It is when I read articles like this that I have "my blood all going up to my head" (that's a Greek saying for people that get angry). So apparently, Apple is trying to patent "transparent windows that do a certain action after fading away". While I don't personally find this "innovation/invention" patentable, it's fine with me: Apple is doing the best it can to secure its business (maybe I would do the same if I had shareholders on my back).

Video and new screenshots of SkyOS 5.0-beta6 available for download. (MPG, 352x240, ~7min). In other news, the Diff-Filesystem is almost finished. The Diff-Filesystem is a layer between the VFS and any disk's file system. Elsewhere, the Syllable team released experimental new USB drivers.

Paul Otellini showed an interesting slide at the NY analyst meeting last night which shows how fast Intel hopes to move to multicore processors. Otellini said: "What's next is something more profound, moving our product line from logical to physical parallelism. Parallelism is computer speak for taking a serial of tasks and doing them together. You need parallelism in the hardware and operating systems and apps that are aware the machine can handle multiple threads".

Following Paul Ferrill's article "What is Mono and why should you care?" on DevChannel.org, find an all-around Linux article by Dee-Ann LeBlanc "And Then There's Mono", while yesterday the LUGRadio had a show dedicated to the controversial nature of Mono.

The update for the company's Enterprise Linux product was released Wednesday, with added support for x86 chips and IBM JS20 blade servers. Up next, the new release of the cutting edge Fedora, News.com reports. Update and mini-commentary: Editorial at eWEEK: "Why Linux users hate Red Hat". We don't think so, Red Hat is still the most used/downloaded distro of all. However, it is true that people usually hate the No1 (just because it is No1) and favor any underdog. Having said that, I prefer Slackware because of its simplicity, app stability, fewer distro bugs and speed compared to Fedora.

It's looking more like the next-generation Windows Server, code-named Longhorn, will get key orchestration features derived from BizTalk Server. Microsoft is working on workflow and orchestration technology, called the Windows Orchestration Engine (WinOE), for the Longhorn/Orcas time frame, several sources familiar with the company's plans said. The technology manages how processes or software services interact in distributed systems. Elsewhere, Microsoft will 'componentize' both the client and server versions of Windows Longhorn, its next-generation platform.

Open source presents a large potential competitive advantage for hardware and software vendors, and vendors of complementary or substitute services. Linux has contributed greatly to the adoption and success of OSS. In this article, ITManagersJournal examines seven open source strategies that can give your company a competitive advantage.

Apple Computer seeded its developers this week with a new build of Mac OS X 10.3.4 Panther, labeled Mac OS X 10.3.4 build 7H56.

Here are two articles introducing Slackware to new users: a Slackware installation guide and a "quick and dirty guide to packages". Update: One more article: "Slackware Linux with pkgsrc Packages".

Join MSDN TV for a glimpse at the newest release from the patterns & practices team. In this episode they discuss memory management, COM Interop and the Dispose pattern.

OSNews will feature a review of the upcoming Linare Professional edition next month. For this new version Linare has developed a new KDE theme along with other updates to their distro. Screenshots.

In recent years "scripting languages" are becoming a path which is a must go for rapid application development. The open source community has seen many scripting language implementations. Some really popular and good ones available are perl and python.

Bill Gates' dream of an end-to-end search tool for corporate networks remains just that: a dream, at least until the end of the decade, says News.com.

NetBSD's Linux emulation doesn't run a Linux kernel on a virtual machine; it runs Linux binaries on a NetBSD kernel. Linux emulation let you run plenty of useful programs that won't run natively under NetBSD, such as Sun's 1.4 Java Runtime Environment and JDK. Read the rest of the article here.