My Garden Vista

As indicated at Bartleby.com, the American Heritage Dictionary defines "vista" as

"A distant view or prospect, especially one seen through an opening, as between rows of buildings or trees."

Above is the view or "vista" from my back patio. Many, many years ago, glaciers formed the area where I live. Beyond the trees on the right, there is a steep hill leading down to a fresh water creek. In the back is another hill sloping down and then back up where the top of the hill meets my neighbors' back yards.

Perhaps another occasion will be a fitting time to provide a view of another part of my garden vista. This time, however, I really want to start thoughts in the direction of another vista entirely; that is, Microsoft's Windows Vista. As reported by Paul Thurrott for Windows IT Pro, in his August 15, 2006, exclusive, Microsoft Still Plans October 2006 Vista:

"Although I'm not at liberty to divulge the full contents of the message, Microsoft has placed build 5520 into escrow as the RC1 of Vista. This build will be released to testers and the public after the Labor Day holiday in the United States, which falls this year on September 4. Currently, Microsoft expects to ship RC1 on or after September 7."

With Release Candidate 1 right around the corner, you may want to start watching more closely the progress of Vista. Two sources of information from Microsoft are the Microsoft Windows Vista Security Blog and the Windows Vista Team Blog. On the other hand, MaryJo Foley of Microsoft Watch, often provides a slightly less biased viewpoint.

As much as I like the Microsoft operating system and Office software, for some reason IE does not play well with my dialup connection. I discovered Firefox doesn't have a problem loading pages quickly with dialup. Also, with the volunteer help I provide on various security forums, great extensions like BBCode by Jed Brown, certainly simplify formating the post replies. What am I leading up to? Just this -- thanks to a post by Marsden11 at Scot's Newsletter Forum, I learned that Sam Ramji, Director, Open Source Software Lab for Microsoft, has invited Mozilla developers to Redmond work to on compatibility problems between Vista and Mozilla's open source software, Firefox and Thunderbird:

"As part of my mission as an advocate for open source applications on Windows, I've gotten spaces set aside at the Windows Vista Readiness ISV Lab. In the past the company has only invited commercial software developers to these labs. I'm committed to evolving our thinking beyond commercial companies to include open source projects, so I went to the non-trivial effort of getting slots for non-commercial open source projects."

Sam Ramji Invitation

In the link Marsden11 provided to the Beta News Forum, I learned that Opera has been to Redmond already and is Preparing Opera for Vista.

As time goes on, I may provide more on my garden vista. But, for now, I glad to see that Microsoft is also expanding their Vista.