Apple won't stand in the way of people who want to run Windows on its forthcoming Intel-processor Macs. But whether or not users will be able to run Windows directly on the machines is still a mystery. Analysts fear short-term hit to Apple in wake of Intel deal: See sales of PowerPCs suffering if buyers wait until 2006 for Macs with new chips

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.

Recently NewsForge published an interview with Linus Torvalds on the similarities and differences between the Linux kernel and the BSD operating systems. As a follow-up, NewsForge asked similar questions of OpenBSD's Theo de Raadt, and NetBSD's Christos Zoulas.

Stuart Wells, VP of Strategic Development and Sun Financing, shares his insights on how the Sun grid and utility computing will change the business of buying and using computer assets.

On the heels of its recent acquisition of Brazilian Linux vendor Conectiva and name change from Mandrakesoft to Mandriva, Mandriva will announce today that it has acquired Lycoris, a US maker of user-friendly desktop Linux distributions. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Mandriva's February acquisition of Conectiva SA was valued at $2.3 million in stock. The DesktopLinux.com news item is here, and an associated interview with Lycoris founder/CEO Joseph Cheek is here.

QNX (pronounced either Q-N-X or Q-nix) is a commercial POSIX-compliant Unix-like real-time operating system, aimed primarily at the embedded systems market. The system is quite small, fitting in a minimal fashion on a single floppy, and is considered to be both very fast and fairly "complete." But how does it perform? Stuart Goddard submitted the following editorial to osOpinion/osViews, which shows his experiences after installing version 6.3 of the operating system. Update: The story was removed at osViews.

Microsoft on Tuesday issued three "critical" patches for flaws that could allow a malicious attacker to take remote control of a computer.

Sun Microsystems chose to employ the human touch when it introduced more than 5 million lines of Solaris source code onto the Internet on Tuesday.

Use of Microsoft Windows XP has grown inside corporations, but a new study shows that nearly half of business PCs are still running the older Windows 2000.

REAL Software announced today that REALbasic 2005 for Linux, a groundbreaking new visual development environment for Linux, is available for public beta and can be downloaded now from www.realsoftware.com/demo. REALbasic 2005 for Linux Standard Edition will be offered for free when it ships in August. The Mac OS X version was posted today.

The executive committee for Java SE/EE has approved the new JSR-275 to add units/quantities to the Java platform (see JSR-275 results). Although the early specification/implementation of the units package provided by the wide-ranging JScience open-source project has to be simplified significantly according to Google Inc. executive member.

Hyperion Entertainment announced the immediate availability of the final intermediate update of Amiga OS 4.0 prior to its full commercial release later this year. People can testdrive the latest release at the upcoming '20th birhday of Amiga' celebration events in California and Sweden.

There is a new video of the SkyOS IndexFeeder available on the SkyOS website, which consists of two parts that show how to perform queries for file meta data and file content using the viewer, and how the Open/Save dialog makes use of the IndexFeeder in order to find documents very quickly, regardless of where they are stored.

GnomeFiles.org, the software repository for applications using the multi-platform toolkit GTK+, is now one year old. During that time 840 applications were posted and 240,000+ file downloads occured. The site now enjoys about 20,000 pageviews daily on average (which was our initial goal). A few more statistics for the curious: 69% of GnomeFiles' visitors are using Linux and it was a surprise for us that only 1.2% are using a *BSD. Regarding browsers, Firefox dominates with 71% while Gnome's Epiphany scores a 5% with IE barely at 6%. We would like to thank our loyal GnomeFiles visitors for their support. Please leave a comment if you would like to see a new feature on GnomeFiles.org.