At least one university liberal enough to accept the deeply flawed and mostly rejected Vista OS is recommending faculty and students stay away from SP1. "University of Pennsylvania tech staffers are advising faculty and students not to upgrade their computers to the new service pack for Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system. The school's Information Systems & Computing department said it will support Vista SP1 on new systems where it's pre-installed, but added that it 'strongly recommends that all other users adopt a "wait and see" attitude,' according to a newly published department bulletin." And CIO magazine doesn't quite go so far as to call on Microsoft to throw away Vista, but it does ask its readers to weigh in on that topic.

harsha_c sends in a local Indian perspective on the vote against Microsoft's OOXML ahead of the March 29 deadline. Of 19 companies participating, only 5 voted in favor of OOXML. "It was the ultimate battle for control over global IT standard for documents — between Microsoft-promoted OOXML and Sun and IBM-backed Open Document Format. It was played out between Indian IT giants, namely Infosys, Wipro, TCS supported by Nasscom on one side and the global IT biggies like IBM, Sun Microsystems, Red Hat backed by te IITs, IIMs and IISc on the other, on their respective positions on Microsoft's OOXML standard. Microsoft understandably expressed its disspointment. 'While we are disappointed with the decision of the BIS committee, we are encouraged by the support from NASSCOM.'

LarsWestergren writes "Many Mac users have been upset that Apple has not made Java 6 available on the platform. Landon Fuller posts that there is a developer preview release available of Java JDK6 on Mac OSX, Tiger and Leopard. It is based on the BSD port of Sun's Java 6 and is made available under the Java Research License. Charles Nutter posts about impressive JRuby performance gains using Java 6 on his Mac."

g-san writes "Some Mac users are having problems with the latest 10.4.11 update, yours truly included. The problem seems to be caused by the presence of a Boot Camp partition and renders the Mac unable to reboot after the update fails. Note the Geniuses at the Apple stores are recommending a full disk wipe; but data can be recovered via Firewire." MacNN has a note up that if you fall victim to this "known issue" and need to reformat the disk, you can't reinstall Boot Camp because it is no longer available to OS X 10.4 Tiger users.

An anonymous reader writes "An entry on the Mandriva Blog, written by Mandriva CEO François Bancilhon, says that the Nigerian government, after ordering thousands of Classmate PCs with Mandriva Linux installed, has suddenly decided that they will instead install Windows. They will pay for the pre-loaded Mandriva Linux on the low-cost computing devices intended for children in the developing world, but immmediately replace the OS. The blog doesn't quite use the 'B' word but does suggest that this was not a decision that the Nigerian government made on its own."

Z80xxc! writes "Some Mac users upgrading to Apple's new Leopard operating system are encountering long delays on reboot — an experience they liken to the Windows 'Blue Screen of Death.' While some of those upgrading were able to access their computer after waiting for as long as several hours, others were forced to do a complete reinstall. Some suspect that a framework called 'Application Enhancer' by Unsanity LLC may be causing the problem, but there has been no official word from Apple at this point."

vivIsel writes "When RMS took the stage to address the Yale Political Union, Yale's venerable parliamentary debate society, it was already an unusual speech: instead of the jacket and tie customary there, he sported a T shirt, and no shoes. But then he was attacked by ninjas. Apparently some students took it into their head to duplicate an XKCD webcomic before a live audience — luckily, though, Stallman didn't resort to violence. Instead, he delivered an excellent speech about DRM."

thefickler writes "Dissatisfaction with Windows Vista seems to be swelling, with the Dutch Consumers' Union (Consumentenbond) asking Microsoft to supply unhappy Vista users with a free copy of Windows XP. Not surprisingly, Microsoft refused. This prompted Consumentenbond to advise consumers to ask for XP, rather than Vista, when buying a new computer."

Kelson writes "The Internet Explorer team has updated the installer for IE7. Mostly they've adjusted a few defaults and updated their tutorials, but one change stands out: The installer no longer requires Windows Genuine Advantage validation. Almost a year after its release, IE7 has yet to overtake its predecessor. Was WGA holding back a tide of potential upgrades, or did it just send people over to alternative browsers?"

An anonymous reader writes "According to CNet, the iPhone is likely to be launched in the UK next Tuesday. 'Yesterday we were invited to an Apple press conference to take place next Tuesday — and we think it's most likely going to be the UK iPhone launch. Apple, as always, is keeping tight-lipped but there are several clues that point in the iPhone's direction'. No word yet on a UK operator, pricing or whether or not it will have 3G."

a_n_d_e_r_s writes "The vote on OOXML looked fairly secured. Most in the Working Group in Sweden was against the vote to approve OOXML. The day of the vote, though, more companies showed up at the door. Some 20 new companies — each one payed about $2500 to be allowed to vote — and vote they did ... for Microsoft. Most of the new companies were partners from Microsoft who suddenly out of the blue joined the Working Group, payed membership fees and voted yes for approval. From the OS2World story: 'The final result was 25 Yes, 6 No and 3 Abs and this would from the start be a done deal of saying No! Jonas Bosson who participated in today's meeting on behalf on FFII said that he left the meeting in protest and so did also IBM's Swedish local representative Johan Westman.'"

An anonymous reader writes "Over the months since Vista's release, there has been no doubt about the reduced level of network performance experienced compared to Windows XP. However, some users over at the 2CPU forums have discovered an unexplained connection with audio playback resulting in a cap at approximately 5%-10% of total network throughput. Whenever any audio is being sent to a sound card (even, several users report, while paused), network performance is instantly reduced. As soon as the audio is stopped, the throughput begins to climb to its expected speed. It's a tough one for users — what do you pick, sound or speed? So much for multi-tasking."

brajesh writes to tell us that Skype has blamed its outage over the last week on Microsoft's Patch Tuesday. Apparently the huge numbers of computers rebooting (and the resulting flood of login requests) revealed a problem with the network allocation algorithm resulting in a couple days of downtime. Skype further stressed that there was no malicious activity and user security was never in any danger.

An anonymous reader noted that "Ubuntu had to shutdown 5 of 8 production servers that are sponsored by Canonical, when they started attacking other systems. Canonical blames the community, saying they were community hosted, and were poorly maintained. However, kernel upgrades couldn't be done because of poor backwards compatibility with the very hardware that Canonical had sponsored! While people point fingers at each other it is pretty clear that both sides are equally to blame, the community administrators for practicing bad security practices, such as using unencrypted FTP transfers with accounts, not properly maintaining the system. However Canonical should have been well aware of what they are hosting. The question remains, if any of the files distributed to users have been compromised. A major blow for Canonical though who are attempting to enter the business market with Ubuntu Server."