Microsoft's current plan for OpenGL on Windows Vista is to layer OpenGL over Direct3D in order to use OpenGL with a composited desktop to obtain the Aeroglass experience. This means that OpenGL performance will be significantly reduced - perhaps as much as 50%. It would be technically straightforward to provide an OpenGL ICD within the full Aeroglass experience without compromising the stability or the security of the operating system. Layering OpenGL over Direct3D is a policy more than a technical decision.

Researchers from a little-known security software company named Sunbelt Software have seemingly uncovered a criminal identity theft ring of massive proportions. According to one of their employees, Alex Eckelberry, during the course of one of their recent investigations into a particular Spyware application - rumored to be called CoolWebSearch - they've discovered that the personal information of those "infected" was being captured and uploaded to a server.

"The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 6.0-BETA2." A list of mirrors is available here.

Microsoft is planning to reissue the Windows 2000 Service Pack 4 Update rollup that it first launched in late June. While the company did not specify a reason for the planned reissue, a number of Windows 2000 users who have installed the download have complained of a variety of problems, ranging from incompatibility with third-party security applications to network-printing issues.

"One of the new additions of Fedora Core 4 is a natively compiled version of Eclipse. I took it for a spin to see if it is a suitable replacement for 'regular' Eclipse."

In a series of articles (part I, part II) during the month of July, OfB's Timothy R. Butler explained why he felt that KDE needed to move beyond the Qt toolkit it uses as a foundation. In that series, he asserted that the licensing of Qt is becoming a stumbling block to the desktop's adoption. Eric Laffoon, the project lead for KDE's Kdewebdev module, takes exception to Butler's arguments and makes the case for his view on the issue of Qt at OfB.biz.

In the last few days, KDE developers have been actively discussing usability issues for KDE 4. Here are some thoughts, and some more are here. What do you think?

A new scripting tool targeted by a virus writer will not be part of Windows Vista, the next Windows client release, Microsoft announced Friday. Instead, the software maker is looking at delivering the command-line shell tool, code-named Monad, as part of its next major server operating system release, a Microsoft representative said. That release, code-named Longhorn Server, is due in 2007.

So, you are not sure what makes a Linux distribution a good desktop Linux but you know it when you see it, right? Perhaps but perhaps not. So, what does it take to be a good desktop Linux distribution?

The big themes seem to be networking and minor annoyances, with a secondary focus on iChat and Mail, which always seem to have problems in the first release of a major Mac OS X version. It’s those changes—along with improvements to Tiger’s disk repair tools—that we’ll focus on during this inside look at Mac OS X 10.4.2.

UIMA 1.1 is a pure Java SDK that supports the implementation, composition, and deployment of applications working with unstructured information on Linux. Version 1.1 has been incorporated into IBM's enterprise search product, WebSphere Information Integrator OmniFind Edition, Version 8.2.2. UIMA Annotators can now be deployed into WebSphere II OmniFind for semantic search solutions. Here's a helpful user guide.

Read a long review titled "Mandrake Revisited: A Lycoris user revisits the OS he left years earlier". On a separate note, Linux Format issue 70 presents a Gaël Duval interview.

The CEO of cluster software vendor Scali takes issue with Microsoft's clustering options. Scali is demonstrating a new, major upgrade to its Scali Manage and Scali MPI Connect suites at next week's LinuxWorld Conference & Expo.

For those of you who just can't get enough Mighty Mouse news, here are a couple of tidbits: An intrepid tinkerer bought a MM, only to take it apart for all the internet to see. Also, WSJ tech oracle Walt Mossberg takes a look at the MM and compares it to Microsoft's latest Mouse offering. His verdict? "Stop the presses: Microsoft has beaten Apple on hardware design, at least in this one case."