In a rare discussion on the severity of the Windows malware scourge, a Microsoft security official said businesses should consider investing in an automated process to wipe hard drives and reinstall operating systems as a practical way to recover from malware infestation. "When you are dealing with rootkits and some advanced spyware programs, the only solution is to rebuild from scratch. In some cases, there really is no way to recover without nuking the systems from orbit."

Although it has done so subtly, Apple Computer has slowly been addressing issues with its new MacBook Pro notebooks and now appears to be shipping a fourth minor revision of the Intel-based computers. While the MacBook Pro has been receiving praise and stellar reviews from mainstream media outlets, its earliest adopters have had some quibbles. On a related note, Newsforge has a review of Camino 1.0, the Gecko-based Mac browser from the Mozilla Foundation.

A review of RR64 Linux, a distribution based on Gentoo with Xgl included. "While I will probably never move completely away from the Debian system, I think I have found a winner in RR64. I get along quite nicely with the Gentoo portage system, and I have found the Gentoo community extremely helpful and the documentation both on the DVD and online to be extensive and answer all questions I have had very clearly and concisely."

"Frank Hecker from the Mozilla Foundation contacted Theo to inform him that the foundation decided to donate $10000 to the OpenSSH project. Frank mentioned this today in the Mozilla Foundation's status report. The OpenSSH project truly appreciates this gesture of solidarity from such a respectable open source project. Besides this sizeable donation we also received hundreds of smaller donations, mostly from individuals and small companies. Thanks everyone for stepping up to keep OpenBSD/OpenSSH ticking."

"Evans Data today announced the results of Developers' Choice - IDEs, a study in which over 700 developers ranked the features and capabilities of nine top IDEs that they currently use. IBM's Rational Application Developer edged past Borland's JBuilder to receive the highest overall relative scores against top IDEs including Eclipse, Macromedia Studio MX, and Oracle Developer Suite. IDEs were ranked in 13 distinct categories including compiler/interpreter, debugger, editor, compiler performance, performance of resulting apps, ease of use, sample apps, and libraries/frameworks."

"Karmencita is a high level object query language for .NET. It's purpose is to allow easy querying from in memory structured data. Features: easy, SQL like language; common, slim API used for querying data; supports any IEnumerable data source, DataTables and XmlDataDocuments; extensible implementation; and much more."

"Nowadays I collect, store, and listen to music mostly on digital media, so I thought I'd find myself a Linux audio player that does all the things I need it to do. Little did I know how many options I had! After evaluating more than a dozen applications, I've found three that I feel provide the best mix of features and performance." Read more at Linux.com.

" This database stuff is clearly the next frontier. If we are ever going to have natural speech interfaces and virtual assistants that collect and display our information in more useful ways, the computer is going to need to know much more about how our files relate to each other and remember what we’ve done to them and who’s done it. Moving all this organization to the system level instead of locking it up in separate applications that are then duplicated in a search index seems like the best way to get there."

"The 10.4.6 Update is recommended for all users and includes general operating system fixes, as well as specific fixes for the following applications and technologies: login and authentication in a variety of network environments; file access and byte range locking with AFP file sharing; network access when using proxy server automatic configuration files; searching iWork '06 and Microsoft Office documents with Spotlight; creating Automator workflows for iPhoto 6; synchronizing contacts and calendars to .Mac and mobile phones; and much more." There's a delta update for 10.4.5, and a combo update for 10.4.0-10.4.5. Easiest method is to just use Software Update.

Geeks.com is selling the HP iPAQ h2210 for less than $220 this week, with a... 3600 mAh extra battery and a 128 MB SD card. While this model is pretty old now it is still very capable with its 400 Mhz processor and so we thought that we could review it from the point of view of an affordable SIP phone (Ekiga, Gizmo, Stanaphone, FreeWorldDialup, Skype). Read more for our findings and a quick rundown of its amazing battery life times!

Ars reviews the Alienware Sentia m3200, a 12" laptop which is not unlike Apple's iBook in case of features. Ars concludes: "The Sentia m3200 is small, light and fast enough to be a very good machine for many tasks. It's not built to handle the latest 3-D games, as it uses onboard graphics, but it makes up for that by being a well-rounded multimedia machine and the fact that it runs cool is a nice plus. When the kinks are ironed out of PowerCinema, the Instant-On feature will make more sense."

Microsoft has a big surprise planned for not just those of its own customers using virtualization, but for those in the open-source community as well. On April 3, the software giant will use the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo in Boston to announce that it is making its Virtual Server 2005 R2 Enterprise Edition product available as a free download from the Microsoft Web site. On a related note, "XenSource has prepped its first major charge at Microsoft Windows customers with a new package that includes the open source Xen hypervisor along with some management software."

"The National Archives of Australia has announced that it will move its digital archives program to software that supports the ODF. The significance of this example is that the NAA gathers in materials from multiple sources, in many different formats, which will need to be converted to ODF compliance for long term archival storage. The NAA's decision provides a new and distinct case study for those considering a move to ODF. Unlike Mass. or Bristol, the NAA will deal almost exclusively with documents created elsewhere. As a result, it provides a 'worst possible case' to test whether operating an ODF environment in a world that uses multiple non-ODF compliant formats is practical."

"The ATX standard allows power supplies and cases to be commodity parts, dramatically reducing the cost of computer design. Lessons learned from the success of this standard show why standardizing parts is important. The BTX standard builds on this, and the blade.org standards work should do likewise."