"At the Worldwide Developers Conference in August, Apple plans to provide a sneak preview of the next major update to OS X, code named Leopard. Apple is typically tight-lipped about what to expect from Leopard, so we have no idea what new and improved features await us in August. But that's not stopping us from coming up with a list of things we'd like to see in OS X 10.5." And for when you're done reading.

"The last time I tried Opera, it was still advertisement supported, and offered me no real reason to choose their ad-free option for the money being asked. A number of people used to feel that Opera's ads were off-topic and more annoying than anything. I should be clear in saying that I support companies with a strong privacy policy using ads should they choose to. I just did not see the value in adding them to a browser that offered very little that other browsers did not. Today, this has changed. Opera is now ad free, and they have added some cool new functionality." On a related note, Microsoft has released the 3rd beta version of IE7 for Windows XP/2003.

KDE is ditching the GNU autotools for development and building of their next version, KDE 4. Its replacement is CMake, developed by Kitware. Alexander Neundorf explains the choice in favor of CMake was mainly due to its support for all platforms KDE4 is meant to run on: Linux, BSD, Mac OS X, Solaris, and even Windows. CMake generates specific command files for each of the 'native' build tools from one common source: Makefiles (for GNU make) or project files (for XCode on OS X, for MS Visual Studio, for KDevelop3). Current KDE 4 modules already build (with CMake) on more platforms than KDE 3 with autotools ever did, with full configure checking on all platforms and all compilers/IDEs. Scribus is now also moving to CMake.

Red Hat will announce its latest quarterly earnings today, and if the outlook of its partners provides any clue the report should be good for shareholders – as well as in future quarters. Especially interesting in a Wall Street analyst's recent report is a finding that 45% of Red Hat’s partners are seeing customers migrating from Windows to Red Hat. That trend could be a tremendous growth indicator for the Hatters since Microsoft dominates world markets and much of Red Hat's growth in the past has come at the expense of Unix or other Linux providers.

A couple of years ago, PHP sat at the top of the powerful-but-easy-to-use scripting languages heap. And then - suddenly, Ruby on Rails hit the programming world like a ton of bricks. Did you really want a ditch it all for Ruby on Rails and start over? Of course not! What was needed was a new framework that incorporates many of these new advantages without dumping your previous PHP work in the garbage, Thus, the Zend Framework was born. This article shares the concepts behind the Zend Framework, including the Model-View-Controller pattern and the PHP coding standards.

Attendees of the recent New England Oracle Applications User Group conference got a refresher course on some of the key tools that Oracle developers use to customize E-Business Suite applications. Sridhar Bogelli, the leader of the session and founder and chief executive officer of Apps Associates, an application development consultancy, told attendees that properly using the tools provided by Oracle and third-party vendors can help developers and their companies avoid embarrassing, production-related problems.

Linux has one, last, chance to become the No1 OS in a particular consumer-oriented market (not counting servers): the mobile phone market. The open nature and yes, the hype around Linux has made lots of mobile-oriented companies to consider using Linux for their next-generation cellphones. But there is a major problem on the way to success, a problem which is created not by Linux itself, but by the greed and close-mindness of these same companies that endorse Linux.

A US Senate panel narrowly rejected strict Net neutrality rules on Wednesday, dealing a grave setback to companies like eBay, Google and Amazon that had made enacting them a top political priority this year. By an 11-11 tie, the Senate Commerce Committee failed to approve a Democrat-backed amendment that would have ensured all Internet traffic is treated the same no matter what its source or destination might be. A majority was needed for the amendment to succeed.

Could many smaller Linux distributions be in violation of the GPL? That's what Warren Woodford, the man behind the popular MEPIS distribution thinks. As detailed in Bruce Byfield's excellent NewsForge story, "A GPL requirement could have a chilling effect on derivative distro", Woodford recently ran afoul of the GNU GPL (General Public License) requirement that downstream distributors of GPL code are obligated to provide source code to users in an easily accessible format.

At Windows Vista lab in Redmond before the release of Beta 2, Microsoft developers showed off the new OS to a room full of MVPs and enthusiasts. But even the company's most loyal fan base turned ugly when User Account Control took the stage. Now, Microsoft is begging users not to disable the controversial feature. User Account Control, or UAC, is a fundamental security change coming in Windows Vista and one of the most important additions to protect users from threats, Microsoft says. But the company is struggling to find a balance between security and usability.

A new version of Plan 9 has been released. "Major changes were made to /sys/src/fs, removing some dead code. Some major bugs were fixed. New features were added and the memory limit was increased." More information can be found in the mailing list message. For those that don't know: "Plan 9 was born in the same lab where Unix began. Underneath, though, lies a new kind of system, organized around communication and naming rather than files and processes. In Plan 9, distributed computing is a central premise, not an evolutionary add-on."

A Sun Microsystems Inc. executive said Tuesday said the company is "months" away from releasing its trademark Java programming language under an open-source license. Simon Phipps, chief open-source officer for Sun, said the company is ruminating over two major issues: how to keep Java compatible and ensure no particular company uses market forces as muscle for its own implementation, a move that would threaten Java's "write once, run anywhere" mantra.

"Western Digital has settled a class action lawsuit concerning the deceptive labeling of their hard drives. The problem occured when consumers bought hard drives with a stated capacity. As an example, let’s say you purchased a Western Digital 250 gigabyte hard drive. After you install the drive into your computer, you will notice that the drive size has become 231 gigabytes. The reason for this is that Western Digital, along with most hard drive manufacturers, calculates the storage capacity of their hard drives using the decimal system. This in contrast to virtually all operating systems that calculates the capacity of the hard drives with the binary system. As hard drives become larger, this discrepancy grows larger."

FreeDos has been declared dead, and the homepage been moved to Sourceforge. From the FreeDos.org site: "On 28 June 1994, the project that became FreeDOS was announced to the world. It's 12 years later, we still haven't reached "1.0", and there's no sign of getting there anytime soon. I have given up. I've stopped waiting for "1.0". FreeDOS is dead." You can still see the message if your DNS servers haven't been updated yet.