Over 100 Microsoft MVPs (Most Valuable Professionals) have signed an online petition that demands Redmond resume development and support of "classic" Visual Basic, a-k-a VB6. The MVPs are calling for all VB developers and IT leaders to review and consider signing the petition.

Now that we've got your attention, no, Linus has not quit using Linux. He had an opportunity to get a free Dual G5 Apple, and he decided that, after all his years working on x86, the PowerPC architecture has a future, and deserves some attention. Torvalds' added justification for his switch is that he's a "technology whore."

I've been a professional software engineer for close to ten years. Based on my experience, I recently attempted to enumerate the ten worst engineering "traps" most developers seem (for whatever reason) prone to fall into. Here's the list I came up with. It should be noted that wherever two of these come into conflict, the item close to the top of the list wins.

CherryOS is available for trial and download. Requires a 1.6 Ghz PC or more and at least 256 MBs of available RAM.

Since usability seems to be a major topic on the OSNews forums, I think time has come to clarify some common misconceptions. Usability is not about selecting the fanciest Theme from kde-look.org, it's not about 'Reading the F*** Manual', it's not about having all application share the same looks, it's not about nice front-ends to obscure command line programs, it's not about newbie-friendliness, it's not about apt-get install foobar and it's not about setup.exe.

Wondering if you should stay Windows or make a switch? Read on to learn about what's coming up for Microsoft's Longhorn and Apple's Tiger.

Portable, compact, and simple hobby Operating System for the 64bit age: AireOS.

KernelTrap has spoken with OpenBSD creator Theo de Raadt and several other OpenBSD developers regarding their recent efforts to add comprehensive wireless hardware support to OpenBSD. The article takes an in depth look at several of the dozen new drivers found in the upcoming OpenBSD 3.7 release, exploring the stories behind their development.

Christos Zoulas announced recently that as of 2005-02-27, NetBSD has PAM enabled for all applications that perform authentication. Support for PAM, which is specified in the X/Open Single Sign-On standard, was originally imported into NetBSD-current on December 12th, 2004. This means that NetBSD 3.0 will ship PAM-enabled per default; users following -current should take care to update their systems using etcupdate and/or the '/etc/postinstall' script. See Christos' email to the current-users mailinglist and the OpenPAM website for more details.

BitTorrent 4.0.0 is released for Windows and Linux. The Mac OS X version is pending.

The DR-DOS/OpenDOS Enhancement Project has released v7.01.07 of Enhanced DR-DOS, an Open Source OS based on DR-DOS 7.01 alias OpenDOS.

The Council Presidency today declared the software agreement of 18 May 2004 to have been adopted, in violation of the procedural rules and in spite of the evident lack of a qualified majority of member states and the requests of several states to reopen negotiations. More here.

Named CommWarrior.a, the new virus attacks smartphones running the Symbian OS based Series 60 platform, replicating over both MMS and Bluetooth.

As criminals operating online have begun to realise the potential commercial value of Internet-related crimes, so they have started to investigate other ways of using malware to line their pockets.