"You might not be familiar with messages, but they're extremely important, especially when you need to perform tasks outside of the range of tasks that Microsoft programmed into the .NET Framework. All communication in Windows relies on messages. This article reveals Windows messages to you, shows you how to capture messages that a .NET application doesn't normally capture, and demonstrates how to generate messages that .NET applications don't normally generate. In short, by the time you finish this article, you'll know about an entirely different world: the one that the .NET Framework hides from view."

Alcibiades' recent article hit some sensitive nerves. One of our readers wrote a retort, stating: "The reader will notice that this author glosses over two important issues in attacking the Mac community. One of these is that Windows, at least since 95, has always been notorious for its reliability and security issues. He does not mention the 'Blue Screen of Death' even once. He does not mention the fact that, to run Windows reliably, you need anti-virus software which costs extra (unless it came bundled with the machine), and uses extra system resources. He does not mention the continual updates, which as time goes on, detract from the performance of Windows - or even that the last fresh Windows OS was released as long ago as 2001."

Linux Format has an interview with Greg Mancusi-Ungaro, the director of Linux and OSS marketing at Novell. "It's been challenging for us to work with partners in a way that's rational, but we've decided that in the next generation of our enterprise products, GNOME will be the default desktop. But we will continue to ship and support KDE."

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."

Plans for an area of the internet dedicated to pornography were killed last night in a vote by overseeing organisation ICANN. In a split 9-5 board decision, the organisation acted ruthlessly, against its own previous position, in order to put an end to an increasingly difficult and controversial issue - the approval of a .xxx top-level domain.

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.

A feature called System Management Mode included in modern x86 cpus opens the way to the land of kernel space and the quest for ring zero. Federico Biancuzzi interviews French researcher Loïc Duflot to learn about the System Management Mode attack, how to mitigate it, what hardware is vulnerable, and why we should be concerned with recent X Server bugs.

"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."

Gstreamer developer Christian Schaller explains why he thinks Phonon (announced a few days ago by the KDE project) is a broken wheel. "I have held back blogging about Phonon for some time to avoid flamewars, but I don't want to have efforts like OSDL delayed due to setups like Phonon being promoted or thought of as a workable solution for the issues faced. Let me start of with a brief introduction to the area of multimedia frameworks."

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.

Six months ago, architects from two dozen desktop-oriented Linux projects gathered in Portland to work together on creating the best possible Linux desktop. Thus was born the Portland Project. Now, in Mainz, Germany, the expanded group is meeting again on May 8 and 9 to see how far it's come and to look at what's ahead.

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.

"IBM's contribution to the launch of the new Open Ajax Initiative aims to increase accessibility to the powerful Web programming technique through the Eclipse Foundation. To help prepare developers for the new tool set, this article introduces two existing runtime tools - Dojo and Zimbra - which will be supported in Eclipse's Ajax Toolkit Framework."

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.