As anticipated and without much fanfare, Microsoft this morning made active links for downloads of Windows XP Service Pack 3 Release Candidate 1, as well as the complete Office 2007 Service Pack 1.

For the fifth year, CIO Insight polled IT executives on how well their major vendors deliver business value, reliability and quality. This year's winner? The No. 1 vendor? None other than Linux distributor Red Hat.

A heavily promoted performance test by an evaluation software firm appeared to situate Windows Vista SP1 performance against Windows XP SP3. But the initial workloads were actually different due to the Office software used, testers admitted to BetaNews today.

A year never goes by without someone inventing something hilariously useless. Over the next ten pages, we'll take you on a guided tour of disastrous tech products, the gadgets and concepts we felt really surpassed themselves in being utterly crapulous. Many of these travesties aimed to reinvent the wheel, but were plagued by huge dollops of fail. Speaking of which...

It would appear a January fix that supposedly protects against malformed URLs to the RTSC protocol of Apple's QuickTime wasn't a complete fix after all.