Today, Andy Tanenbaum has officially announced the release of MINIX 3.0, the third stable version of this rather legendary operating system. The launch of v3 has been accompanied by a new website and a new logo. From the new website: "MINIX 3 is a new open-source operating system designed to be highly reliable and secure. It is based somewhat on previous versions of MINIX, but is fundamentally different in many key ways. MINIX 1 and 2 were intended as teaching tools; MINIX 3 adds the new goal of being usable as a serious system on resource-limited and embedded computers and for applications requiring high reliability." Read on for more information.

Rink Springer would like to see his Xbox port migrated into FreeBSD-current. He is looking to import his FreeBSD/Xbox within the FreeBSD/i386 port, bringing support into FreeBSD-CURRENT. He is proposing a prioritized plan in order to accomplish this goal and is looking for your comments and feedback.

"Are you ready to take a look at a fairly new technology that promises you to save bandwidth? Maybe you're even more interested when the promises range from a 50% to a 80% amount of savings? Jump in, and take the ride to see if it works out as well as you were promised. I'm going to take a walk down Apache 2 server lane and benchmark mod_deflate in a real life situation instead of a synthetic setup."

Ars Technica has posted a lengthy article on the new promising Microsoft Command Shell. It looks at MSH from the point of view of both coders and Windows admins.

Tiger is the latest and greatest version of the Mac OS X operating system. But even though it's the latest and greatest, it's still Mac OS X. In this chapter, you'll become familiar with Mac basics as author Robin Williams shows you how to use the Finder, Dock, contextual menus, and keyboard shortcuts.

There are more than 50 GUI controls available in the .NET Framework Class Library. This chapter takes a selective look at some of the more important ones. They all derive from the System.Windows.Forms.Control class that provides the inherited properties and methods that all the controls have in common.

Coming into Apple's Cocoa programming from the Java world has been a huge eye-opener for Marcus Zarra. Whenever he speaks with other developers who have worked with Cocoa, he hears praises about Apple's development tools. See if you agree with his conclusions about Apple's Interface Builder from a Java developer's point of view.

Mockup 0.2.0 Alpha 1.1 has been released. Again, this release is solely for developers and not for the faint of heart. A roadmap is available in the release announcement. A guide on installing this latest Mockup snapshot can be found here.

"PC-BSD 0.8.3 was released today. This version offers some new visuals, new languages, as well as important bugfixes with systems that have had trouble booting after the install. The complete changelog is available here. Users running 0.8.2 may update to this version using the Online Update utility within the PC-BSD Config menu." Download here, release notes here.

"In the short time that I've spent using Ubuntu 5.10, I've really come to like it. The installation was painless, all my hardware was detected and configured correctly, package management was easy, and the clean-cut GNOME desktop is terrific." In addition, here's a guide on setting up Ubuntu as a server.

"Dan Warne reckons Apple is about to deftly round-house kick Microsoft’s media center strategy for six. First Apple leaves a mysterious header on the Mac Mini motherboard for a non-existent iPod dock connector. Then it brings out media center software and a video iPod at the same time. Then it recruits the head of TV recording company ElGato. When you put the pieces together, it ain’t pretty for Microsoft." Elsewhere, the new iMac is not Apple's first attempt at entering your living room.

In the few short years of its existence, Google has come a long way, simultaneously striking fear in the hearts of major players in the computer industry and also arousing their curiosity. While the company is keeping all competitors on their toes, it poses a special threat to one particular company -- Microsoft. Why? Because Google's existing and potential products -- as well as those of other firms -- raise the specter that Microsoft may witness an erosion of its control over the platform for the next generation of software application development, according to Wharton faculty members who follow the technology sector. Just how serious is this threat and what is Microsoft doing to combat it?

This is a comprehensive list of where Linux wireless support currently falls a bit short. This list of problems that should get fixed in Linux wireless grew out of Dan Williams' attempt to put a GUI on top of Linux wireless with NetworkManager.

Microsoft met with the OSI board this week to discuss their new Shared Source licences. "After their announcement this week, MS did meet with a quorum of the OSI Board and we discussed our commitment to equal application of the license approval process and gave them very preliminary feedback on the licenses as they appear on the MSDN Web site. So far, MS's licenses have not yet been submitted to License-Discuss for public discussion, but OSI is hopeful that they will be," OSI stated. Other OSS prominents, like Tim o'Reilly and, believe it or not, the FSF, have already been positive about the new licenses.