The microkernel vs. monolithic debate, whether you boys and girls like it or not, rages on. After Tanenbaum's article and an email from Torvalds, another kernel developer steps up, this time in favour of the muK. A developer of the muK-based Coyotos writes: "Ultimately, there are two compelling reasons to consider microkernels in high-robustness or high-security environments: there are several examples of microkernel-based systems that have succeeded in these applications because of the system structuring that microkernel-based designs demand, there are zero examples of high-robustness or high-security monolithic systems."

At its annual Press Day Wednesday, Google introduced three new services while attempting to kill the popular story in the media that it is involved in a fierce winner-take-all battle with Microsoft. Instead, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said that there would never be a single victor. Schmidt said that having a single search engine would stagnate innovation. Competition, on the other hand, would support growth as well as advertising prices, and he added that there was room in the industry for more than one strategy.

Ars reviews Aperture 1.1, and concludes: "I have to admit, I was very skeptical that Apple could whip together professional-quality RAW conversion for numerous camera models in a few months. Either they bought some existing technology we don't know about or there are some seriously overworked software engineers getting some much-needed sleep right about now. But who cares? The plain fact is that Aperture 1.1's high-quality RAW processing says "we can move quickly in areas where we've had little experience" and the discount/refund says "users won't be expected to beta test at their own expense again." Ars's review of Aperture 1.0 was quite negative.

"After lot of work and several delays, we proudly announce the availability of SUSE Linux 10.1. In tribute to 42 and as today is the fifth anniversary of the death of Douglas Adams, we dedicate this release to him. As usual, we ship all the latest open source packages available at the time. But we want to give special mention to Xgl for 3D acceleration on the desktop, NetworkManager for getting painless wifi access everywhere, the completely open source AppArmor 2.0, and the full integration of XEN 3 in YaST." You can get it from the download page. Update: Screenshots.

"Aside from an awesome user interface and a great underlying architecture, Apple built OS X with security in mind. As part of that central security theme, OS X has been designed using three key isolation features: system isolation, user isolation, and memory and application isolation."

Mad Penguin has published a short review of the Penguicon 4.0 convention and has an interview with Chris DiBona of Google. When asked what percentage of people at Google use Linux, he replied: "Probably way more than half. I don't know the exact ratios though. All the developers use it and most of the engineers and sysadmins."

I started out as a Mac user in about 1985 in a world which will be totally unfamiliar to almost all readers of OSNews. You wrote out your stuff by longhand, and a secretary typed it on a word processor. If you were lucky and able to manage it, you could dictate it. But you did not dictate into a dictating machine, because these were big heavy and expensive. You dictated it directly to someone who could 'take shorthand'. If you had a PC, it ran DOS. You looked for your files, and moved them around, started applications, one at a time, from the command line, and the command line was not pretty, it was green on black.

Apple has sent in the clones. Well, sort of. "Some nine years after the Apple clones were officially killed off, pirates in South America have resurrected the trade. Apparently, the latest thing is a 'PowerPC G6 Macintosh', an 'Apple G6 Macintosh-Clone Computer' with a 3.8GHz Pentium 4. These come with shedloads of OSx86 compatible hardware, and pre-loaded with something called a 'Mac OSX-86 Apple MacOS X Tiger 10.4.3'." As for real Apple news: there's a solution to a problem whitch will affect virtually all Mighty Mice eventually. The problem, where the MM stops scrolling down, can be solved by opening the mouse and cleaning it . I tested it, and it works (my two MMs had the problem).

The Solaris Containers technology addresses this void by making it possible to create a number of private execution environments within a single instance of the Solaris OS. This paper provides suggestions for designing system configurations using powerful tools associated with Solaris Containers, guidelines for selecting features most appropriate for the user's needs, advice on troubleshooting, and a comprehensive consolidation planning example.

Nintendo has turned to Opera as the browser for their upcoming Wii gaming console. "Opera Software today announced that Nintendo's much anticipated new generation game console, Wii, will use the Opera browser. Users of the Wii console will browse the Internet using their consoles. Navigating via the innovative new Wii Remote controller, users can visit Web sites in between gaming sessions."

Torvalds has indeed chimed in on the micro vs. monolithic kernel debate. Going all 1992, he says: "The whole 'microkernels are simpler' argument is just bull, and it is clearly shown to be bull by the fact that whenever you compare the speed of development of a microkernel and a traditional kernel, the traditional kernel wins. The whole argument that microkernels are somehow 'more secure' or 'more stable' is also total crap. The fact that each individual piece is simple and secure does not make the aggregate either simple or secure. And the argument that you can 'just reload' a failed service and not take the whole system down is equally flawed." My take: While I am not qualified to reply to Linus, there is one thing I want to say: just because it is difficult to program, does not make it the worse design.

Got $18m to spare? That's the market capitalization of one of Silicon Valley's most glamorous companies this morning, after Silicon Graphics Inc. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The size of SGI's debt - at $664m it's twice the value of its assets - is enough to deter all but the most determined bargain hunter. Apart from a ragbag of trademarks - such as OpenGL - what growth has SGI left to offer?

Despite the advent of lower-power designs from Intel and AMD recently, today's processors are still power-hungry beasties. One company says it has a solution to the problem, which may lead to the kind of clock speed increases we used to see back in the heyday of Intel's 'it's all about CPU speed' fixation.

LinuxHelp reviews Vector Linux, and concludes: "All things considered, if one is on the lookout for a Linux distribution which is robust, fast, secure, able to play multimedia files without any configuration from the user's side, containing the latest versions of the software and good enough to be used in a small business setup then Vector Linux could fit the bill. Additionally if you are looking for a Slackware based distribution which covers all the above criteria, then Vector Linux is definitely the obvious choice."