The Amanith Framework is a cross-platform (Linux, Win32, MacOS X, FreeBSD and IRIX) open source C++ framework for vector graphics. The new 0.2 release adds support for MacOS X Tiger (XCode 2.2) and implements a new drawboard in OpenVG/SVG style, built on top of OpenGL. Version 0.2 has been released today.

It's been a long, strange trip for the personal computer over 30 years. Ars takes a look back at the comings and goings of players in the PC market, from Altair to Zeta OS, to see how we got where we are today. "When you step back and look at the big picture, the overall dominance of the PC becomes clear. However, this was not always the case, and in fact it wasn't until 1986 that the PC platform first surpassed 50% market share. This was more than a decade after the first personal computer was sold."

The first version of the Mozilla Foundation's Thunderbird was a serviceable e-mail client; the latest version may be a great one. At first, Thunderbird Version 1.0 made a good impression. On a longer acquaintance, however, problems such as poor search functionality and memory leaks tarnished its reputation. Now, with Thunderbird 1.5 Release Candidate Two in hand, the program stands poised to regain its good name and far, far more.

Bob Sutor from IBM, Alan Yates from Microsoft, Bill Sproull from Sun, Peter Quinn, MA CIO, and others sat elbow to elbow in the Massachusetts Senate Reading Room today and answered questions to a crowd of legislators, press and industry representatives about ODF and Microsoft's XML Reference Schema. Here's an unelaborated report of who said what, transcribed in real time as they said it, and a link to the full audio tape as well.

PCStats is going to look at the new features which Microsoft plans to bring to the table with Internet Explorer 7, and examine how the underlying unctionality of the browser has changed to better protect your computer.

This PDF compares the quality of various audio compression codecs run with various parameters. Overall, of all the audio encodings attempted which produced output at the same sample rate as the input, constant bitrate MP3's produced the highest quality files, exceeded only by variable bitrate MP3's at bitrates above 224kbps. In all cases AAC produced inferior quality results.

The gospel according to LUA (least-privileged user account) took center stage at Microsoft's Security Summit East here with a pair of Redmond consultants pitching the idea of a well-funded security deployment repository to help developers create applications for non-admin users. The LUA principle, which promotes the use of accounts with fewer access rights than Administrator accounts, has been largely ignored by end users, but if Aaron Margosis and Shelly Bird have their way, code writers will have a central place to get tools and training to create least-privilege applications.

Today, we cannot know if people would still buy Microsoft products because the government protects the monopoly. What percentage of the market would Microsoft have in a fair market? The only way we can answer that last question is to stop manufacturers from preloading Windows. Until then, we do not have a free market. Microsoft has no way to prove itself otherwise, says LXer.

As the end of the year approaches, it appears that virtualization's time in the open source spotlight has all but come. Whether it is because of the machinations of companies like XenSource or analyst endorsement, emulating an enterprise-class infrastructure environment using open source has been on the rise in 2005. And, now, it looks ready to burst next year.

Yonah, a dual-core notebook chip based on a new design, will be released in January, said Keith Kresslin, director of mobile platforms marketing at Intel. It is expected to provide around 68 percent better performance than current Intel notebook chips, which sport one processing core. Computers with Yonah will also be better than PCs today at running many applications at once, he said.

"Charles recently caught up with seasoned Niner, Larry Osterman, an SDE and 20 year Microsoft veteran, and Elliot H Omiya, a Software Architect and audio guru, to dig into the innerworkings of Vista's updated Audio Stack and new user mode API. Much of the guts of Windows audio have been moved up into the land of the user and this has consequences for both Windows audio developers at the API level and for Windows at the general programmability, reliability and stability levels."

"It's all a gush in Sun Microsystems' low-end SPARC server business with code-names flowing toward El Reg at speed. Last week, we brought you the details on Niagara II, and this week we bring you Michigan and Huron. The 1U Michigan box will replace the 1U Erie system and boast twice as much memory support - up to 64GB. Huron will be the 2U replacement for Ontario and also double the memory support, stretching up to 128GB." Sun also released the open-source Java database.

"On the weekend of December 10th and 11th, a small group of nine KDE contributors met in Hamburg to work on quality assurance checks for KDE's code base. This not only covered C++ sourcecode but also other aspects such as checking the state of the API documentation, looking for common errors in KDE's manuals and evaluating the usability of KDE applications. Read on for the full report."

Because of the amount of controversy its review of Aperture received, Ars Technica have posted a follow-up to address some of the issues which were raised by readers. It includes a side-by-side comparison of Apple's RAW importer with those of Capture One Pro and Adobe, which illustrates the difference in quality.