SINCE LAST week the coastal city of Rosario, Argentina's second largest city and home of about a million people is among the growing club of World cities with free municipal Wi-Fi access.

In a setback for the City of Vienna's three-year-old open-source migration programme, city authorities decided on Wednesday to scrap most of the systems that have so far adopted the city's custom-built Linux distribution, instead approving an €8m migration to Windows Vista.

"Dave Richards is an IT administrator for a city government. The city has been using OpenOffice.org for about six years. Dave's a Linux guru, and helps run an elegant, efficient Linux network with a nice big server and lots of fairly old dumb terminals running OpenOffice.org at a very acceptable speed."

Bandwidth Vista 2, The Next Generation bandwidth monitor with GEO-IP Connection Mapper. Displays Real-Time TCP and UDP Connections including Country and City. Holds a full log of bandwidth usage. New to Bandwidth Vista 2 is Voice Alerts and a Whois Lookup Tool and two kinds of graph.

A few days ago i published a short article describing how Windows Vista would accept incorrect passwords at the login screen. Now, as if God/Microsoft her/himself had intervened, my Vista connected to the network, installed some unspecified update, and the password problem is solved. The weird thing is - Vista refuses to connect to my WLAN, so it shouldn't have been able to get any updates.

Last year, curious over the hype that was flooding the internet in the wake of the release of Windows Vista, I decided to turn masochist and inflict a 14-day Vista trial on myself. I found the operating system much worse than even its worst critic.

"In contrast with Linux and even OS X, [Vista]’s expensive and bloated. Vista’s look may be shiny and attractive, but users aren’t being fooled by what their eyes are seeing. Everywhere you turn on the Internet, it’s easy to find another story of a loyal Windows user who after trying out Vista on their own machine has decided to downgrade to XP."

Last week I put Windows Vista Ultimate and Fedora Linux 9 to a test. The article hit the front page of Digg but received a lot of criticism by those disappointed with the performance of Internet Explorer. So, let's dig deeper and use Firefox to see if Internet Explorer's memory footprint is actually a Windows Vista "feature" or not.

When the city of Madera, Calif., needed a new voice system, it turned to open source technology -- not just for the IP telephony but for an entire network-infrastructure overhaul and loads of other functions. All the renovations cost less than half the estimated price of deploying a commercial VoIP system alone.