With Vista, Microsoft is addressing what's become a sad truth for most people: PCs run more slowly over time. Vista will automatically de-fragment hard disks, make better use of memory to more quickly load programs, and include a new performance control panel that will identify performance bottlenecks, according to the company. Elsewhere, ActiveWin hosts widescreen, high-res screenshots of Vista.

Looking to counter Microsoft's claims of security superiority, open-source software vendors are giving the battle against vulnerabilities top billing at this week's LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in San Francisco.

Agile development methodologies might be the new fad in software design, but how much emphasis is there on secure code? Australian .NET developer and consultant at Readify, Rocky Heckman, reveals some concerns of agile development methodologies.

This is a detailed guide for Linux beginners about how to setup a web, mail and FTP server with Mandriva 10.2. It covers every aspect of the installation and demonstrates the setup process with the help of 39 screenshots. Experienced administrators will benefit from this tutorial as well.

Ultimate++ 0.98.7 was released. Ultimate++ (U++) is an attempt to provide the optimal Windows/Linux development platform based on C++. By utilizing of new ideas in C++ development, Ultimate++ achieves significant reduction of source code complexity for most applications when compared to other development platforms. To get a clue how development using U++ looks like, see this example.

This chapter introduces the idea of the device context, generalizing the concept of a drawing surface such as a window or a printed page. It will discuss the available device context classes and the set of "drawing tools" that wxWidgets provides for hand.

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.