There's a new twist in the "Windows Vista Capable" lawsuit that brought us all those behind-the-scenes e-mails last week: Microsoft has petitioned a federal appeals court in an attempt to overturn the judge's Feb. 22 decision granting the lawsuit class-action status.

Watch out, parents - close the windows, and protect your kids. Ballmer is on the move again, this time to put the final nail into his own coffin.

"Being the largest OEM of PCs on the planet and pushing GNU/Linux -- albeit a distro shrouded in non-free layers -- HP can put the last nail in the coffin of M$'s monopoly," predicted blogger Robert Pogson.

Readers are encouraged to phone their standards bodies now, in order to pull another nail off OOXML's ISO coffin.

At the end of April, the UK Unix and Open Systems User Group (UKUUG) applied for a judicial review of the British Standards Institution's (BSI's) decision to vote 'yes' in an international vote on whether to standardise Office Open XML (OOXML). A High Court judge threw out the application on 5 June, but UKUUG is now set to appeal that decision.

"Our primary goal in this campaign is to reverse the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) decision of 'In re Alappat'. Here, I will explain the history of what that ruling meant, and why that same history has shown us that it should be the focus of our campaign..."

This one is strictly for the hardcore fan - for the very first time, it says here, you have the chance to purchase a giant poster showing the history and development of Unix. Debian, OpenServer, OpenBSD and Mac OSX all have their place in history shown.

"A brief review of the history of Unix will place in context much of the terminology and philosophy of this operating system. Terms like Linux, GNU, Unix, Gnome, Free Software, and Free and Open Source Software get bandied around, often with little understanding and usually with much misunderstanding..."

The trial between the SCO Group and Novell over the question of whether or not the copyrights to Unix were sold together with the Unix distribution rights has taken another turn.