Why did computers come to adopt the GUI as their primary mode of interaction, and how did the GUI evolve to be the way it is today?

James Gosling sees new uses for the programming language he created 10 years ago, such as making his home-entertainment system work right.

Ubuntu Down Under (UDU) was the third Ubuntu conference and was held in Sydney, Australia. The first was held in Oxford, United Kingdom and the second one in Barcelona, Spain. The conference went for a whole week, starting on Monday 25th of April.

Apple Computer released 20 patches for its OS X operating system designed to fix flaws that could catch users off-guard. The vulnerabilities apply to Mac OS X v10.3.9 and Mac OS X Server 10.3.9, according to Apple's advisory. The advisory also falls just days after Apple's much ballyhooed release of the latest version of its operating system, Mac OS X 10.4, widely known as Tiger.

A developer who's spent five years working on Java/J2EE applications for the enterprise takes Mono for a spin. He's a self-described Java lover, and isn't afraid to say it. What does he think of Mono?

Mobile security is a hot issue, but who is listening? The mere word 'security' sends most people running. Investing in preventative IT security has never been a very popular topic. It often needs a competitor or an organisation itself to become a victim of crime before senior executives sit up and listen. read more

After more than two years in the making, DarwinPorts 1.0 is now available in binary and in source form. The DarwinPorts Project's main goal is to provide an easy way to install various open-source software products on the Darwin OS family (OpenDarwin, Mac OS X and Darwin).

The suit claims that the "Free Software Foundation has entered into contracts and otherwise conspired and agreed with individual software authors and commercial distributors of commodity software products such as Red Hat Inc. and Novell Inc. to artificially fix the prices charged for computer software programs through the promotion and use of an adhesion contract that was created, used and promoted since at least the year 1991 by the Free Software Foundation" Update: A Groklaw article casts some serious doubt on the validity of the suit and sheds some light on serious inaccuracies in the Linux Business News article linked above.

The Darwin 8.0.1 Installer CD is available and corresponds to the open source core of Mac OS X 10.4.

Ada - a modern programming language designed for large, long-lived applications - and embedded systems in particular - is set to get some extensions in its next incarnation Ada 2006. There is a talk here, highlighting the most important changes (eg. cyclic type structures, Java-like interfaces, standardization of the Ravenscar tasking profile, container libraries, etc.). Updated drafts of the standard are available here. For general information about Ada there is a Wikibook Programming:Ada.

A few days ago I wrote on my blog about the "sorry state of proper h.264 support on the PC". The bottomline was that if you need some good HD h.264 support for HD videos the solution is Apple's G5 with Qt 7 PRO, or QuickTime 7 PRO for Windows (whenever this is going to be released). The existing PC solutions (Win or Linux) were ranging from bad to terrible with all-time-worse being mplayer's support (about 0.3 fps on the 1080p Serenity trailer on a 2.8 GHz P4) and 'best' the Elecard Moonlight player that could barely do about 10 fps on a brand new 3 GHz P4-630. However...

Underlying Longhorn is the Windows Graphics Foundation, or WGF. The first version, prosaically dubbed "WGF 1.0" will incorporate DirectX 9.0c as its primary interface. Longhorn will also have the next-generation 3D API also built in at release. You can think of it as "Direct3D 10," but it's currently called WGF 2.0.

In this special 50th episode of the .NET Show, Rick Rashid, Brad Abrams, John Shewchuk, and Michael Wallent discuss where the Microsoft platform technologies can, should, and will be going in the future. This show also features a special interview with Bill Gates.

An interesting review and performance testing of the new GCC 4.