Microsoft's decision to call the next version of its OS Vista might have a raised a few smiles last week but one Redmond resident is less than impressed. The boss of Vista, a software and services company for small businesses is considering taking legal action against the software giant.

Yahoo has acquired software "widget" engine Konfabulator in a move to spur third-party developers to devise new applications for the Internet giant's services. Yahoo plans to run the widgets via XML feeds.

Distrowatch reports that a new beta version of Mandriva Linux 2006 appeared on the mirrors over the weekend. Like the first one a week ago, the new beta release, labelled as 2006 0.1.1, has not yet been officially announced, but the good news is that the mirroring problems we mentioned in last week's DistroWatch Weekly have been solved and the new release is now available from the usual Mandriva mirror sites. OSDir has a handful of screenshots.

Core Data Explorer is an interactive tool for browsing, manipulating and querying Core Data, the new object-oriented persistence layer in Mac OS X Tiger. It provides full object introspection, graphical browsers for objects and collections and a graphical interface for querying the Mac OS X persistent stores.

"Everyone of us always wanted to have the ability to compile for Windows and Unix in one makefile, right? Unfortunately, there is very few documentation on this topic and I had quite a hard time to get things working the way I wanted to. I wrote this small how-to to share the way I managed to build my toolchain with other people."

There's been a lot of talk lately about how phones with mp3 functionality will inevitably take over the mp3 player market. Consolidation seems to be the word. The folks at Geeks.com sent us the US edition of the (unlocked) Nokia 3300 mp3 phone -- one of the first of its kind -- and we put it to test.

Do you want to make the most of your Mac applications? Like all operating systems, the Mac has many different levels of programming, and more than 80 percent of all applications built for OS X leverage AppleScript as an automation tool. In this introductory article, Matthew David tells you how you can best leverage AppleScript for your Mac applications.

Every project requires investments in terms of time, money, and other resources. This chapter will help you analyze the requirements of your project at hand, and decide how to proceed in light of the investments required to make it work.

Windows Vista beta 1 is due out by August 3. So what can we expect to see? What are Microsoft's goals? Wincustomise's Frogboy shares his views.

This is a very detailed tutorial about how to use Fedora Core 4 to set up a server, with numerous screenshots to aid you along the way.

There have been many recent pieces written about how a resurgent Mac is a threat to Linux. This particularly hit fever pitch when Apple decided to jump ship to Intel CPUs. The notion that the Mac is either a short or long-term threat to Linux is wrong for a number of different reasons. 10 in fact.

The FreeBSD operating system is the unknown giant among free operating systems. Starting out from the 386BSD project, it is an extremely fast UNIX-like operating system mostly for the Intel chip and its clones. In many ways, FreeBSD has always been the operating system that GNU/Linux-based operating systems should have been. It runs on out-of-date Intel machines and 64-bit AMD chips, and it serves terabytes of files a day on some of the largest file servers on earth. Elsewhere, here is a guide to PC-BSD.

Sun Microsystems president and COO Jonathan Schwartz on Thursday cited the company's plans to eventually offer all of its software for free as a way to build communities around its technologies.

Vulnerabilities in USB drivers for Windows could allow an attacker to take control of locked workstations using a specially programmed Universal Serial Bus device, according to an executive from SPI Dynamics, which discovered the security hole. However, SPI tested attacks on Windows systems, but any operating system that is USB-compliant is probably vulnerable.