CEO Steve Ballmer has issued a threat by phone to European Commissioner Neelie Kroes that MS will not ship Vista to Europe if regulators don't "cooperate." Microsoft made the same threat to South Korean regulators, but did not follow through when they lost that battle.

internetnews.com has the story

Since this is probably the most annoying thing Microsoft has ever put into their operating systems, here's some links to sites that teach you how to disable it:

Download everything from Microsoft without WGA Check

Disable and Remove Windows Genuine Advantage Notifications Nag Screen

For those of you in a hurry, here's the quick answer:

1. Download mgadiag.exe
2. Start mgadiag.exe and copy the download center code
3. Visit a download page at microsoft.com
4. Append &Hash="download center code" to the url (example &Hash=6VJPCR9), no quotation marks needed
5. Hit enter

LinuxGames is reporting that "Savage: The Battle for Newerth" is now free. Not Free software, though but free as in no-cost.

Looks like old people are being barred from the internet.

From the article:

After walking the Great Wall of China and making plans for a trip to Russia, Shirley Greening-Jackson thought signing up for a new internet service would be a doddle. But the young man behind the counter had other ideas. He said she was barred - because she was too old.

2X software have released an NX server as well as a client to the community. Finally a fully featured GPL server as well as client is available to the general public and can be included by DEFAULT in all the distributions thus making them Terminal Servers.

Malta Linux User Group has the story.

Mozilla has decided to hire an outside firm to work on the Firefox 2.0 theme. Toronto software development company Radiant Core has been selected by Mozilla to design the user interface and improve the usability of Firefox 2.0. Others considered were Meta and Raiz Labs.

IT Business has the story

A group of OpenOffice enthusiasts has released OpenOffice Premium, a new bundle that includes the OpenOffice suite and a grab-bag of extras, such as clip art, document templates, and fonts.

Jeremy Reimer of arstechnica wrote an article about it.

This guy has StarCraft running on Linux/WINE, using a touchscreen monitor!Pretty neat! :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYY-g6ionzMread more

Computers use electricity. Teens love MSN Messenger. Teens also like to keep their computers on in order to have their MSN Messenger accounts logged in at all times, which is a huge waste of energy for something really unnecessary. Could this be something to worry about? Maybe it is...

Here's something I've known for some time: The Ubuntu Guide.

If you want to know how to do something with Ubuntu and don't know how, the answer is probably there.

It went through a big revamp since the previous version and it's better than ever.