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DOS 4.0, Zune, and Windows 8 are but a few of the landmarks among 25 years of failures Redmond-style, writes InfoWorld's Woody Leonhard in a round-up of Microsoft's 13 worst missteps of all time. 'Over the years, Microsoft's made some incredibly good moves, even if they felt like mistakes at the time: mashing Word and Excel into Office; offering Sabeer Bhatia and cohorts $400 million for a year-old startup; blending Windows 98 and NT to form Windows 2000; sticking a weird Israeli motion sensor on a game box; buying Skype for an unconscionable amount of money. (The jury's still out on the last one.) Along the way, Microsoft has had more than its fair share of bad mistakes; 2012 alone was among the most tumultuous years in Microsoft history I can recall. This year you can bet that Redmond will do everything in its power to prove 2012 naysayers wrong. To do so, Microsoft must learn from the following dirty baker's dozen of its most dreck-laden decisions, the ones that have had the very worst consequences, from a customer's point of view.'

"For years I've tried my damnedest to get away from C. Too simple, too many details to manage, too old and crufty, too low level. I've had intense and torrid love affairs with Java, C++, and Erlang. I've built things I'm proud of with all of them, and yet each has broken my heart. They've made promises they couldn't keep, created cultures that focus on the wrong things, and made devastating tradeoffs that eventually make you suffer painfully. And I keep crawling back to C."

Anyone who has turned on a shortwave radio in the past decade knows it's a wasteland out there, to the chagrin of nostalgic old geeks like me. But this technology sector is also one poised to explode with innovation thanks to software-defined radio. From H-Online: "Software-defined radio promises to the complexity in radio systems a software problem. The principle is simple and, in the ideal setup, an antenna is connected directly to analogue-to-digital converters for receiving signals and digital-to-analogue converters for transmitting them, with software running on an attached processor taking care of everything else." Your computer is about to become more useful than ever.

This week the folks on the webOS forum got into an interesting and productive discussion about how webOS can fit into the current world where iOS and Android seem to have completely stitched up the market. Even Windows Phone 8 is having trouble getting a toe-hold! But there is hope.

The mostly-morubund Hurd project is well known for what it's not: the kernel at the heart of the GNU/Linux system. But there's a long and interesting story about what it could have been, too. From Linux User magazine: "The design of the Hurd was an attempt to embody the spirit and promise of the free software movement in code." Those are mighty ambitions, and this story is as much about competing visions as competing kernels. Says Thomas Bushnell: "My first choice was to take the BSD 4.4-Lite release and make a kernel. I knew the code, I knew how to do it. It is now perfectly obvious to me that this would have succeeded splendidly and the world would be a very different place today." This is a well-written and fascinating read.

In 2011 Novell sold the SUSE franchise to Attachmate, who has run it since, and a portfolio of patents to a Microsoft consortium. But now Novell shareholders are alleging the deal was cooked, and Novell's board withheld information from another potential bidder to ensure Attachmate would win. From Groklaw: "Party C actually bid a bit higher than Attachmate. But the allegation is that Attachmate was favored with information that Party C was not given". The news doesn't affect Attachmate, who won the bid. But Novell's Board of Directors is going to have some explaining to do.

We're infatuated with Siri on our iPhones, and wish something similar existed for Linux. Turns out, it does exist. Almost. An interesting article by a guy who seems to know a lot about the Xvoice project, and an invitation to get involved. The best open source adventures start like this.

Asus is the company that shook up the laptop market a couple of years ago with their introduction of the EeePC netbook. And with their announcement that they will no longer be producing netbooks in 2013, Charles Arthur over at the Guardian UK has declared that the netbook era has now come to an end. Sad news for those of us who still love our netbooks! Harry McCracken over at Time Mag thinks they'll be back. Anybody who spends time wiping the smears off their tablet's touchscreen might agree.

Want to run FreeBSD on your Raspberry Pi or other ARM-based device? You're not far away from being able to do so. The folks over at the FreeBSD Developers Notebook report huge gains made in running FreeBSD on ARM v6 processors. They've got builds prepared for the Raspberry Pi, Beagleboard, and several others, though support isn't yet total. What can you do with it? Lots of stuff, like running the Go programming language on it like Dave Cheney. Cool!

There are a lot of WebOS fans out there who regret this remarkable operating system got shelved by HP just as Android was swooping in to win the hearts and minds of developers. Is there still hope? WebOSNation reports they've got it running on Google hardware. Surely a little competition for Android isn't a bad thing?

"Whonix is an anonymous general purpose operating system based on Virtual Box, Debian GNU/Linux and Tor. By Whonix design, IP and DNS leaks are impossible. Not even malware with root rights can find out the user's real IP/location. This is because Whonix consists of two (virtual) machines. One machine solely runs Tor and acts as a gateway, which we call Whonix-Gateway. The other machine, which we call Whonix-Workstation, is on a completely isolated network. Only connections through Tor are possible."

With Enlightment 0.17 released, it's no surprise the Linux distribution that uses E17 for its desktop is rushing to release a new version that uses it. Look for Bodhi 2.2.0 in January, featuring the stable E17 desktop. If you've never experienced it, Bodhi is a Ubuntu derivative, and it offers more configurabality than you can imagine. Have you been complaining about Unity and Gnome3 taking away your options? Bodhi and E17 bring them back - and many more, too.

The openSUSE community has elected its new board of directors, who will take office in January 2013. Welcome to Raymond Wooninck and Robert Schweikert, who will have a lot of work ahead of them as the board helps navigate openSUSE through some choppy waters. openSUSE remains one of the most popular Linux distros around, but their delayed release of 12.2 in September has led the team to spend the last six months reworking their development process, and both new members are planning to prioritize improvement of openSUSE's communication strategies as well.

It's not exciting to talk about money, but it does often take cash to keep funding the developers that improve code. Congrats to the FreeBSD foundation then, for beating their fundraising goal of $500K by almost 40%. The $690K they raised will go to funding coders, developer conferences, and some limited travel. That bodes well for continued strong support for FreeBSD in general, soon to release version 9.1 (currently at RC3).