Hot on the heels of an AMD antitrust lawsuit against Intel and a recent ruling in Japan that found that Intel abused its monopoly power, European Comission officials and competition authorities from several European countries raided the offices of Intel and several computer manufacturers. These "inspections" were probably carried out under article 81 of the EU Treaty, which prohibits price fixing and other distortions of competition within the EU.

Microsoft has paid two unnamed informers $250,000 for help in tracking down the author of the Sasser worm. The Sasser worm infected over 18 million computers worldwide within its first week in the wild, costing businesses estimated millions.

Longhorn will have some new features that will be particularly interesting for hardware hackers: The Windows System Assessment Tool (WinSat) is basically a built-in benchmarking tool that should help with determining what affect a new component is having on the system, and another, unnamed feature looks for hardware changes on boot, and, if it finds any, will restart the hardware configuration process.

Have you ever gone on vacation and missed a day's news? Ever have a busy day and need to quickly catch up on what you missed? Well, your problems are solved with the new OSNews Digest. Read on for details. UPDATED

Mike Nash, Microsoft's security business and technology unit corporate vice president, has said Longhorn would accord end-users certain rights and privileges apparently ending the concept that everyone using their PC is also the PC's administrator. Update: More on new Longhorn features here.

The People Behind KDE interviews are back with a new series. First in the hot seat is aKademy organiser Antonio Larrosa. The People Behind KDE interviews take a look at the human side of KDE development by asking the important questions to our team of coders, artists, translators and everyone else who helps KDE.

Workplace Designer is an Eclipse-based integrated development environment that gives you an easy way to use document-oriented programming without requiring a comprehensive knowledge of Java. Workplace Designer pre-release supports several database platforms, including IBM Cloudscape, DB2, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL Server. For more in-depth information, take a look at this introduction to Workplace Designer article.

The true reason for this article is to point out some sensitive points and to start a discussion. Hopefully, this discussion will produce some useful outcome and if some people in the Linux community are willing to listen to them, I would already be very enthusiastic. Let's start, shall we?

Two years ago, software engineer Shaun Walker got an e-mail from a Microsoft product manager, suggesting ways to keep Walker's development project from foundering. One important note: Walker's product is open-source.

Microsoft may love its partners. But that isn't stopping the company from continuing to encroach on areas that have traditionally been its partners' turf. Ballmer warned the company's channel partners that Microsoft has its sights set on some markets that partners have had to themselves until now. Elsewhere, MS countered claims it gave preferential treatment to adware maker Claria.

During the trip that BeBug made to yT's headquarters in Mannheim, they also had a talk with CEO Bernd Korz. They discussed marketing, future releases and much more.

TheOpenCD team is pleased to announce the release of TheOpenCD 3.0, now featuring a live CD based on Ubuntu. TheOpenCD traditionally provides a handy collection of quality FOSS applications for Windows, professionally presented in an elegant CD browser.

Can't move to JDK 5.0? Many of the J2SE 5.0 language features would be just as useful for older JVMs, but the compiler that implements these features generates code that requires JDK 5.0 or later. Fortunately, there's an open source project that bridges the gap between J2SE 5.0 and older JVMs -- Retroweaver.

Various sources are posting screenshots of the upcoming beta release of Longhorn, Microsoft's succesor to Windows XP. IE7 shots are also included. Due to the Slashdot-effect, mirrors are already available. Original source | mirror 1 | mirror 2. My take: Too much transparency.