Microsoft has urged businesses running Windows XP to upgrade their machines to take advantage of added security features, but only a quarter of XP corporate machines have been upgraded to Service Pack 2, according to a new study.

"If you're a typical FreeBSD user, you don't have a background in C programming. Yet, if you've ever used make world to upgrade your operating system or issued a make install somewhere within your ports tree, you've compiled C code. This article covers some make basics so you have an idea what is happening behind the scenes. It also examines some of the options you have available when issuing make commands." Read it here.

Adobe today announced the Adobe Creative Suite 2, which includes new versions of Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, and GoLive.

A preview of WBEL4 (White Box Enterprise Linux) is currently available via BitTorrent. White Box nicely fills the niche between Fedora and RHEL. WBEL Sreenshots. WBEL FAQ.

The inability to keep crosscutting concerns separate can really get in the way of creating a clear and understandable system. Find out how to keep your aspect-oriented software from becoming a tangled mess in this sample chapter.

The Nokia Developer Platforms allow developers to write scalable applications across a range of Nokia devices. This chapter covers the technologies from a bird's-eye view.

Speech processing is an important technology for enhanced computing because it provides a natural and intuitive interface for the user. This chapter explains the Microsoft Speech Application SDK, shows you how to create, debug, and tune a speech application, and how to set up a telephony server.

Motorola AltiVec can dramatically improve the performance of many tasks, even tasks that you might initially think are too linear to get much advantage from parallelizing. This article looks at some real-world code that processors might spend a serious amount of time running, and shows how to tweak it to get extra performance.

This document explains the use of threads in Symbian OS. When using threads, synchronization and mutual exclusion must be considered in order to get thread interactions safe.

The future is mobile. That much we know for sure. But it seems that the operating system world in this market is being rapidly taken over by --again-- Microsoft. The new smart phones are are using WinCE, Symbian or Palm. Linux has barely 1% of this new, smartphone market.

Some Sun Engineers have started blogging about how Sun does performance work on Solaris during development. They mention that they felt they should start talking about it after Linus Torvalds said more regular performance testing of Linux would be usefull. The posts are here and here.

Learn how to develop USB drivers using this sample chapter (PDF).

Mozilla has just released version 0.8.3 of its Camino browser for Mac OS X, which uses the Gecko browsing engine with a Cocoa user interface. Release notes here.

Protothreads are an extremely lightweight, stackless type of threads written in portable C code. Protothreads provide blocked waiting and sequential code execution on top of event-driven systems, without the overhead of full multithreading or per-thread stacks. They are designed for severely memory constrained systems, has a very low RAM overhead, and can be used with or without an underlying OS. New in version 1.1 is the PT_YIELD() operation that allows a protothread to yield the CPU.