Windows Vista had RTMd on November 8 (read more here, here and here). The future is here, ladies and gentlemen!

The official retail date is January 30, 2007, but I'm sure the warez people are waiting for the volume-licensed editions to be available, to start bringing Windows Vista Ultimate Edition to the masses. Halleluya!

In less exuberent news, today I have learned, from a mass e-mail I have received from Seagate, that it had acquired Maxtor (this, apparently, happened quite a while ago - read the official press release here). I am unhappy about this merger because it used to be that one could trust only two brands: Seagate and Western Digital. Then, Maxtor bought out Quantum, making bad hard drives even worse, and now Seagate bought up Maxtor, leaving the market with only one viable (and dependable) competitor.

I guess this is just l'esprit du temps, what with hundreds of companies being bought by Microsoft almost monthly, Macromedia being bought by Adobe, LiveJournal by MovableType, and Winamp by AOL. The most important question right now, then, is whether these quiet mega-mergers would yield better products or would eventually cause some sort of replay of the monopoly scandals of the 1990s, in the next few years.