Surfing the Web has never been more risky. Simply connecting to the Internet — and doing nothing else — exposes your PC to non-stop, automated break-in attempts by intruders looking to take control of your machine surreptitiously.

Open source stacks such as XAMPP from Apache Friends are simplifying open source development by making it easier to write and distribute applications in a stable and standardized environment. The trend of combining Apache, MySQL, PHP, and Perl into integrated middleware stacks promises to make open source development more competitive with J2EE application development, at least for low-end applications. Our Take: I use XAMPP nearly every day, at home and at work, as a testbed. It's one of my top three essential open source apps, and - by far - one of the easiest to use.

Follow the development of a native SkyOS application from the ground up in the first 5 chapters of Pig!. This tutorial is for both C++ beginners and experts, and illustrates a variety of design topics such as message dispatching, error handling via exceptions, and auto-destruct GUI widgets, all with source code examples. The Pig! application is based on the Humble Framework: a rapidly growing class library of C++ classes that is intended to help programmers get a 'head start' on creating native SkyOS applications; this framework is fully documented, open source, and currently contains over thirty unique classes, with more on the way.

Taking an intentionally cautious tone, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems executives said Wednesday that the first eight months of their 10-year partnership have yielded small, but significant progress.

The Mozilla foundation has released a new release candidate of Thunderbird 1.0 closely following the stable Firefox 1.0 release. A final version is expected within this month.

Microsoft is investigating a security flaw in Windows server software that could allow an attacker to gain complete control over systems running the software, the company says.

With CD Shell, it's possible to boot multiple live distros from the same piece of media. Load up a CD or DVD with combinations of Damn Small Linux, DBAN, Slax, or other "live" distributions and always have the right tool for the job.

According to Digital Online news, a Windows version of Mozilla using both the Gecko engine, and the Internet Explorer engine is under development.

Its a SQL tour through the DB2 TPC-C benchmark implementation. This article introduces advanced SQL features which are being used in IBM DB2 Universal Database for Linux, UNIX, and Windows TPC-C benchmarks. Find out how to use efficient SQL query plans, which in turn will mean that the only codepath that is necessary will be executed.

Apple Computer this afternoon seeded developers with build 7S210 of Mac OS X 10.3.7. With this latest latest build, Apple has asked that developers focus their testing efforts on audio, printing, storage or audio-based FireWire devices, and graphic intensive games that utilize OpenGL.

The November edition of the Syllable Development Newsletter is now available -- highlights include kernel work, Glibc updates and more. Additionally, plans are underway for SYL-CON, a user and developer meetup. See this post or contact Mike if you're interested.

A quick visit to Frys Electronics last weekend left me with (yet another) webcam. But not an ordinary webcam: this is an utrla tiny cam, created specifically to mount on laptops!

In part three of this three-part series, the authors offer a real-world implementation example of how the Analytics Acceleration Grid Environment (AAGE) can be used to deliver a virtual system environment that supports a wide range of application requirements, and makes the best, most efficient use of computing resources and data regardless of where or in what format they reside.

According to WindowsForDevices, Microsoft's Mobile and Embedded Devices Group has just released the final version of Windows XP Embedded with Service Pack 2. The latest release of the componentized version of Windows XP -- targeting a wide range of embedded systems and devices -- is now available for free download from Microsoft's website. The free 120-day evaluation software kit comprises the entire product including binaries and tools, and can be used to develop, build, deploy, and test a target OS image in a real device.