In an unexpected move, Microsoft posted its formal response to the European Commission and correspondence used in the case in the EU's anti-trust case against the company. According to Microsoft, the EC had "not even bothered to read the most recent versions" of and "waited many months before informing Microsoft that it believed changes were necessary". And: "despite Microsoft's substantial and serious efforts to reach the ever-receding horizon of the commission's demands... The commission was not to be deterred from its pre-holiday rush to impose a punitive daily fine on Microsoft."

"For backups, especially network backups, I have been using, developing, and advocating Bacula, the Network Backup Tool for Unix and Windows. Bacula backs up to tape, disk, DVD, CD, etc. The server runs on Unix operating systems, yes, including Mac OS/X. The client runs on Unix, and on Windows, and has support for VSS which allows you to backup files that are in use (if the application using the file has VSS support)."

"Why is there more than one Java GUI tool kit? The best answer is that one size does not fit all, nor is there a one-size-fits-all GUI tool kit to be invented soon. Each tool kit offers advantages and disadvantages that make selecting one more appropriate, given your needs and intended audience. Read descriptions of each tool kit's basic features, and the pros and cons of using each."

"If you are interested in developing with Mono using Visual Studio, there are a number of tools that Francisco Martinez has developed to make your experience smoother. He created a few screencasts and a general introduction on his blog."

Screenshots are available of Mandriva's 2006.0 beta, following the release announcement. "This live CD is a complete Mandriva Linux system, which you can use directly from the CD or install on your hard drive. It includes OpenOffice.org, KDE, Firefox, GIMP, Amarok, etc."

"Is Dell is on its way to becoming the first tier-one PC vendor to offer a mainstream business Linux desktop to US customers? It's starting to look that way. Dell has started advertising a trio of affordable workstations with RHEL WS 4 preinstalled."

"Yesterday, I got Qt running on top of the Glib main loop. By using the QAbstractEventDispatcher API, I was able to completely replace the entire event dispatching mechanism of a Qt 4 application with less than 600 lines of code. What does this mean?"

"SWsoft Virtuozzo for Windows is deadly simple to install and manage, with extended virtual servers' centralized management features, and enhanced provisioning capabilities. Anyway you should consider that OS partitioning is different from virtualization. Virtuozzo is less flexible than any VMware or Microsoft virtualization software and you won't be able to consolidate different platforms, or migrate some of them when the new Microsoft codename Longhorn Server will come."

"With the release of Mac OS X for x86 processors, Apple has chosen to not release source to key components of the OS, such as the kernel and all drivers. This means Darwin/x86 is dead in the water; Darwin/ppc has many closed source components and is a deprecated architecture." Read more here.

Ten years ago, on 24 February 1996, Greg Lehey submitted for publication the final version of the first ever book on the FreeBSD operating system, "Installing and Using FreeBSD". It was later renamed to "The Complete FreeBSD", as is now known and appreciated by the users of this OS. Grog have always retained full rights to the book, and for today he has decided to release it for download under a Creative Commons license. Besides, he doesn't have the time to keep updating it, so he is asking for help. He can't guarantee money, "just" recognition in the preface.

"Trying to combine JSF and JSP is like trying to shoehorn a foot into a glove: it's possible, but it's really just a stopgap measure until something better comes along. In this article, JSF enthusiast Rick Hightower introduces you to what he likes best about Facelets: easy HTML-style templating and reusable composition components."

"Most Linux people don't know much about JBoss, the open source firm reported in talks with Oracle about a $400 million purchase. That tops any free software deals I can recall. Novell paid $210 million for SUSE in cash. So, what about this JBoss company? They did it without any initial outside funding, generated revenue and self-funded and stayed true to open source 100% while selling services."

Geek Patrol benchmarked a MacBook Pro and a PowerBook G4. Not surprisingly, they concluded: "The MacBook Pro outperformed the PowerBook G4 in almost every benchmark. Since all of the MacBook Pro's baseline scores are over 100, it even outperformed our baseline system, a Power Mac G5 1.6GHz! The only benchmark where the PowerBook G4 outperformed the MacBook Pro, Stdlib Allocate, depends more on library performance than raw hardware performance. If you're upgrading from a PowerBook G4 (or even an early Power Mac G5), you'll certainly notice how much faster the MacBook Pro is, especially with multi-threaded applications."

David Reveman of Novell shares his thoughts on Xgl, Metacity, and more."I've been getting a lot of mail from people asking me about my thoughts on AIGLX, the GL compositing work being done on Metacity and nVidia's xdevconf paper. Instead of replying to everyone individually, I though I'd send a mail to the Xorg list."