Noted PC Magazine columnist John C. Dvorak was one of the first to predict the release of Boot Camp. His prophesizing continues in his lastest column. "A cloud is rising over Mac OS X and its future unless Apple makes its boldest move ever: turning OS X into an open-source project. That would make the battle between OS X and Linux the most interesting one on the computer scene. With all attention turned in that direction, there would be nothing Microsoft could do to stem a reversal of its fortunes."

From the article: "In order to allow our users to follow the most important changes over the last few months, we provide a brief summary in these official status reports on a regular basis. These status reports, released with irregular regularity, are suitable for reproduction and publication in part or in whole as long as the source is clearly indicated. This report summarizes the changes within NetBSD during the first three months of 2006."

A U.S. judge has quashed Microsoft's attempts to obtain documents in its antitrust battle against the European Commission, ruling the software giant was trying to undermine European Union law. Elsewhere, Burst.com has filed a countersuit against Apple Computer claiming that the iTunes software, the iPod and the Quicktime streaming software all infringe on patents held by Burst.com, Burst announced Monday.

While most people won't be able to get their hands on Vista until next year, consumers will be able to get some of the media enhancements sooner. Microsoft is on track to release a Windows XP version of Windows Media Player 11 before the end of June, the company confirmed last week.

" Let's start with Vista. Fine, so it got delayed by a few months. No big deal. If people can wait for a year, they can definitely wait for a few more months. But with Vista, Microsoft is definitely taking a big leap forward. Right about now, all you Mac fans are clamoring to be heard claiming that Mac OS had all these features for years. True. But with 2-3 percent marketshare in the desktop area, I really don’t think Microsoft is all that worried about the Macintosh platform. And with Vista, most Mac enthusiasts wouldn’t be able to point fingers at Windows users about how sleek (appearance and functionality) their OS looks, because Vista definitely looks comparable. I agree it feels quite raw, but it’s still in Beta, so I’m willing to give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt here."

The Xfce project has released the first beta in the 4.4 release cycle. "Xfce 4.4 beta1 (4.3.90.1) is now available for download. Xfce 4.4 features new tools such as the much anticipated 'Thunar' file manager as well as several huge improvements of its core components."

Robert X. Cringely thinks that Apple will offer virtualization in Mac OS 10.5, but in order to do that, he thinks Apple will need to drop Mach. "So Apple will at least offer the option for users to run a virtualized version of Windows Vista atop OS X. Don't be surprised, either, to see that OS X 10.5 has a new kernel, finally giving up Mach and a big piece of its NeXTstep heritage. I write this for one thing - because OS X has kernel problems and needs some help, especially with swap space. I say it also because of the departure of Avie Tevanian, Apple's chief software technology officer, and the guy who hung onto Mach for so long." The Mach kernel has recently been the target for complaints; esp. in server duties, OSX' kernel lags behind significantly compared to i.e. Linux.

"US software maker Oracle is considering launching a version of the Linux operating system and has looked at buying one of the two firms dominating the technology, the Financial Times newspaper reported on Monday. As part of a recent study of the open-source software market, Ellison told the newspaper, Oracle had considered buying Novell, which after Red Hat is the biggest distributor of Linux."

MadPenguin takes a look at Flight 5 of Ubuntu Dapper, and concludes: "All in all, Ubuntu 6.06 is gearing up to be quite an impressive release. Granted, I saw some bugs during my stay on the distribution, but can I really complain? It's not a full release, so it deserves some breathing room. Considering some of the horribly authored software I've looked at over the years, I feel that Ubuntu in pre-release form is more stable than other distros when they reach final release status. It's not quite in the league of Slackware and Red Hat/Fedora in that respect yet, but it's surely getting there in a hurry."

In a post to the Haiku mailing list, Simon Taylor has provided a screenshot which he has entitled 'interesting', of Firefox running on Haiku. It's displaying the manual for Gobe Productive off his own hard drive, as Simon is unable to access the internet from Haiku - no dialup internet is supported - and he doesn't think that networking is going to work anyway. Only one bug in the tree required fixing for the browser to run, and it now joins NetPositive as a supported browser on the platform.

Defect removal is preferred over defect survival. If some defect slips through the cracks, however, the C++ exception handling mechanism helps to fortify your software's fault tolerance, as Cameron and Tracey Hughes explain. Also, elsewhere on the same site, old maps were marked with the phrase "Here be Dragons" to help seafarers steer away from dangerous places; in programming the best way to avoid dealing with bad code is to avoid writing it. Diomidis Spinellis points out 10 giveaways to spot bad code that you (or others) may have written.

This chapter introduces Interface Builder, a tool no less important to Cocoa development than Xcode itself. IB is used as a straightforward tool for laying out windows and views. You'll see how to set the many options for automatic sizing of embedded views and how to use Interface Builder's own simulation mode to verify that your layout and sizing choices work.

John Smart provides a quick intro to Lucene, a powerful and elegant library for full-text indexing and searching in Java, with which you can add rich full-text search functionality to your Java web application.

Right in between a car crash and Easter, I knew I had to write a Sunday Eve Column. So here I am, digesting vast quantities of chocolate eggs (and I don't even like chocolate), craving for coffee (for me about as special as breathing), with the goal of explaining to you my, well, obsession with microkernels. Why do I like them? Why do I think the microkernel paradigm is superior to the monolithic one? Read on.