David Bradley describes how he invented CTRL-ALT-DEL, then tries to backpedal after he inadvertently slams Bill Gates for making it famous.

Last week's widely reported "Windows Vista virus" was not, in fact, a virus that targets Windows Vista at all, but was instead a virus that targets the Microsoft Scripting Host (MSH; codenamed Monad), an object-oriented, .NET-based command line environment. And while MSH may be installable in Windows Vista Beta 1, the environment does not come with Beta 1 and will not appear in future betas or the final release, Microsoft says. Furthermore, the new Windows Vista security subsystem isn't even enabled in Beta 1.

Thus, there's no Windows Vista virus. Sorry, conspiracy fans.

While I'm sure the gleeful Mac fanboy sites that ate up the "Vista virus" stories will be equally expedient in covering the truth, I have to wonder more about the mainstream media, which was equally ravenous about covering this story. Heck, even F-Secure, a widely-trusted security company, covered the alleged virus. There's no Windows Vista virus out there, folks. Anyone care to write about it?

RealSoftware's REALBasic 2005 -- the popular cross-platform interactive development environment (IDE) for Mac OS X and Windows -- is scheduled to debut for the Linux platform later this month, perhaps as early as the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in San Francisco. For the past couple of weeks, I've been falling asleep each night to the glow of beta versions of REALBasic 2005 running happily on SUSE Pro 9.3 on my monitor.

REALBasic 2005 is nothing like the Basic I used to know ... The language these days is thoroughly modern and object-oriented: it's all objects, properties, methods, and classes.

REALBasic is a powerful language with an equally powerful IDE. It is also a proprietary, closed software product, but you can develop free software with it. That means the source code and the executable of any apps you build with REALBasic can be freely distributed, without restriction. Or if you like, you can build freeware, shareware, or legacy proprietary apps with it. There are no restrictions, no royalties, and no runtime required.

Apple's archrival Microsoft has been making two-button models since its first mouse hit the marketplace a few months after Apple's in 1983, and models with a scroll wheel since 1996.

On Tuesday, Apple finally gave in -- sort of. The company released an optional, add-on mouse called Mighty Mouse that allows right-clicking and scrolling. But in a stubborn homage to the old dogma, Apple designed the Mighty Mouse so it looks like, and can work like, a one-button mouse. Those clashing design goals make the Mighty Mouse harder to use than competing mice.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has also brought out a new mouse in the past few weeks, the Wireless Optical Mouse 5000. It isn't as slick-looking as Apple's new entry, but it's better, in my view. The Microsoft mouse has an innovation: It allows you to instantly magnify any portion of your screen without zooming into the whole display. That's a great help to people doing detail work, not to mention to the increasing number of baby boomers with declining vision.

Microsoft's new model is cordless, like most modern, premium mice. Apple's Mighty Mouse is tethered to the computer with a cord, like most low-end models.

Macintosh fan sites on the Web are already hailing [the Mighty Mouse] as another of Apple's brilliant design coups. It's not. In my tests, I found that the design makes right-clicking slower and clumsier than on a typical Microsoft or Logitech mouse with real buttons. (These non-Apple mice work perfectly on Macs.)

[We found that] right-clicking with the Mighty Mouse was unpredictable. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. We needed to press the right side repeatedly to get a single right click, slowing us down and annoying us, well, mightily.

So, stop the presses: Microsoft has beaten Apple on hardware design, at least in this one case.

All of this power comes at something of a price—mainly increased RAM consumption from open widgets, even if Dashboard itself is closed.

If you’d like to disable Dashboard, for either RAM usage or other reasons, here’s how to do it. It requires a trip to the Terminal, in /Applications/Utilities, but it’s not too hard to do.

Open Terminal, and then type this command, followed by the Return key:

defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES

This tells the system that you no longer wish to have Dashboard available. However, the Dashboard task is actually “owned” by the Dock, so to make your changes take effect, you need to restart the Dock. The easiest way to do that is to type this command into the Terminal (and press Return when done):

killall Dock

After the Dock restarts, hit F12 and you’ll see…nothing at all. If you run Activity Monitor, you also won’t find any Dashboard widgets in the list of tasks, even if you had several open when you ran the above command. Dashboard has been eliminated from your system, and won’t return until you tell it to do so. You can do just that by opening Terminal again, and typing this command:

defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean NO

Novell is planning to open up a version of its Suse Linux operating system to users and developers, unveiling its OpenSuse project at the LinuxWorld show next week in San Francisco, a company executive confirmed Wednesday.

"We're making OpenSuse available for anyone anywhere," said Greg Mancusi-Ungaro, director of marketing for Linux and open source at Novell (Profile, Products, Articles). "We've learned from customers that it's still very, very hard to get Linux unless you're a technical user."

Novell will rename its Suse Linux Professional flavor of Linux, Suse Linux, and will open source the operating system, hosting those efforts at a new Web site, according to Mancusi-Ungaro. "We're moving from a closed model where the code was tested in-house to a completely open and transparent model" where developers will have access to the source code and their input will be welcomed, he added.

At LinuxWorld, Novell will release its first public beta of Suse Linux, version 10.0, Mancusi-Ungaro said. In 2006, the company intends to establish a public code repository and a public build server for the open-sourced operating system, he added.

Apple recently started shipping Developer Transition Kits that help developers test and prepare software for the switch to the Intel-powered computers next year. The kit contains a version of OS X for Intel, and a Mac computer featuring an Intel processor.

The computer features a security chip called the Trusted Platform Module (TPM), an open industry standard governed by the not-for-profit Trusted Computing Group which develops security standards.

Each TPM chip contains an encrypted serial number that allows the operating system to verify whether it is running on Apple hardware.

The upcoming Windows Vista relies on the TPM for a technology dubbed Secure Startup, which blocks access to the computer if the content of the hard drive is compromised.

This prevents a laptop thief from swapping out the hard drive, or booting the system from a floppy disk to circumvent security features.

Reynolds suggested that in the future software developers could use the chip as an anti-piracy device. The vendor would link the TPM identification number to the software registration key.

Apple today introduced Mighty Mouse, its next generation mouse with several innovative new features that make using a Mac even more powerful and easy. Mighty Mouse offers power users up to four independently programmable buttons, without compromising simplicity for users who prefer just a single-button mouse. Mighty Mouse also introduces an ingenious Scroll Ball that lets users scroll in any direction—vertically, horizontally and even diagonally. With the Scroll Ball, users can scroll with natural, fluid movements, making Mighty Mouse perfect for applications from viewing web pages and photographs, to video editing and music creation. Mighty Mouse is priced at just $49.

Mighty Mouse features an easy-to-use design that comfortably fits the left or right hand and an optical tracking engine for responsive and accurate cursor movement on almost any type of surface. With up to four programmable buttons, Mighty Mouse makes it easy to access key features of Tiger with the side buttons and Scroll Ball providing quick, one-click access to Spotlight, Dashboard and Exposé.

I think most real users know, in our heart of hearts, that Mac OS X has been misfiring quite a bit lately, and that 10.4 was almost a total misfire in terms of actually using it. It doesn't mean we're going to switch, it doesn't mean we've given up, it just means we know something is wrong.

You can like the idea of XHTML/JavaScript/CSS apps and still know Dashboard was a complete misfire, even if your only clue is that they're bolting on major functionality in a .2 release.

Severe, extreme wonkiness like this doesn't happen by accident, whether it is going on at Apple or Microsoft or anywhere between.