of Xfce 4.4 is now available for download. A lot of bugs were fixed during the last two months and several new features were added. For example the brand new Xarchiver 0.4.0 is included, trash support was added to Thunar and xfdesktop, and the overall memory usage was reduced. See the ChangeLog for a complete list.

"Screen savers have always been a staple free software for RISC OS, with the likes of the venerable Out to Lunch, AlphaSave, and the now GPLed Delirium all acting as saviours of the CRT for many years. However, it was not until RISC OS 4 that graphical screen saver capabilities shipped as a standard part of the OS." More here. Additionally, RPCEmu has been ported to the Mac OS X platform, allowing RISC OS 4 to run alongside Apple's shiny desktop.

Patrick Volkerding has just released Slackware 11 RC4. Take a look at the changelog for more info.

This howto will show you how to store your users in LDAP and authenticate some of the services against it. It will not show how to install particular packages, as it is distribution/system dependant, instead it will focus on pure configuration of all componenets needed to have LDAP authentication/storage of users. The howto assumes that you are migrating from a regular passwd/shadow authentication, but it is also suitable for people who do it from scratch. On other business/networking software news, check this review of the Hula calendaring server and app.

What is the future of programming? I retain a romantic belief in the potential of scientific revolution. To recite one example, the invention of Calculus provided a revolutionary language for the development of Physics. I believe that there is a “Calculus of programming” waiting to be discovered, which will analogously revolutionize the way we program. Notation does matter." More here.

Version control systems are commonly used by programmers, but their benefits can easily be exploited by regular users as well. Learn how to install, configure (step-by-step) and use Subversion at home to improve control over your own set of documents.

Simon and Tim (and team) are working on a programming technology called Software Transactional Memory (STM) which provides an elegant, easy to use language-level abstraction for writing concurrent applications that is based on widely-understood conceptual constructs like Atomic operations (and, well, Transactions...). Simon, Tim and team do all the nasty locking work for you. With STM-enabled languages, you can just concentrate on the algorithms at hand and leave the low-level heavy lifting to the sub-system.