In case you haven't heard, Microsoft is giving away copies of Windows Vista Ultimate (32-bit or 64-bit DVD), Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007, Microsoft Money Plus Premium, Microsoft Student with Encarta Premium 2008, or Microsoft Streets and Trips 2008 — you can choose any one. The caveat is that you have to let them monitor your use of the program.

I am downright embarrassed by the quality of my code. It is buggy, slow, fragile, and a nightmare to maintain. Do you feel the same way? If so, then what is holding you back from realizing your full potential? More importantly, what if anything are you planning to do about it?

Sadly the one constant in my career is that I am assigned to projects that drift, seemingly aimlessly, from inception to a point where the client runs out of funding. Have any developers here successfully lobbied their company to stop or cut back on 'cowboy coding' and adopt best practices?

Bean-counters at Gartner have warned businesses that they should roll out Vista as soon as possible or be prepared for pain.

The outfit is, apparently, a little concerned that some businesses have written Vista off as a lemon and have decided to wait until Vole comes up with something better.

But Silver warned that there were no guarantees that the next version of Windows, code-named "Windows 7" will arrive on time and might end up being just as lemon flavoured.

Anyone trying to by-pass Vista will have the same woes, he warned.

If you try to play an AACS-protected disc on an unapproved TV, the player is required to reduce the quality of the video, or refuse to play the video altogether. As a consequence, there are a lot of customers out there who would like to play their legally-purchased movies on their legally-purchased TVs, but whose legally-purchased HD-DVD or Blu-Ray players refuse to cooperate.

Ed Felten notes that the limited functionality of the official players has created a market for software that will allow them to play their movies on "unapproved" hardware. And thanks to the DMCA, such players cannot be legally developed in the United States. So not surprisingly, overseas firms are taking up the slack.

As Hollywood develops ever-more-elaborate and restrictive copy protection schemes, those copy-protection schemes come to inconvenience more and more customers. That, in turn, creates a larger market for circumvention software, prompting software companies to invest more in developing more powerful and user-friendly tools for removing copy protection.

In the past WoW's Warden functions could be checked by third party gamer software which could make sure that it did not get out of control.

However the latest Warden patch includes a different random cryptographic hash function in every copy, apparently used for cryptographic key exchange.

This makes it impossible for the third party software to work and, according to Onwarden, is a security hole in its own right. A hacker, or even Blizzard itself, could use it to retrieve information from a computer at random.

All it would take is for Blizzard, or a rogue employees to decide to have a look at a punter's computer and they could do it.

The fact that the new Warden patch makes it impossible for third party software to see what Blizzard is up to means that it is almost impossible for users to tell what is going on.

Bruce Schneier has a story on Wired about the new official standard for random-number generators the NIST released this year that will likely be followed by software and hardware developers around the world.

The generator based on elliptic curves called Dual_EC_DRBG has been championed by the NSA and contains a weakness that can only be described as a backdoor. In a presentation at the CRYPTO 2007 conference (pdf) in August, Dan Shumow and Niels Ferguson showed that there are constants in the standard used to define the algorithm's elliptic curve that have a relationship with a second, secret set of numbers that can act as a kind of skeleton key. If you know the secret numbers, you can completely break any instantiation of Dual_EC_DRBG.

The Mozilla Foundation's chief executive now earns roughly half a million in pay and benefits. With $70 million in assets, the Foundation gave out less than $300,000 in grants to open source projects in 2006. And in 2006 85% of their $66 million in revenue came from Google. When these figures first came to light, people worried whether Firefox was becoming a pawn in Google's cold war with Microsoft. The Foundation addressed these fears and largely laid them to rest; but now the worry is that, even though it's clear that the community's code is what makes Firefox successful, Mozilla may be becoming dangerously reliant on Google's cash.

There have been a number of issues that Vista users have reported relating to copying and moving data, especially large numbers of files. Often there can be multiple errors at play making it difficult for Vista users to track down the problem, in fact very often there is little indication that file copy operations haven't completed correctly. It's only when the user checks the number of files in source and destination that they realize they have a problem.

These don't have to be large files and the problem can also occur when copying smaller groups of files that in total exceed 16,400 files between reboots. Following the "Out of Memory" message a range of other errors can occur such as menus and tabs disappearing within the Windows environment and even reboots and BSODs are reported.

Windows Vista's market share in businesses logs barely more users than Windows 98, reports Softpedia.

Vista wasn't released for consumers until January 2007. However, figures gathered and recently released by security vendor SunBelt Software indicate that businesses are staying away from Vista in droves, as opposed to home users who often have had no other choice but to run Vista on a new PC.

CEO of OIN Jerry Rosenthal believes that Microsoft's statements are empty threats. He says the Vole should either disclose exactly which patents its talking about or cut out slandering Linux and drop its claims.

OIN and many open sauce developers suspect that, if Microsoft actually has any software patents to back up its bluster, those could either be invalidated by finding prior art or easily worked around with programming changes.

The president of the Open Source Consortium, Mark Taylor, was even more direct in denouncing Microsoft's patent claims about Linux. He said, "We say show us the patents. This has been the strategy against open source all along. It's precisely the same tactics as SCO used: implied threats and mafia techniques. This is just FUD. It's smoke and mirrors."

It's doubtful that Microsoft really wants to get into a software patent war with OIN, which has millions of dollars in a patent litigation war chest. In addition, OIN's members include Google, IBM, NEC, Novell, Philips, Red Hat and Sony.