Mozilla Lab's push is to blur the edges of the browser, to make it both more tightly integrated with the computer it's running on, and also more hooked into Web services.

Early examples of this intelligence include the "awesome bar," which is what Mozilla calls the new smart address bar in Firefox 3. It offers users smart URL suggestions as they type based on Web searches and their prior Web browsing history. He's looking to extend on this with a "linguistic user interface" that lets users type plain English commands into the browser bar.

The Thunderbird development community aims to release the first alpha of Thunderbird 3 next month.

Thunderbird 3 will use Gecko 1.9, a new version of the rendering engine that serves as the foundation for the Mozilla platform. Gecko 1.9, which has also been instrumental in the making of Firefox 3, offers a number of very significant improvements, including a new Cairo-based rendering backend and support for JavaScript 1.8.

Ascher believes that a better out-of-the-box experience and support for calendaring are the two killer features that will make Thunderbird a success.

"Immediately after receiving reports of this error, we made the decision to temporarily suspend automatic distribution of the update to avoid further customer impact while we investigate possible causes," said Volish Vista bogger Nick White, yesterday.

The update number 937287 is designed as a prelude to Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1). Unfortunately, it sent some PCs into an eternal cycle of reboots that only ceased when the plug was pulled.

Currently, the Vole plans to switch off the life support on XP in June even though the patient is not dead and is probably getting better.

Burton Group service director Richard Jones told Infoworld that in any operating system transition, you need to have the original and new products running side by side for a couple of years.This gives punters a chance to do a decent migration.

Jones added that the Vole had been a little too aggressive because it took too long to release Vista and this deprived it of cash. However, it was making users pay for its mistake, he said.

There was a chance that Microsoft would see customers abandoning Windows rather than being forced to move to Vista.

I have been using Vista for well over a year now (since Beta 1). Of course Vista is slow, its bloated (over 10x the size of XP), aero kills system performance (even though this should be done on the video card), networking is pathetically slow, etc etc. We all know Vista sucks.

But recently my blood has been set to a rolling boil by the fact that most of my games just don't work in Vista. At all. Its so bad that out of spite I have decided to make a list of games that work better in Linux under Wine than in Vista.

This post is clearly a bit biased. What shocked me though was how easy it was to find games that didn't run under Vista but did in Linux by using Wine or DOSBox.

Every game but Blackthorne crashed my Vista box, this didn't happen a single time under Linux.

The demo scene has been around for twenty years now, and it has grown by leaps and bounds. From the early days of programmers pushing the limits of Ataris and Amigas to modern landscapes with full lighting, mapping, and motion capture, demo groups have done it all and done it under 100k.

The latest version of Apple's QuickTime media player has video production people venting their spleens after discovering that new digital rights management features have crippled the use editing software from Adobe.

Shortly after updating to QuickTime 7.4, legions of people charged chat groups to report they were unable to access files created with Premier and After Effects, two pricey Adobe programs used for editing video.

Those After Effects users unfortunate enough to have installed the update get a DRM-related error when trying to access their video files. It reads: "After Effects error: opening movie - you do not have permission to open this file (-54)."

On Jan. 15, the Palo Alto, Calif., company announced that it would acquire Thinstall, a privately held company that specializes in application virtualization technology for PCs. The deal is expected to close by the end of the first quarter of this year.

"The addition of Thinstall to our desktop virtualization portfolio will help us to better deliver cost-effective and more flexible tools for quickly and securely provisioning desktops," said Jeff Jennings, vice president of desktop products and solutions at VMware, in a statement.

Thinstall, which is based in San Francisco, has about 600 customers in both the enterprise space and within government. Lambert believes that VMware will re-brand the Thinstall product line by the second half of this year, but that it will keep the company's partnership with LANDesk and BMC in place.

We've already pointed to the backlash against the BSA for its activities, and now we're seeing how these kinds of crackdowns are doing exactly the opposite of what BSA/SIIA members would want: they're looking for open source alternatives. Following the ongoing "international crackdown" on software piracy, it appears that the Vietnamese government is the latest to start promoting open source alternatives.

After all, as Microsoft and others have long admitted, you're much better off if someone is using an unauthorized version of your software, than if they're using the competition (especially if that competition is free).

However, by putting such a big effort into cracking down on software piracy, all the industry has done is highlight why people are better off going with free alternatives.

Pro-Linux reports that KDE 4, scheduled to be released in January 2008, consumes almost 40% less memory than KDE 3.5, despite the fact that version 4 of the Free and Open Source desktop system includes a composited window manager and a revamped menu and applet interface. KDE developer Will Stephenson showcased KDE 4's 3D eye-candy on a 256Mb laptop with 1Ghz CPU and run-of-the-mill integrated graphics, pointing out that mini-optimizations haven't even yet been started.