boyko.at.netqos writes "Jim Sampson at Network Performance Daily writes about his attempts over a decade to get Linux working in a business/enterprise environment, but each time, he says, something critical just didn't work, and eventually, he just gave up. The article caps with his attempts to use Ubuntu Edgy Eft — only to find a bug that still prevented him from doing work." Quoting: "For the next ten years, I would go off and on back to this thought: I wanted to support the Open Source community, and to use Linux, but every time, the reality was that Linux just was not ready... Over the last six years, I've tried periodically to get Linux working in the enterprise, thinking, logically, that things must have improved. But every time, something — sometimes something very basic — prevented me from doing what I needed to do in Linux."

An anonymous reader writes "George Ou writes in his blog that he found a remote exploit for the new and shiny Vista Speech Control. Specifically, websites playing soundfiles can trigger arbitrary commands. Ou reports that Microsoft confirmed the bug and suggested as workarounds that either 'A user can turn off their computer speakers and/or microphone'; or, 'If a user does run an audio file that attempts to execute commands on their system, they should close the Windows Media Player, turn off speech recognition, and restart their computer.' Well, who didn't see that coming?"

guruevi writes to let us know about a review of Microsoft Vista in the NY Times, in the form of an article and a video, by the known Mac-friendly David Pogue. In the article, Pogue recasts Microsoft's marketing mantra for Vista: "Clear, Confident, Connected" becomes "Looks, Locks, Lacks." Pogue writes that Vista is such a brazen rip-off of Mac OS X that "There must be enough steam coming out of Apple executives' ears to power the Polar Express." But the real fun is in the video, in which Pogue attempts to prove that Vista is not simply an OS X clone.

Nico M writes "The highly publicized UK murder hunt for the serial killer(s) of five young sex workers in Suffolk is using Skype to ask the public for information. BBC News is embedding freephone Skype links to both the police incident room and Crimestoppers UK. Is this the first time Skype has been used in this way?"

ReadWriteWeb writes "Read/WriteWeb offers 3 scenarios for a GoogleOS and suggests it could be less than 6 months away. They say it may be a web based desktop (aka WebOS), a full featured Linux distribution, or a lightweight Linux distro and/or BIOS. They predict that once Microsoft's Vista rolls out, it will present a direct threat to Google's Web properties and so therefore Google will start a more punchy strategy — pushing Firefox and some form of Google OS in order to nullify Vista's potential impact."

snib writes "Microsoft has launched Aggreg8, a 'social networking and collaboration space for the IT community.' Apparently, the owner of the popular open-source RSS reader of the same name sold the domains to Microsoft for $5000 in August in order to host what was then called 'Microcosm.' Microsoft hopes their new service, which utilizes Windows Live ID (formerly .NET Passport) authentication, will become a 'MySpace-like forum for developers to share scripts, tools, or best practices, or even to just connect with others within the profession.'"