After a long wait the new major version 0.7 update to Portable.NET has finally been released. The new version features numerous performance improvements, fixes for WinForms and Xml, and many other changes - read the full list of changes. The new release also brings a new runtime package (at this stage for Windows systems only) - at just under 2MB. More details.

Two Microsoft interviews, here and here , discussing virtualization, clustering and Longhorn.

Mandriva, with the recent purchase of Lycoris, a U.S. Linux desktop distributor, is expanding rapidly, but analysts ask whether it's growing fast enough to compete with the major Linux vendors: Red Hat and Novell/SuSE.

Tired of getting up from your desk to fax a document? Have you ever wondered why your company’s call center maintains wall-sized desks of fax machines? Employees at many large organizations are asking the same questions. Fortunately, so is Biscom, Inc. While there are a few companies providing enterprise fax solutions, Biscom, in this author’s opinion, stands out as the market leader.

RISC OS users have crowed for years about the intuitiveness of their operating system's GUI. But that vaunted usability is of little utility in this modern world without a modern web browser to go with it. So you'll understand the importance of the RISC OS Firefox port released today.

Sun Microsystems unwrapped two new identity management products this week, designed to ease the process of federating identity across multiple partners and customers.

Analysts of the software industry often point out that the majority of software written in the world is not commercially released, but used in-house. Computerworld has an interesting profile of a well-known company that writes virtually all of its software in-house. It discusses some of the challenges they face, the temptations to use more off-the-shelf software, and some available apps and tools that they do use, that have proved to be useful.

A U.S. District Court judge let stand two of the six counts in Novell Inc.'s antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft Corp., which accused the software giant of damaging Novell's business through monopolistic behavior. The remaining counts were dismissed. Novell's case is that Microsoft wielded its OS monopoly to prevent Novel's office applications from competing fairly in the marketplace.

The U.S. software industry lost 16 percent of its jobs from March 2001 to March 2004, the Washington-based Economic Policy Institute found. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that information technology industries laid off more than 7,000 American workers in the first quarter of 2005.

There is no question that USB Flash Drives and their electronic counterparts are a valuable addition to the road warrior's toolbox. They have also created a nightmare for data security managers and have spawned an entire sub industry that is aimed squarely at portable data storage security.

With "only a little Java code and a third-party product," Bob Reselman was able to make Windows pay attention to the goings-on of a Macintosh server. Here's how he did it.

This chapter will discuss essential Linux concepts, such as understanding the login process, using the command-line and graphical environments, finding your way around the filesystem, using the available help systems, and understanding text-editing tools in the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 environment.

With the backdrop of the OSX/x86 brouhaha, a story at Low End Mac reminds us of the secret Novell/Apple project to port MacOS to IBM compatible PCs. The team of engineers responsible for the project were successful in porting Mac OS, QuickTime and portions of QuickDraw GX until Apple canned the project and reallocated resources to PowerMacintosh.

Capacity planning is an important part of the work that Systems Administrators perform on a regular basis. The knowledge about the current utilization levels becomes indispensable to predict when the next hardware upgrade will be needed. Moodss (Modular Object Oriented Dynamic SpreadSheet) is a free tool for collecting data from different systems and making it readily available for analysis.