Opera Software has released Opera 8 for Macintosh, available for Mac OS X versions 10.2 and higher. According to the company it is faster than ever before, this Web surfing package gives Macintosh users Opera's extensive functionality and an optional 15 languages standard upon download.

"A year later I'm still with my good friend SuSE, being more productive than ever, while I still notice my neighbors are now living with the fact that their PCs are slower to use as a result of installing the new Microsoft software." More here.

Anti-spyware advocates cry foul as the popular peer-to-peer protocol becomes the latest mechanism for the stealthy distribution of adware/spyware bundles.

Longhorn Server Beta 1 looks likely to hit by August. And Microsoft is considering a future home version of its Windows Server product, too.

According to the Linux watching web site, DistroWatch, there are more than 400 Linux and BSD distributions currently available and active. Many of these exist with many versions, giving thousands of possible options to choose from. The question often arises "Which one is the best?".

From the time at which Steve Jobs announced that Apple will be using Intel processors rather than PowerPC ones, every analyst, armchair CEO, and every anonymous forum poster with a two bit opinion suddenly became an 'expert' on the proper way to execute Apple's plan. "jwdsail" submitted the following editorial to osOpinion/osViews, which offers an equally if not more accurate way to predict Apple's future plans... by consulting his Magic 8-Ball.

The Internet has become a far more dangerous place than it was 20 years ago. Nowadays, Operating System and application security is an integral part of a server configuration and, while firewalls are very important, they are not the panacea.

The Mac platform was always considered a premium platform, hence much of its software is shareware or commercial. In the recent days more freeware applications have emerged, but the majority are small utilities and not full scale applications. Enter the world of GNU which can not only provide "free" applications as in beer, but most importantly, "Free", as in Freedom.

GTK+ 2.6.8 is released with many bugfixes, mainly in the filechooser.

In late June of this year, the latest release of the Eclipse Platform, version 3.1, will be available for download from eclipse.org. Read more here.

Sun Microsystems has fixed a pair of security bugs in Java that could be exploited by attackers to take over computers running Windows, Linux and Solaris.

Sun Microsystems is guiding the spotlight away from a once-prominent feature of Solaris 10. Elsewhere, Solaris Engineering: huge amount of technical articles. Sun Microsystems is revamping the start-up process for its Solaris operating system, scrapping an awkward, elderly approach for one the company promises will be faster, more familiar and more useful on a wide variety of computers.

Code owners previously using the InvariantCulture for string comparison, casing, and sorting should strongly consider using a new set of String overloads in Microsoft .NET 2.0. Specifically, data that is designed to be culture-agnostic and linguistically irrelevant should begin specifying overloads using either the StringComparison.Ordinal or StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase members of the new StringComparison enumeration. These enforce a byte-by-byte comparison similar to strcmp that not only avoids bugs from linguistic interpretation of essentially symbolic strings, but provides better performance.

Four major PC makers have no plans to sell the media-player-free version of Windows, which Microsoft was ordered to offer by Europe's competition commissioner.