Shantyman writes "ZDNet has a counterpoint to the negative impressions of Vista's Beta 2 going around. Entitled Vista Beta 2, up close and personal, Ed Bott writes: 'I've spent the last three months running beta versions of Windows Vista on the PCs I use for everyday work. February and March were exasperating. April's release was noticeably better, and the Beta 2 preview - Build 5381, released to testers in early May - has been running flawlessly on my notebook for nearly three weeks.'"

An anonymous reader writes to mention a piece on the Harvard Business School site talking about Lessons from the Browser Wars; specifically, what can be learned about first-mover advantages and the upsurge in Firefox use? From the article: "As a tool for exploring how standards are set when new technologies hit the market, the browser wars exhibit many features we like to study: competition between two viable alternatives, rapidly improving technologies, the ability of firms to use strategic levers such as market power and channels of distribution, growth in demand leading to diffusion of the new technology through the population, and uncertainty. Thus, this is one example from which we can generalize lessons regarding the outcome of diffusion of innovation into a market."

An anonymous reader writes "IT Observer has a look at some of the perceived problems with an OpenSource approach to security and what could be done to improve the situation. From the article: 'There is a widespread and wholly inaccurate impression that open source development is somehow haphazard and undisciplined, a free-for-all among brilliant but uncoordinated individuals. In fact, most major open source projects are very tightly managed highly disciplined teams. This article gives examples of very successful Open Source security projects -- netfilter and Snort -- and also describes some weaknesses that need to be addressed by IT organizations or vendors.'"

Chapium writes "Google Romance (Beta) is a place where you can post all types of romantic information and, using our Soulmate Search(TM), get back search results that could, in theory, include the love of your life. Then we'll send you both on a Contextual DateTM, which we'll pay for while delivering to you relevant ads that we and our advertising partners think will help produce the dating results you're looking for. With this addtion has Google gone too far with its data collection?"

DesertBlade writes "Forrester Research examined the trust that American households place in PC and consumer electronics. Sony, Dell and Bose all recieved a ranking of A+ while Microsoft recieved a C (I know most of you would say it is closer to a F). "Microsoft faces big consumer defection risk. One measure of consumers' dissatisfaction with Microsoft is seen in the 5.4 million households that give it a brand trust score of 1 [distrust a lot] or 2 [distrust a bit]. Compared with all Microsoft users, these at-risk users have higher income, are much more likely to be male, and are bigger online spenders.(see endnote 7) These households know they run Microsoft software but would be just as happy to leave it behind -- if they could." Does Microsoft face that big of a risk?"