I just read some disturbing comments following the post Why Linux will not displace Windows over at the Education IT blog (ZDNet.com). If you have a few moments give the following comments a quick read:

• That wont work without THEFT of intellectual property
• It wont happen
• You are kidding arent you ?
• It wont happen

Even though these are all entered by the same person, it reveals the level of knowledge and experience among the common office employee (or lack of) I’m afraid. In my opinion many business owners are holding back on drastic changes like switching OS, as training costs would exceed the benefits of reduced license fees.

I hope the user (jerryleecooper) is just trying to start a discussion, and that he really isn’t this ignorant (airhead). Again, I do hope he’s kidding - seriously!

If you know of any others sharing his level of expertise, please share!! It’s Monday, I could use a good laugh

Daniel Pistelli, the man behind NTCore.com, recently released an extremely useful Windows Vista management tool. If the following applies for you as well you should give it a go [download].

Vista4Experts is kind of a treat for computer experts who don’t want security center notifications, User Account Control dialogs, automatic Windows Defender scannings, automatic update installations (which cause you to reboot your system if you don’t react quickly enough). People who want MSDN (or google) set as default search engine in the Internet Explorer search bar, who want the start menu power button to shut down the system instead of hibernating it, etc. These and many more fixes are included in Vista4Experts. All of these changes can be discarded, enabled or reversed. Vista4Experts is the first expert utility of its kind and works on every platform.

It may reduce the security level of your Vista installation, but if you know what you are doing you will finally escape from all those annoying security alert boxes. Besides other applications probably keep the security (AV, Firewall, etc.). Best of all, it’s FREE (and comes with the standard “avoid lawsuit disclaimer”).

After more than a decade serving us web surfers Netscape has announced that their browser will be unsupported as of February this year (2008). The good thing is that they recommend everyone to switch to Firefox, but then again it really has been a FF-clone for several years now already.

Those of you that can’t live without the Netscape “look” can download Netscape theme and Netscape extensions to keep the familiar appearance…

In the comments (to the blog announcement) I see people complaining about Netscape giving up, and saying it’s sad to see someone give in to IE. In my opinion IE is just one of those things that comes bundled with Windows, and not really something people are downloading. The real competition is, and has been for several years, Opera, Firefox and Safari. And they’ve done wonders in respect to development and finding new markets, which Netscape on the other hand has failed to do (blame it on AOL).

Feel free to share your thoughts on this, or post your condolences…

The Mozilla development team recently announced that anyone could join the Firefox 3 Beta 2 Test Day. That was last Friday, but you can still download the Firefox 3 Beta 2 RC1 Build from here.

Before you install you should either back up your profile or use the profile manager to create a new profile for testing.

In order to limit distribution of this not-yet-tested release, anyone who was linked to the release candidate download directory will be redirected to this announcement. If all goes well during the testing, Firefox 3 Beta 2 will be released on December 21st in the early afternoon, Pacific Standard Time. You can track the progress on the Firefox 3 Beta 2 Release Checklist.

New features and changes in this milestone that require feedback include:

• Improved security features such as: protection from cross-site JSON data leaks, tighter restrictions on site-specific content using effective TLD service, better presentation of website identity and security, malware protection, stricter SSL error pages, anti-virus integration in the download manager, version checking for insecure plugins.
• Improved ease of use through: better password management, easier add-on installation, new download manager with resumable downloading, full page zoom, animated tab strip, and better integration with Windows Vista, Mac OS X and Linux.
• Richer personalization through: one-click bookmarking, smart bookmark folders, location bar that matches against your history and bookmarks for URLs and page titles, ability to register web applications as protocol handlers, and better customization of download actions for file types.
• Improved platform features such as: new graphics and font rendering architecture, JavaScript 1.8, major changes to the HTML rendering engine to provide better CSS, float-, and table layout support, native web page form controls, colour profile management, and offline application support.
• Performance improvements such as: better data reliability for user profiles, architectural improvements to speed up page rendering, over 330 memory leak fixes, a new XPCOM cycle collector to reduce entire classes of leaks, and reductions in the memory footprint.

You can find out more about all of these features in the “What’s New” section of the release notes.

The first release candidate of Service Pack 3 for Windows XP is now available. Visit Microsoft to download the Standalone Update Package (Windows® XP Service Pack 3 Release Candidate).

Microsoft gives the following overview of what to expect:

This is the self-extracting executable that contains the update package for Windows® XP Service Pack 3. Windows® XP Service Pack 3 (SP3) includes all previously released updates for the operating system. This update also includes a small number of new functionalities, which do not significantly change customers’ experience with the operating system.

This pre-release software is provided for testing purposes only. Microsoft does not recommend installing this software on primary or mission critical systems. Microsoft recommends that you have a backup of your data prior to installing any pre-release software.

Early feedback from other users indicate that SP3 provides slightly better overall performance. SP3 also includes NAP (Network Access Protection) support which helps determine your computers “health” before granting access to on-line update services.

For those of you with a somewhat “fishy” XP license, be aware that SP3 will ask you for the product key, but this time AFTER the installation. Just so you know…