Between December 2004 and July 2005, the "defect density" in the Linux kernel has fallen from 0.17 to 0.16 and all serious defects have been corrected, a new report out from code analysis firm Coverity asserts. Defect density declined by 2.2 percent.

OfB is reporting that, contrary to widely-published and discussed rumors, Apple is not including the controversial Trusted Platform Module (TPM) chip in its Intel-based Macs. An anonymous registered Apple developer claims that the Apple x86 test boxes do not have DRM or TCPA components. Developers are forbidden from discussing the units by the nondisclosure agreements they've signed with Apple. so they've been unable to counter the rumors.

"I am proud to announce the official release of Symphony OS Alpha 4. Alpha 4 includes the KNOPPIX version of the 2.6.11 Linux Kernel and an updated base based on Knoppix 3.9, numerous improvements to the Mezzo Desktop environment, includes synaptic for package management, beagle for local searching, supports freedesktop.org .desktop files in the Programs target, and much more."

"With the introduction of Solaris 10 and the dynamic tracing facility (DTRACE), the ability to dynamically instrument a system and solve complex problems is a D script (D is the language used by DTRACE) away. Several extremely useful D scripts have emerged, so I thought I would share my ten favorite DTRACE scripts with the OSNews community."

Some interesting newsbits from the RISC OS world in the last few days. First of all, "Drobe webmaster Ian Hawkins has unveiled The RISC OS File Repository, an online software database for RISC OS software." Secondly, "Castle has updated their range of RISC OS 5, XScale powered Iyonix computers, with the addition of a Aria Cube and X300 series of cases." And lastly, the A9 takes priority.

"The Code Skipper, a new free Qt community resource site has been founded to provide our community of developers with a place to meet. This is a site where tutorials and articles that can be found on a range of Qt related subjects. Skipper also contains a lot of code that can be easily integrated into your applications. Learn Qt tricks from there and share your own ideas."

The Mozilla Foundation, developer of the Firefox Web browser, plans to announce Wednesday that it has created a for-profit subsidiary to pursue wider potential for the software.

Patrick Volkerding, Slackware's maintainer, announced that Slackware 10.2 is going into beta: "I think it's time to consider this to be mostly frozen and concentrate on beta testing in preparation for the Slackware 10.2 release, so there won't be too many more upgrades and additions."

Why go through the hassle of figuring out how to integrate and connect J2EE components to add Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) connectivity when someone else has done the work for you? This article shows you how to build ESB connectivity and to use a model-driven approach to develop service-oriented architecture (SOA) solutions.

IronPython is the codename for an alpha release of the Python programming language for the .NET platform. It supports an interactive interpreter with fully dynamic compilation. It is well integrated with the rest of the framework and makes all .NET libraries easily available to Python programmers.

It seems that PC-BSD has set a trend. "DesktopBSD aims at being a stable and powerful operating system for desktop users. DesktopBSD combines the stability of FreeBSD, the usability and functionality of KDE and the simplicity of specially developed software to provide a system that's easy to use and install." How this new BSD distribution stacks up against PC-BSD remains to be seen.

Popular Java IDE IntelliJ IDEA's 5.0 version is released by JetBrains. Some of the new features: advanced Css, Html, XHtml, Javascript and JSP support, Integrated Subversion-Perforce support, J2ME developement and a lot of editor-coding related enhancements. IDEA is a commercial product, however they provide free licenses to active Open Source projects.

Authentication auditing is an essential part of protecting Windows computers from intrusion. The big problem in Windows auditing is trying to understand what's going on, without drowning in a flood of irrelevant or useless information. If you let it do so, Windows 2000 will bury you in event notifications. Figuring out what's going on from those notifications can be a real chore. In this Informit.com article, Rick Cook provides specific suggestions to start making your auditing process more informative.

A Windows domain administrator needs to accomplish quite a bit in a given day: map user shares at login, run hardware and software audits; install the new corporate wallpaper (or other such important software). And do it all transparently to the users. Simple, right? It is, if you use a secret weapon: a login script. In this DevSource article, Lynn Greiner demonstrates how the free language, KiXtart, can help you get the job done.