"From its humble origins in the 'hacker' culture of US computer science laboratories in the 1970s, open source software has grown to become arguably the most influential and talked about phenomenon to hit the computer industry since the invention of the microprocessor. Many of the proponents of OSS seem to have been captivated by the idea of a free lunch and may have failed to consider the longer-term effect of OSS on our fragile software ecosystem. Let us examine some of the issues surrounding OSS that aren't normally aired in public."

LINQ stands for Language INtegrated Query and in a nutshell, it makes query and set operations, like SQL statements, first class citizens in .NET languages. Watch an interview about LINQ here.

"Wish to learn about C++ programming for Symbian devices? My site is a tutorial in form of a blog. Also with a more traditional tutorial that collects and organize the content of the blog."

A recent blog post on ZDNet contends that Firefox is not as secure as promised by counting exploits. Joseph Huang contends that severity and the number of unpatched vulnerabilites matters, not just the number of exploits discovered.

"Every now and again I like to spend a while becoming really familiar with the various tools which I use frequently. This week I spent several hours experimenting with the various paging applications available to Debian users. Here is my guide to the common pagers, and what they can do."

Palm opened its first retail store in the Bay Area this week (Stanford, Palo Alto). OSNews was there today and we are sharing our quick look at it via pictures, here and here.

"Now that Firefox has become the first viable contender to Internet Explorer in years, its popularity has brought with it some unwanted attention. Last week's premature disclosure of a zero-day Firefox exploit came a few weeks after a zero-day exploit for Internet Explorer appeared on the Internet. Firefox not only has more vulnerabilities per month than Internet Explorer, but it is now surpassing Internet Explorer for the number of exploits available for public download in recent months." Note: Read this article, and especially the update, carefully before commenting.

Mandriva Linux 2006 RC2 has been released. You can read the release notes here, download locations are underneath the release notes. This will be the last RC before 2006 goes final.

The BSD Certification Group are running a new survey: the BSD Usage Survey. This survey aims to collect detailed statistics on how and where BSD systems are used around the world. The survey is short - only 19 questions - and should only take a few minutes to complete.

"There's lots of innovation going on in security - we're inundated with a steady stream of new stuff and it all sounds like it works just great. Every couple of months I'm invited to a new computer security conference, or I'm asked to write a foreword for a new computer security book. And, thanks to the fact that it's a topic of public concern and a "safe issue" for politicians, we can expect a flood of computer security-related legislation from lawmakers. So: computer security is definitely still a "hot topic." But why are we spending all this time and money and still having problems?"

Mac OS X provides a kernel extension mechanism as a means of allowing dynamic loading of pieces of code into the kernel, without the need to recompile. These pieces of code are known generically as plug-ins or, in the Darwin kernel, as kernel extensions or KEXTs.

The framework is intentionally designed to support only the basic functionality, as it will ultimately be used to support many RAID controllers. Theo explains, "the functionality supplied is also very basic, almost minimal. But this is done like this on purpose, since we believe that we could support this functionality on all RAID controllers in the same way, without special 'but that controller is so different' mindsets entering the picture. RAID management should (and can be) be no more complicated than ifconfig managing network interfaces."

While Dell recommends the use of Windows XP Professional, in France Dell and Mandriva have announced the availability of a Dell laptop preloaded with Mandriva Linux. This is the first time any Dell laptop with pre-installed Linux has been sold or supported by Dell. Previously, only Dell N-Series Precision Workstations with Red Hat Linux were available from Dell.

Bob Muglia, Microsoft's senior vice president for Windows Server, on Thursday shed some light on the upcoming Windows Server 2003 R2 release during his keynote address at the Professional Developers Conference here. R2, which is due later this year, would bring features such as Services for Unix, the WS-Management standard, along with the next generation of the management console, MMC 3.0.