Taiwan's parliament has voted to end its dependence on Microsoft software, demanding that the government reduce purchases from the software giant by 25 percent this year. The resolution, passed on Friday, is an attempt by the island's law-making body to end the near monopoly Microsoft has with local government offices, a legislative aide said.

When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, Micheal Dell was asked what he would do to fix Apple. Dell replied: "What would I do? I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders." Following Friday's news that Apple had surpassed Dell's value of $71.97 billion, Jobs wrote an email to his staff: "Team, it turned out that Michael Dell wasn't perfect at predicting the future. Based on today's stock market close, Apple is worth more than Dell. Stocks go up and down, and things may be different tomorrow, but I thought it was worth a moment of reflection today." Who said capitalism is humourless?

GNU Classpath 0.20 has been released. "New StAX pull parser and SAX-over-StAX driver. Full XMLEncoder implementation. The packages javax.sound.sampled, javax.print.attribute and javax.print.event have been implemented. Lots of new datatransfer, print, swing and swing.text work. Performance improvements in the painting/layout mechanism. Additional 1.5 support, including (separate) generic branch release. SecurityManager cleanups and start of review of all Permission checks. Buildable on cygwin. Fully buildable as 'in-workspace' library-plus-vm inside (native) Eclipse. Real world Free Swing and CORBA example added." There is also a Roadmap paper available.

The Mozilla Corporation has set a March launch date for a version of its Firefox Web browser that will run on Apple's Intel version of Mac OS X. "We are targeting the official release of Firefox for Intel Mac OS X in late March with the Firefox 1.5.0.2 update," Mozilla software engineer Josh Aas told ZDNet. Demand for the browser on Apple's new CPU platform is expected to rocket as the PC vendor last week started selling the first Macs based on CPUs from Intel. However, an unofficial build can be found here.

"Booting a computer from your USB flash drive may seem like a daunting task, but it is actually quite easy. With the right equipment and some basic knowledge this very useful technique can be taken advantage of in all sorts of different circumstances. This article goes over booting your Windows or Linux system from USB as well as booting directly into Linux and a few other details of the process."

As reported by Engadget, Apple Newton enthusiasts have the Einstein core running on a Sharp Zaurus SL-5500 PDA. The port is still slow but the developers are hopeful to fully optimize it soon.

"One of the biggest issues involved with becoming a web publisher is the question of hosting. With an internet clogged with false hosting review sites, hosting companies trying to rip you off, and hosting companies run by 14 year olds, the majority of web publishers are at the mercy of random chance when it comes to finding a quality host. To solve this huge problem and to grant freedom to all, we have come up with 75 extremely specific steps that will get you up and running with a *nix box (running FreeBSD), along with the most recent versions of Apache, Perl, PHP, and MySQL."

"When that high-profile project just ain't gonna happen, how can you ensure that your head isn't on the chopping block? Matt Heusser provides some practical suggestions for passing on the bad news without just passing the blame."

"Managing user accounts is a fundamental task for any systems administrator. Working with user and computer accounts in a network is often a common part of many IT and technical support jobs as well. To manage user accounts in a Mac OS X environment, it helps to understand how they are stored and accessed on both individual workstations and in shared directories in Mac OS X Server. This article covers the conceptual and practical aspects of how Mac OS X workstations and servers use Apple's Open Directory architecture to store and make use of user account information."

Dell's Chief Executive Kevin Rollins said on Thursday that he is open to selling computers that run on AMD chips. Dell, the world's biggest manufacturer of personal computers, currently only uses Intel chips, and is Intel's biggest customer. Rollins said that Dell was always open to change: "We want the very best technology for our customers."

A selection of BeOS/Zeta news today. First off, here's a progress report on YellowTAB's attempt at porting OpenOffice.org to Zeta: "We have now succeeded in porting 50 of the total of 200 packages of OpenOffice to yellowTAB ZETA. This includes one of the most complex components namely the SAL (System Abstraction Layer)." Secondly, IsComputerOn points out that screenshots of the BeMediaCenter have been published, while an update to BeeF is almost finished. And last but not least, Cola-coder is working on a front-end to IM_Kit (ICO has a download link).

For the fourth consecutive year a group of KDE PIM developers followed the gracious invitation of Intevation GmbH to meet at their headquarters in Osnabrueck, Germany on the first weekend in January. As in the past years, the face-time proved very productive especially since everyone felt that with KDE 4 the time for more fundamental changes has come. By the end of the meeting the group had agreed on a vision and initial architecture for a unified, extensible storage service for PIM data and metadata, allowing all applications on the desktop fast and reliable access as well as powerful search capabilities. This service, codenamed 'Akonadi', together with intiatives like Plasma and Solid will form the basis of an exciting KDE 4 experience.

"This tutorial describes how to set up database replication in MySQL. MySQL replication allows you to have an exact copy of a database from a master server on another server (slave), and all updates to the database on the master server are immediately replicated to the database on the slave server so that both databases are in sync. This is not a backup policy because an accidentally issued DELETE command will also be carried out on the slave; but replication can help protect against hardware failures though."

The ultra powerful alternative file manager for Mac OS X 10.4.x was just released: Path Finder 4 (screenshot). The new version sports over 100 improvements and features bringing Path Finder one step closer to perfection. Read more for our quick write up on the new release.