Apple's worldwide market share fell to 1.8% in the third quarter of this year from 2.1%, and dropped to 3.2% from 3.6% in the U.S., according to figures from research company Gartner. The numbers also showed dramatic declines in the quarter-to-quarter growth rate of Macs sold while Apple's Windows-based competitors saw double digit increases in the U.S and an almost 10% rise worldwide.

VB News has posed the Mono question to Microsoft and gotten an answer. Microsoft's position appears to be that Mono is an unlicensed attempt to reverse-engineer .NET but otherwise remains noncommittal. In the meanwhile, Novell is conducting a formal patent review of Mono to settle the question once and for all.

The Office of Government Commerce's report into the viability of using open-source software in the public sector was toned down in its praise of Linux security before release, silicon.com has discovered. A copy of the report, seen by silicon.com with amendments still visible, shows changes were made to the government's stance on the particular advantages of Linux versus proprietary software regarding security.

The Abstract User Interface Markup Language toolkit is a rapid-development tool to assist developers in writing GUIs to run as either Swing applications or on the Web -- without any changes. This article takes you on a tour of the AUIML toolkit, which includes rapid prototyping with the eclipse-based Visual Builder, DataBean implementation, built-in data validation, built-in internationalization and more.

CTO of Adeptiva Linux, Stephan February, admitted that consumers find it difficult to use Linux because of the lack of support compared to Windows. "There is no compelling need to shift to Linux today," he said. Despite the availability of user-friendly graphical user interfaces similar to what Windows-based desktops have, Linux remains a very technical software product with few people outside the technical community are available to support consumer users. My Take: I personally agree with this fellow.

With the European Parliament poised to begin deliberating on software patents again, organizations on both sides of the argument are continuing to push their cases. Many European local governments are thinking about ditching Windows, but Microsoft is fighting back. Elsewhere, The Australian government agency responsible for distributing social security payments is still moving towards near-universal use of desktop Linux, but it's slow progress.

In this month's KDE: From the Source, entitled Breaking the Network Barrier George Staikos takes us on a walk-through of KDE's desktop networking protocol handlers in the vein of sftp:// webdav:// and a few really nifty ones I wasn't aware of like info:/ perldoc:/ and tar:/.

KeithMerrington has a first look at the new eCS 1.2, and includes some screenshots.

One of the minor ironies of the Linux world is the slight disconnect between the mantra of "choice" the most ardent advocates use to make the case for a multitude of graphical interfaces and the state of the North American enterprise Linux market, where a single distributor has dominated since the late '90s. That distributor is, of course, Red Hat, and while the numbers analysts produce about its share of the Linux market vary, they consistently hover above 75 percent. The company is so dominant that it's not uncommon to hear less savvy executives simply refer to the distro as "Linux," which infuriates many.

"In NetBSD's sweet spot are organizations looking for a slim, lightweight, highly stable, and capable operating system to run the latest server applications on modest or specialized hardware." Read the article at ServerWatch.

This article provides an overview of how to use the new Edit and Continue debugging feature in Visual C# 2005. The feature allows you to make changes to the code while an application is being debugged and apply those code changes without having to close, rebuild, and run the application again.

MadPenguin has the first review of VectorLinux 4.3, with screenshots.

In this article we'll discuss the claim made by proponents of open source software that such software is more secure. Is open source really inherently more secure than closed source commercial software? If so, why? And if not, why do so many have that perception? Read Article

The C++ GUI Programming with Qt 3 book written by Trolltech software engineer Jasmin Blanchette and Trolltech's documentation manager Mark Summerfield, can now be downloaded in PDF format from the publisher's homepage in the "Downloads" section.