In the effort of maintaining Mac market dominance, Parallels virtualization firm already started a new beta cycle of its popular Desktop and reveals virtualization.info a major product: Parallels Server for Mac OS. In the meantime Microsoft killed its Mac VirtualPC and VMWare announced its new Mac product.

Paul Thurrot, everybody's favourite Microsoft Apple Microsoft zealot, writes on his webpage: "It's funny. Apple calls Microsoft a copy-cat, and yet, I feel like I've seen some of these features somewhere before. Many of the features, however, are just sad. Is this really the best they had to show off right now?" El Reg agrees with him, saying: "On the basis of the evidence so far the sixth release of Mac OS X is, to put it bluntly, a point release." Update by ELQ: A related editorial by Wired.

Some tidbits on Haiku/BeOS again, today: "Michael Lotz has posted to his blog about the status of USB on Haiku. Michael, who took over working on the USB stack from Niels Reedijk, has got it to the stage where he can now use his USB mouse under Haiku, albeit only temporarily before memory leaks take it down. He states the core stack is around 80% completed, with the UHCI driver around 75% of the way - lacking support only for isochronous transfers." Also, Pe 2.4 has been released to BeBits.

"You've probably heard of full disclosure, the security philosophy that calls for making public all details of vulnerabilities. It has been the subject of debates among researchers, vendors, and security firms. But the story that grabbed most of the headlines at the Black Hat Briefings in Las Vegas last week was based on a different type of disclosure. For lack of a better name, I'll call it faux disclosure. Here's why."

"There are a lot of reasons why people make their code open source. I believe that one of the strongest original motivations has often been overlooked. Our hagiography tells the tale of how it all started with the quest for software freedom. But contemporaneous with Richard Stallman's story, other people were taking the same path (releasing source code) for a very different reason: the architecture of Unix."

"Microsoft has reached an enormous success with its Windows product during the last decade and practically monopolized the market for home computer operating systems. But, does it mean Windows is still the best OS around, especially for power users? I'm going to cumulate my Windows XP frustrations and tell you about the top 10 reasons why I decided to dump Windows and use GNU/Linux as my primary desktop OS."

Borland Software's Developer Tools Group is moving back to the company's roots and relaunching its Turbo brand of products - offering the tools both for beginners and nonprogrammers, as well as for professionals. Borland officials said the company is bringing back its Turbo brand of tools as a set of low-cost, language-specific rapid application development tools for students, hobbyist developers, occupational developers and individual programming professionals.

Yesterday, Steve Jobs of Apple held his usual keynote speech at the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference at the Moscone Center, San Fransisco. I usually thoroughly enjoy Jobs's keynotes; they are a well-planned piece of theater, complete with drama, comedy, and even action. In between, of course, some new products are announced, and some meaningless figures are given (classic example of spin doctoring: use only the figures of your strongest market, in Apple's case, the US laptop market; ignore the rest). However, this time, the theater part seemed to far outweigh the new-products-part. And that's a shame. Note: The, Tuesday Eve Column.

Three weeks ahead of schedule, version 1.0 of Freespire, the no-cost community version of Linspire, is now available from the project's website. You can download a completely open source version, or a version that includes various proprietary codecs and drivers for an improved out-the-box experience. Screenshots.

Michael Phipps announced that Waltercon 3 will be held in Orlando on October 28th and 29th. Among other news, Haiku has a webdesign contest as well as an icon set contest. The new website will be based on Drupal, the submission deadline is October 1st. The icon contest deadline is September 1st.

The libferris virtual filesystem project now provides a yum repository for installation on Fedora Core 5 machines. With libferris you can mount PostgreSQL, XML, db4 files as a filesystem and also expose it to all applications using ferrisfuse. Extensive support for indexing and searching ferris filesystems is also available in the binary packages.

Mac OS Forge, a new community site hosted by Apple, is being created to support WebKit and other open source projects focused on Mac OS X, especially those looking to transition from OpenDarwin.org. New buildable kernel sources for Intel-based Macs are posted there as well, finally answering the complaints from the community. Other than this, Xcode 3 now includes Sun's Dtrace.

Jobs introduced today Mac OS X Leopard, built-to-order Xeon-based Mac Pros and XServes. We attended the keynote and we just posted some pictures below. We loved these new Mac beasts, plus Time Machine looked really cool. The rest of the OSX features were mostly evolutionary.

"In a fairly short time, Novell has transformed itself from a firm that had next to nothing to do with Linux into one of the Penguin's most visible and aggressive flag-bearers. For evidence of this metamorphosis, we need look no further than Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10, which breaks ground in the client operating system territory that Linux leader Red Hat has so far opted scarcely to tread. SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, or SLED, is the most polished Linux client operating system we've yet tested, and well-deserving of our Analyst's Choice designation."