Quite the big "ouch" to the Redmond giant: the Department of Transportation (DoT) and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has banned Windows Vista, Office 2007, and Internet Explorer 7 from its offices. They are considering switching its operation to Macs and PCs running Novell's SuSe Linux.

The rather harsh policy was sanctioned back in January, but through the enactment of a moratorium, the blocking of Vista upgrades is still in effect. 15,000 users at the DoT and 45,000 employees at the FAA have been barred from upgrading to any new software from Microsoft.

The memorandum, dated January 19, was distributed to address concerns about licensing issues, upgrade costs, and backward compatibility with their existing key software and systems. They aren't scrapping Vista altogether if issues could be resolved, although they are considering alternatives to just going Vista all the way.

Aside from educational institutions and research associations, it seems that even the U.S. government is affected by the cost and compatibility problems regarding Bill Gates' new "Wow" product that shuns many XP compatible programs on its questionable platform.

We may remember JetBlue as that plane that performed an emergency landing at the Los Angeles International Airport when its front landing gear failed to retract, and the whole dilemma was watched by the passengers on the plane's TV. Well, there were no casualties in that incident, but JetBlue maybe finding it hard to shake-off that stigma from their image.

Well, this piece of tidbit may help them. JetBlue Airways Corp. won a wireless license to offer high-speed Internet and other communications services on commercial aircraft in a U.S. Federal Communications Commission auction that ended on Friday. Other auction winners were LiveTV LLC which got a 1 megahertz wireless license and AirCell Inc., which won the 3 megahertz license.

Verizon Communication's Airfone unit, the current user of the airwaves, dropped out from the auction due to reasons that we could only speculate about. But the poor performance of the company's telephone service aboard commercial airflights could be one of the reasons why they didn't participate from the auction.

With that, Verizon must limit operations and then in 2010 give up the airwaves. According to the FCC, the licenses doesn't mean that passengers can now use their cellphones onboard airplanes. That issue would be decided by FCC and the Federal Aviation Administration.