While the computing industry has been working to tighten up the security of its products amid increasing threats from viruses and hackers, a truly trustworthy infrastructure is still a few years off, Hewlett-Packard's security head said in an interview this week.

A Java web developer takes a look at the Java IDE landscape and examines the major offerings. IntelliJ IDEA comes out on top, hands down, according to his measurements, and he includes a detailed review.

As 64-bit PowerPC processors become more widely available, it becomes desirable to make applications run in the 64-bit computation mode, providing access to larger address space and faster 64-bit arithmetic. This excerpt from a longer Technical Library article covers some of the issues faced when porting existing 32-bit code to the new computing model -- or when embarking on new 64-bit development.

The brand new AvantGo version offers improved wireless synchronization; an integrated Internet browser; real-time searching of AvantGo channels; a redesigned user interface with tabbed navigation, customized channel layout and small-screen optimized navigation. Also, users will now be able to add and remove channels directly from their device. Please note that OSNews fully supports most mobile browsers, including AvantGo (just create a custom subscription on your my.avantgo.com). Additionally, the text-only version of OSNews has been now optimized to look a bit better (3 weeks of slow dial-up in Greece forced me to use Firefox without "image loading" and so I took the time to optimize the site's looks for low-bandwidth usage). Here is a screenshot (subscriber's OSNews version is shown).

MadPenguin reviews and details the new XFce visual installer.

Steve Jobs will be the star attraction when the Macworld Conference and Expo opens to the public Tuesday, but many Mac fans might be just as interested in hearing from one of the Mac's original creators.

Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy spoke with IDG News Service correspondent Robert McMillan about company changes, plans for 2005 and how open source relates to Solaris and Java.

TuxMagazine posted a review of Libranet and here is its follow up article.

In two posts on BSD News pointing at e-mails from Robert Watson, a FreeBSD Core Team Developer, presenting both recent accomplishments relating to IPX/SPX and the general status of SMPng and the network stack are discussed.

IBM has updated its well known Reflexive User Interface Builder for constructing and rendering graphical user interfaces (GUIs) for Java Swing and Eclipse Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT) based upon a descriptive XML document. Version 1.1 includes the capacity to validate Eclipse SWT GUIs, generate Java source for GUIs constructed by RIB, and embed Java source code in RIB documents. See new developer article on RIB that shows you how to Build Java GUIs simply and quickly.

Hackers are using the newest DRM technology in Microsoft's Windows Media Player to install spyware, adware, dialers and computer viruses on unsuspecting PC users. Security researchers have detected the appearance of two new Trojans, Trj/WmvDownloader.A and Trj/WmvDownloader.B, in video files circulating on P2P (peer-to-peer) networks.

"The success of the iPod, Apple's biggest ever consumer hit, was bound to overshadow the company's mainstay business in 2004. In the numbers that really count: revenue, margins and profit, the Macintosh remains Apple's core business. So where did it go?" Read the editorial at TheRegister.

LXer reports that Sun has made an evaluation copy of their Java Desktop System 2 available for download. Ever faithful, OSDir provides screenshot zen.

Since the arrival of the very first versions of Gentoo, some people have announced that "Debian is good, but that's not optimized for ". And this is wrong, you are free to recompile software you use on Debian, using the apt system. Downloading a tarball, uncompressing it, running configure scripts and make install, is an easy task for every Linux user, but this is not adapted for the Debian package management system. Stow was a way which worked without too much effort, but compiled programs were not really integrated in the apt dependancies. The ultimate solution is to use apt-build to recompile a software already packaged for Debian. Read in English - Read in Portuguese (Brazilian)