If you've been itching to get your hands on a new flavor of Windows, or if you're just sick and tired of being teased by that release candidate, the wait for Microsoft's Windows Home Server is drawing to a close. Reportedly, the firm has released the software to manufacturing, where it should flow down and hit pre-fabricated boxes "in late September and early October." According to Joel Sider, senior product manager, the move to RTM means that the company has "wrapped up WHS and handed it off to its internal distribution teams and hardware partners." Additionally, Iomega and Fujitsu-Siemens were added to the list of OEM partners that already included HP, Gateway, LaCie, and Medion. Notably, there won't be a great many alterations in the final release compared to RC1, as the main change stated (aside from squashing a few stray bugs) was that the "domain for remote access is now homeserver.com." Hold tight folks, Windows Home Server will be coming your way soon, and the brigade will be led by HP's forthcoming MediaSmart Server.

[Via ArsTechnica]

It hasn't even been out of the nest a full week yet, but already those nefarious software pirates who drive prices up for everyone else have taken the little birdie known as Windows Vista and begun passing it around the interwebs like a hot potato. A quick search of the more popular BitTorrent sites reveals that numerous copies of the RTM version of Vista are available for download, but being the law-abiding netizens that we are, we can't verify that these are actual working packages or simply 4GB archives of nasty spyware. We really shouldn't have expected anything different from the "free software movement" -- after all, the same thing happened with OS X Leopard after August's WWDC -- but we're sure Microsoft is pleased that this group of "early adopters" has given its latest and greatest product a de facto thumbs up. Just a friendly reminder to everyone who's taken it upon him / herself to load up a copy of the yet-to-be-released OS: enjoy it while you can, because once Redmond starts sending out updates and checking the validity of your install, that boatload of crippled features is going to make your PC a real pain in the ass to operate.

[Thanks, Monsieur Cedric]