"Whether you're a buyer or a seller of a product, the essential goal of standardization is to make interoperability possible, allowing communication with anyone else using the same protocol and media. In some cases though, vendors have specific reasons for not being compatible - and those vendors have developed a standard for incompatibility, digital rights management. The goal of DRM is to limit compatibility because things which are compatible can be copied and distributed freely. In this article, Peter Seebach looks at a potential oxymoron - standards designed to subvert and prevent interoperability."

In light of the many misunderstandings about Linux, software repositories and installation of packages, part one of this season's Mandriva Linux 2006 review includes an extensive background article about it. It explains why the nature of Free Software leads to a more userfriendly software installation setup for Linux distributions in general, as compared to proprietary systems such as the current desktop market leader. The process is illustrated with Mandriva Linux tools. This first part of the Mandriva Linux 2006 review also contains information on the installation and benchmark figures against previous Mandriva/Mandrake products, amongst other things.

Coming from his background in Java development, the concept of using delegates and categories, as opposed to subclassing, was a bit foreign to Marcus Zarra. In Java subclassing, nearly everything was quite common. So common in fact, that Sun provided generic subclasses in quite a few cases. Objective-C and Cocoa, however, have a different approach. Marcus walks you through the different approaches used in Objective-C programming. Also: the Java platform includes a number of packages that are concerned with the movement of data into and out of programs. These packages differ in the kinds of abstractions they provide for dealing with I/O (input/output). This chapter covers primarily the stream-based model of the java.io package.

UNIX was a terrific workhorse for its time, but eventually the old nag needs to be put out to pasture. David Chisnall argues that it's time to retire UNIX in favor of modern systems with a lot more horsepower. "UNIX has a lot of strengths, but like any other design it's starting to show its age. Some of the points listed in this article apply less to some UNIX-like systems, some apply more."

Currently in beta-testing, Parallels Workstation is a new virtual machine system for Windows and Linux. The main program is wizard driven and it takes around 30 seconds to set up a virtual machine profile.

The Lycoris source-code saga doesn't seem to want to die, but hopefully the following article will kill this already dead horse. "Parties on both sides of the Lycoris source code controversy stepped up to clarify the issues raised in a LXer article published on Wednesday. Both sides took issue with some of the statements in the article. The controversy came to light as a report on OSNews.com, and the ensuing discussion left questions in many users' minds as to whether the code in question would, in fact, be released."