The European Commission fined Microsoft 280.5 million euros ($357.3 million) on Wednesday to punish its failure to comply with a landmark 2004 antitrust ruling.

A set of major changes in SkyOS is now complete. The entire GUI subsystem was rewritten to support desktop composing including flicker free drawing, double buffering, full alpha transparency, plugable composing effects, etc. Secondly, PE support has been dropped completely, and all libraries, applications, drivers, and the kernel are now ELF binaries. Thirdly, everything is now compiled with GCC 4.1.1 and the latest binutils. And last, but personally definitely not least: SkyOS now has support for BeOS people files. Other than the above, a lot of bugs were fixed as well.

Macintouch has done a hardware quality survey among owners of PowerMac G5s (3000 PowerMacs) regarding hardware quality, support quality, and more. The conclusion: "The Power Mac G5's 17% first-year failure rate remains far higher than the industry average of 5%. If Apple is to maintain its premium pricing, it should provide premium reliability. As things stand, high Power Mac prices must include high warranty service costs built-in. With an overall failure rate of 23%, a quarter of which occur outside of Apple's 1-year warranty, and an average of 1.29 repairs per affected unit implying repeat problems, Power Macs are neither cheap for Apple to service after the sale, nor cheap for buyers. Power comes at a cost." Ok. Run Forrest, run!

Belenix 0.4.4 has been released. "This release marks one more important step for OpenSolaris LiveCD performance. After a couple of months of hacking and testing this release includes an enhancement to the HSFS filesystem module that improves CDROM access time by upto 30%. In addition a bunch of work is going around packaging so the next major release should be complete with packaging based on Pkgsrc." Get it at their download page.

Sun is coming out with the latest of its Opteron-based Galaxy servers, including its first system that will give the hardware maker a presence in the fastest growing and highly competitive blade space. At an event in San Francisco July 11, Sun officials will introduce not only the new Sun Blade 8000, but also another server that can scale to 16 processors and a system code-named Thumper that combines both server and storage capabilities in a single box. There's even a slideshow.

Like many others, I was a long-time lurker on the atheos mailing list. I was happy to see it get forked, because it seemed to mean that some real progress would get made. In many ways that seems to have happened, and in others... Not so much. Note: This is the 3rd entry to our Alternative OS Contest which runs through 14th July!

"If you use your laptop in many different locations, you must be tired of having to configure your network manually every time. Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol is a nice alternative, but what can you do in places where DHCP is not an option. Guessnet is the right tool for that job."

"One of the first things that an admin wants to do with PowerShell is run remotely. To do this securely, you must encrypt your data. SSH has been the proven way to do this. So the question becomes, how do I connect SSH and PowerShell together? With a little bit of kludge, it is possible."

The GNU Compiler Collection contains frontends for C, C++, Objective-C, Fortran, Java, and Ada as well as libraries for these languages. In this version: important security improvements on the generated code. Various optimizer improvements. Many Java (GJC) fixes and improvements. Support has been added for the IBM System z9 109, the MorphoSys architecture. Many other changes.

"Static analysis refers to a method of examining software that allows developers to discover dangerous programming practices, poor use of language features, or potential errors in source code, without actually running the code. If you use Xcode with C or Objective-C, you can gain real quality improvements by understanding the basics of static analysis techniques and by integrating these techniques into your development process. In this article, we show you how to use GCC to help verify C and Objective-C programs."

Computers of the future could be controlled by eye movements, rather than a mouse or keyboard. Scientists at Imperial College, London, are working on eye-tracking technology that analyses the way we look at things. The team is trying to gain an insight into visual knowledge - the way we see objects and translate that information into actions.

Ars reviews Parallels Desktop for MacOS X, and concludes: "People pondering the switch to a MacBook can rest assured that with the exception of USB device support and hardware accelerated 3-D applications, their needs will be well met by this little workhorse of a program. Between the networking that just works, the impressive speed and the inability of the client operating systems to know they are running within a 'virtual machine', I think you'll be hard-pressed to find software for any x86 OS that doesn't work within a Parallels VM."

Open-source and .Net zealots can both take away positives from eWEEK Labs testing of various application stacks, but a mix-and-match approach wins the day. Bottom line: Open source and .Net better learn to play nice.

The Xfce development team is pleased to announce that Xfce 4.4 beta2 is now available for download. Besides Mousepad and Thunar, this release also includes the new Xfce archive manager Xarchiver. Other than that a larger number of bugs wered fixed, and several core components wered improved. See the changelog for details.