The first beta version of Microsoft Windows Vista was released to beta testers today. Breaking with tradition MS have released a number of screenshots on their presspass website.

One of the new features in Windows Vista is called virtual folders. These folders show all the documents of a particular type in a single place, delete the file from the virtual folder and the file is deleted from it’s actual location.  There are folders that will show all music file, video file and even one called ‘All Documents’

I think we call these ‘Views’ in the Domino world

check out the screenshots on the MS Presspass website.

IBM announced earlier this month that it will withdraw its operating system OS/2 officially from sale on December 23 this year and will offer support through to the end 2006. Now that the funeral has been announced the active OS/2 users that still exist are calling for the operating system to be made open source.

Should OS/2 be made open source? Back in it’s hey day OS/2 was a very significant operating system and was major competition to Microsoft Windows, now it is only used by a few banks for it’s ATM’s. Making it open source would mean that it could be updated for today’s hardware and would also make it more secure as all aspects of the system would be open to peer review.

Does the world need another open source operating system? With IBM’s commitment to Open Standards and Open Source ( Eclipse, Apache, Tomcat, J2EE etc ) maybe making OS/2 open source could be a wise move that will keep those few remaining OS/2 customers happy.

What do you think?

The other day Alan Leposky blogged about the World Community Grid. This is a Grid Computing system that used the idle time on your computer to do research on various different research projects. As your computer is processing data it keeps a score and you can track how much data your computer processes.

One thing that you can do is create a ‘team’ so that you and others can collect a community score. There are already teams within IBM that are working together and competing with each other. The IBM Workplace team seems to be the biggest and best and a Lotus Support team seems to have been setup in the last few days.

I have created a ‘Lotus Domino Bloggers’ team that you can join so why not download the Grid Agent today and see if we can catch up on a few of those IBMers. Once you download and install the agent just log into the website and check out the ‘My Teams’ section on the left hand side and do a serach for the team name.

Look forward to seeing a few people joining.