Dealing with widespread worms like Sasser raises the cost of using Windows, a research analyst said Wednesday. Mark Nicolett, research director at Gartner, recommended that enterprises boost spending on patch management and intrusion prevention software to keep ahead of worms, which are appearing ever sooner after vulnerabilities in Windows are disclosed.

After reading the recent article by a user who has switched to a Mac I thought I'd write of my experience. I've was used a Mac from October 2002 to March 2004. It was provided to me when I started working for another PPC manufacturer but they are not really in the same market and in any case don't make laptops.

The portable operating-system interface for Unix, 16-bit computing and the OS/2 subsystem will 'be lost' along with some legacy transport protocols, product manager for the Windows 64-bit client says.

If you're coming from a different programming background, one feature of XSLT (all versions) may seem especially difficult to grasp. I'm not referring to the XML-based syntax; once you get a feel for it, it is surprisingly transparent (even if bulky). For many novices, much more puzzling is XSLT's lack of an assignment operator. Read the article at DevChannel.

Luax is a similar framework as Java or Python for that matter, offering OS-independent programming platform for writing any kind of applications. Unlike Java, LuaX uses existing C/C++ open source libraries extensively (SDL, etc.) to do its work.

In the Unix world of computing, it is possible to exchange your window manager with an advanced one. The window manager's main purpose is to move/resize windows on the screen. These improved window managers differ from the way people are used to interact with windows in the Microsoft Windows world.

With the next version of Windows, Microsoft is looking to add a number of laptop-specific features designed to make portable machines both more powerful and at the same time as easy to use as consumer devices such as portable DVD players.

Zonker wrote a review of the Sun JDS 1 at Unixreview, in the dawn of the JDS 2 release.

Is there no larger contingent of armchair corporate CEOs than Apple fanatics? Let's examine the so-called wealth of opinion out there and see how it measures up.

It would appear that a little tinkering with Longhorn's DLL files allows users to enable a few DWM effects. These include fancy drop shadows on windows, and nice longhorn style icons are noticable on the left of the title bars. Also, animation is visible when opening windows. Also, this review takes a look at what is new in the recently released Longhorn build which was given to WinHEC attendees. Update: Screenshots of Longhorn Build 4074. MSDN subscribers can now download an ISO of the build.

Jono Bacon believes that all DEs should include a utility that reminds the user of taking a break every so often, in order to escape RSI. Workrave (with the cute sheep mascot) is a good example.

After a year of tackling the Windows security nightmare, Microsoft has killed its Next-Generation Secure Computing Base (NGSCB) project and later this year plans to detail a revised security plan for Longhorn, the next major version of Windows, company executives said. On Tuesday, Microsoft executives confirmed that NGSCB will be canned. The project, dreamed up with Intel in 2002, was once code-named Palladium.

Novell Inc. is banking its re-entry into the consciousness of IT shops on Linux. Through its acquisitions of Ximian and SuSE Linux AG last year, Novell is working hard to regain its stature as a major technology player. In this interview, SuSE chief technology officer Juergen Geck touches on Novell's Linux strategy, starting with its recent release of the YaST (Yet another Setup Tool) management tool to open source, his thoughts on back-porting features from the 2.6 kernel and SuSE's product road map for the rest of 2004.

R. Kirk McPike wrote a comparison between Microsoft's Word and OpenOffice.org Writer based on his experience writing a term paper. It's an attempt to consider the end usability of both products, and how OpenOffice.org's challenge should be responded to by Microsoft.