Novell's acquisition of open-source start-up Ximian almost a year ago marked a turning point for the networking giant. Losing out to Microsoft in the struggle for domination of the network operating-system market precipitated a downward slide that saw the company pushed to the peripheries of directory and security software. Read the interview at ZDNet.

"Windows is more secure than you think, and Mac OS X is worse than you ever imagined". That is according to statistics published for the first time this week by Danish security firm Secunia. The stats, based on a database of security advisories for more than 3,500 products during 2003 and 2004 sheds light on the real security of enterprise applications and operating systems, according to the firm.

Sun Microsystems will launch its newest Java development tool at the JavaOne conference next week and lay out plans for improvements to the Java language.

A slimmed-down version of Microsoft's Windows XP will be offered to novice computer users in Thailand beginning in September.

The guys over at Griffin Technology were very kind to send us over two of their products for evaluation: the SightLight and the iFire. Here's what we think about these two Mac products.

Mike Hall builds and debugs a Windows CE operating system for a new device right in front of you. All in less than 10 minutes.

Camino is a web browser optimized for Mac OS X with a Cocoa user interface, and powerful Gecko layout engine. Version 0.8 was released today. Elsewhere, the developers of Mozilla Sunbird, the standalone version of Mozilla Calendar, are looking for a new default theme and are asking the community to build a new one.

Slackware 10 is released. Highlights of the 10.0 release include GCC 3.3.4 (with GCC 3.4.0 as an alternate in /testing), the Linux 2.4.26 kernel (with Linux 2.6.7 as an alternate choice in /testing), X11R6.7.0 from X.Org, Mozilla 1.7, GNOME 2.6.1+, and KDE 3.2.3. Read the announcement and the download information at Slackware's site.

It's been already a week after GnomeFiles.org went live (my, time flies when you work on something night and day) and we have the first statistics in: so far, there are more than 150 applications submitted, more than 3,800 downloads and about 250,000 web pages served. That last number is actually better than I expected, as it seems that Gnomefiles.org is already able to do 15,000 page views per day the last few days without any major linkage from other sites (it went up to 60,000 for the day when Slashdot linked on Sunday). The prizes will be handed out soon to the winning developers so if you haven't submitted your app yet, do it before the end of the week to become eligible.

Microsoft will sell a version of Windows for high-performance computing--a niche in which rival Linux is blossoming--with a first version planned for the second half of 2005.

Given the nature of open source software, many Linux applications are distributed in a "tarball" containing source code that you must build before you can run the application. Larger applications can take several hours to build. This article shows how you can use the distributed C compiler, distcc, to speed up the compilation of these sources so you can start using them sooner.

As a developer there was one language that I could not stand programming to. That would be the Java language. One of the things I have always liked about Windows XP and even Mac OS X are the visual IDE tools that are available. They make designing the interface easy and really hassle free. Even the QT toolkit and GTK offer interface builders. I must say I am a bigger fan of .NET and Mono. The Java language offered Swing and even then it remained a hassle.

This paper provides preliminary information about the Windows Driver Foundation (WDF) for the Microsoft Windows family of operating systems. It describes limitations of the current driver models that have led to the development of WDF, explains how WDF solves these problems, and introduces the fundamental components of WDF.

"This concept of seamless code migration offers a homogeneous OS for heterogeneous hardware. It is imperative in an anti-Microsoft, 'We don't want to be nailed down to one thing anymore' world. We want a choice," Terra Soft CEO Kai Staats told MacNewsWorld in an exclusive interview.