Mark Shuttleworth, founder of the Ubuntu Linux distribution, said that although Microsoft is seen as being very pro-patent at the moment, if every other software maker enforced its patents in the same way then Microsoft would find it very difficult and expensive to do business. "I think in ten years you will see Microsoft become a major opponent of patents and we will see very large software vendors turn around their position on patents," Shuttleworth said.

Aopen confirmed that it will introduce a mini PC closely resembling the design of Apple's Mac mini (code-named Pandora) in time for this year's Christmas season. Apparently the device will sell in two versions for $399 (E327), with Linux, and $499 (E410) with Windows. No specs have been released yet.

Microsoft moved a step closer to becoming a key player in the Internet security business with the announcement Thursday of a new enterprise-class anti-spyware product featuring technology to thwart viruses, worms and kernel rootkits.

Recently, several representatives from Windows IT Pro Magazine received a briefing about the Beta 1 version of Longhorn Server, the next member of the Windows Server family, currently due in the first quarter of 2007, or about six months after Windows Vista ships in late 2006.

"With just one more week to go before the final release of Ubuntu 5.10, the Ubuntu team is proud to announce the Ubuntu 5.10 Release Candidate. This is the final milestone before the official 5.10 release, and includes installation CDs, live CDs, and combination DVDs for three architectures."

This software movement is branching into not just mainstream business applications but also the associated services. And venture capitalists are eager to help.

With each successive generation of technology, we collectively make each leap faster and with slightly less pain. However, as a music fanatic, the jump from tape to CD/mp3 was a tough one for me. Enter the Plusdeck2 Tape-RW PC Cassette Deck. This fantastic device, supplied by geeks.com, has been one of the best devices I've had the pleasure of reviewing. Read on for the complete story.

Sun has rejected notions that bundling the Google Toolbar with Java Runtime will be anticompetitive, especially since users will still have the option to install other toolbars such as Yahoo.

"Theo announced on -misc today that work is in progress to add G5 support to the macppc port. G5 machines will be running in 32-bit mode but there is the possibility of a macppc64 port to follow to take advantage of these 64-bit processors. All Apple models are being targetted (iMac, Power Mac, and Xserve) so if you have such a machine and wish to run OpenBSD NetBSD OpenBSD on it, your dreams are about to come true. As Theo stresses, this is very much a work in progress and not everything is supported or stable at this point in time."

FreeBSD's Murray Stokely says that the FreeBSD Project is pleased to announce the launch of the new website today. The new design was created by Emily Boyd, a student at Smith College that they had the pleasure of working with through Google's Summer of Code program. The old website is available here.

The new Visualizer feature in Visual Studio 2005 lets you see the data as the user sees it, or as the application uses it. And that will save you time and frustration. This article shows how it's done.

The Servlet-Based Content Creation Framework is an easy-used and easily-understood compact, content creation framework utilizing hamlets; a servlet extension that reads XHTML and uses the simple API for XML. Read this article on introducing Hamlets and learn how they can be used to separate Java and HTML in the same source file.

The first point release of the stable 2.12.x series of Gnome has been released. This release includes the latest bugfixes and other improvements such as updated translations.

With the first beta for Microsoft's upcoming Windows Server 2003 Compute Cluster Solution barely out the door, the development team is already thinking seriously about features and functionality designed to make the next version of the product even easier to use and manage than its Linux competitor.