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.

Trolltech has announced the Qt 4 release candidate, the final preview of next generation Qt. The final release of Qt 4.0 is scheduled for late June until which Trolltech will focus on addressing critical stability issues only.

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 nature of the open source community is changing. I'm not exactly sure what "open source community" means anymore. When I first got involved with open source in 1998/99, the community was distinct: It was Eric Raymond, Bruce Perens, Robin Miller, and others like them. Developers. Gear heads. Hackers. Today, it's unclear whether that community still exists in any separate, discernible form." Read more here.

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.

Ars editor Jon "Hannibal" Stokes looks at the Apple-to-Intel transition with an eye on Intel's road map and which CPUs will end up in which Apple models. OSViews & Cringely also have editorials.

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.

"We received reports that GNOME was orders of magnitude slower than CDE on Sun Rays. To verify and measure this, I designed and ran some performance tests in order to compare the time and bandwidth usage of GNOME (JDS) with that of CDE on Sun Rays. The tests measure the time it takes to display data using various desktop applications: Browser, StarOffice and Terminal." Read more here.

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.

Users of Microsoft's Internet Explorer don't have to wait until the release of version 7 to use tabbed browsing. Microsoft announced yesterday that with the newest MSN Search Toolbar, users can upgrade their current IE 6 and add the sought after functionality. You can read the story here.

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).

The U.S. patent system will undergo its most substantial overhaul in decades if a bill introduced on Wednesday becomes law.

Dear Apple, I am among the many switchers you successfully brought to your platform. And now I plan to switch back. Simply put, after reading this press release, I no more think the Mac has any future as an interesting hardware or software platform. I further believe that you have made such a bafflingly shortsighted decision that I worry about the sanity of your management staff, enough to dread more of these moves. I also disbelieve most of the claims that have been made today as purely hilarious.

A Silicon Valley start-up called Transitive is supplying Apple Computer with a crucial bridge to enable the move to Intel-based computers, but skeptics worry about performance problems that have plagued similar products.