Midori could be anything from a complete dead-end, to the OS 95 percent of the world will be running in five to ten years. I suspect that the truth will lie somewhere in between; a future Microsoft OS will use virtualization to provide backwards compatibility, and that future OS will use managed code.

The plans, which are far from being finalized, indicate that Microsoft is really running scared of Mac OS and Linux on the desktop. According to one report, Microsoft’s main objective with Midori is a preemptive strike against non-Windows operating systems.

Normally, unpowered DRAM memory chips lose their contents after a several seconds. But a team of researchers have discovered if those chips can be kept very cool, then they might retain their contents for up to an hour or more. According to the researchers’ findings, that gives someone plenty of time to read the memory in the chips and recover a user’s encryption keys.

Microsoft’s Windows Update can already be extended to update other Microsoft products through Microsoft Update. Why not open this up for any program on your system?

Are you currently running Windows Vista and Linux in a dual-boot setup? You’re going to have major headaches with Vista Service Pack 1, Microsoft has admitted.

Midori, an offshoot of Microsoft Research’s Singularity OS, is a componentized, non-Windows OS that will take advantage of technologies developed since the advent of Windows and likely will be Internet-based, doing away with the need for locally installed applications.