Despite Microsoft's claims that its .Net platform is sprouting its own ecosystem and is undergoing substantial adoption in the industry, some say the adoption of open-source opportunities appear to outpace .Net.

The picotux 100 is the world's smallest Linux computer, only slightly larger (35mm×19mm×19mm) than an RJ45 connector.

Some weeks after Neal Walfield implemented POSIX semaphores for libpthread, Marcus Brinkmann has now implemented SysV shared memory for the GNU Hurd in glibc, based on some earlier work done by Neal. This was probably the last commonly used POSIX feature missing in the Hurd, and having shared memory available will make several programs work much better.

Microsoft has acknowledged that it is working on a patch for a potentially serious security hole in fully patched versions of Windows XP Service Pack 2.

A denial of service vulnerability reportedly affects the Windows Remote Desktop Protocol. Either disable RDP or make sure you have a firewall enabled for port 3389 until a fix is available.

Django for Python is the most recently announced of what is becoming a long line of web frameworks inspired by Ruby on Rails. Others that have popped up include MonoRail for .NET & Mono, Subway for Python, Trails for Java, Catalyst and Maypole for Perl. In the context of all these rails derivatives, this article on "Could Rails have been built without Ruby?" is an interesting read.

Anders Hejlsberg is not resting on his laurels. He's off solving a new problem: Finding a way to query XML and other data using .Net-based programming languages.

The latest issue of The GNOME Journal features thoughts about marketing GNOME, a review of RSS feed readers for GNOME, a short preview on modeling with K-3D, an introduction to F-Spot, an introduction to Foresight Desktop Linux, and a review of Robert Love's 'Linux Kernel Development', 2nd Edition.

Open-Xchange Inc., maker of an open source version of Microsoft's Exchange server software, will bundle its open source collaboration platform with Novell/SUSE Linux and Red Hat Linux distributions. The platform, called Open-Xchange Server 5 (OX), is an open source-licensed collaboration suite that offers a typical array of collaboration features, including e-mail, calendar, contacts, appointments, tasks and others. All are accessible either via a Web client or a fat client, including Outlook, Palm and KDE Kontact.

The FreeBSD 6.0 release cycle has begun. According to the FreeBSD team, "FreeBSD 6.0 will be a much less dramatic step from the FreeBSD 5 branch than the FreeBSD 5 branch was from FreeBSD 4. Much of the work that has gone into 6.0 development has focused on polishing and improving the work from 5.x These changes include streamlining direct device access in the kernel, providing a multi-threaded SMP-safe UFS/VFS filesystem layer, implementing WPA and Host-AP 802.11 features, as well as countless bugfixes and device driver improvements."

Opera's announcement of in-browser support for Bittorent highlights the trend for common desktop applications requesting an ever-larger number of TCP ports to be opened up for them, essentially poking holes into firewalls. File transfer apps, VoIP, games, and other programs routinely request open ports, and that's a security risk, say some security experts.

SCO's CEO Darl McBride was told that the Linux kernel contained no SCO copyright code six months before the company issued its first lawsuit, a memo reveals. An outside consultant Bob Swartz conducted the audit, and on August 13 2002 Caldera's Michael Davidson reported the results.

IBM has hammered the final nails into OS/2's coffin. It said that all sales of OS/2 will end on the 23rd of December this year, and support for the pre-emptive multitasking operating system will end on the 31st December 2006.

When it was first introduced, Sun Microsystems' Java software for cellular phones was supposed to let developers write a single program that could run on any handset. A half decade later, Sun's Java for cell phones, called the mobile information device profile, or MIDP, is used in half the world's 1.4 billion phones for downloading other bits of software. But writing a program that can run on any handset still isn't possible.