My good friend Kurt Hutchinson has kicked out a great write-up for Ars Technica on Microsoft's second beta of Windows Vista. This update to the Windows line has been in the planning and production stages for a long time, and it's nice to finally get to play with a stable copy that's fairly close to what the final version is going to be.

The developers have thrown in new graphic effects and a slew of bells and whistles designed to make the Windows experience capable of competing with Apple's OS X in beauty pageants. Vista has had quite a bit of brand new coding put in, even including native support for cutting edge hybrid hard drives that haven't made it to the market yet.

We're finally seeing a total update for Microsoft’s desktop security protocols. User Account Control (UAC) has been implemented for tightening up the account privileges assigned to normal users and the default firewall package has been seriously beefed up to include packet filtering. The plan is that this will finally be a copy of Windows that the power user can trust and the novice can enjoy.