In late-night sessions this week, Apple developers have been getting their first look at how much work they have ahead to convert their programs to run on Intel-based Macs. Also game developers react to Intel switch. Update: More developer opinions here.

Many virus attacks aren't really exploiting weaknesses in your operating sytem: they're simply tricking you into telling the OS to do things that it shouldn't do. The OS is just doing its job, executing code when you say so. Researchers at HP Labs are working on a solution to this problem using the Principle of Least Authority, or POLA -- "limiting the rights of each program to only the ones needed for the job the user wants done"

The recent announcement from Apache regarding their plans to embark on their own J2SE implementation called Harmony has re-ignited the long-running Java/OSS debate. James "Father of Java" Gosling reacted in an unexpected way by giving a misleading view of what open source is really all about. Now that the dust has settled a little bit, it's time for an article that is not championing the cause for the relicensing of Sun's implementation under more permissive, open source terms, but simply a look at what could (and could not) happen under the open source model.

The command line interface to the Windows Server OS will be changed to the new Monad Shell (MSH), in a phased implementation to take place over the next three to five years. This confirmation comes from Microsoft senior vice president Bob Muglia in an interview published today by Microsoft. 'Monad' Scripting Shell Unlikely to Debut in Longhorn says Mary Jo Foley though: Microsoft is planning to make its alternative to Unix and Linux command-line scripting available as part of Exchange 12, due next year.

The NetBSD Packages Team has frozen the development of new features for pkgsrc to prepare for the release of the next stable branch pkgsrc-2005Q2. The freeze period began on June 6th 2005 and is expected to last two weeks at the most. During this time, the developers will bring down the PR count and fix problems shown by the bulk builds. See Alistair G. Crooks's message to the tech-pkg mailing list for details.

After benchmarking an extensive set of Window Managers for X, we have found that Enlightenment DR17 comes out on top in terms of speed. The benchmark was performed on old (FVWM) and new (Metacity, new KDE / KWin) window managers and rated them in terms of window mapping and response time. The bechmark can be found here (both results and source).