The Register takes a look back at that day a decade ago when Apple's announcement of a RISC-based Macintosh, the "Power Mac" really shook things up. The PowerPC was going to trounce the aging X86 architecture, and herald in a new era of fast computing. Problem is, Intel had a few tricks up its sleeve too. Apple's real achievement, though, was making the transition to a new architecture relatively painless.

The Windows Application Compatibility Toolkit (ACT) version 3.0 for Windows 2000 Service Pack 3 or later, Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 contains the tools and documentation you need to design, deploy, and support applications on these platforms. Tools include the latest versions of the Microsoft Windows Application Compatibility Analyzer that simplifies application inventory and compatibility testing, the Windows Application Verifier that assists developers and testers in locating common compatibility issues during the development cycle, and the Compatibility Administrator that provides access to the necessary compatibility fixes to support legacy applications in Windows.

Today, Microsoft is announcing (free reg. req.) that its shared-source program has one million licensed participants, from lone software developers to large corporations. The milestone, said Jason Matusow, manager of the shared-source initiative at Microsoft, shows that the company has responded to the demands of its customers.

The European Commission is expected (free reg. req.) to declare Microsoft an abusive monopolist, impose a fine of $100 million to $1 billion and order the company to make fundamental changes to the way it sells software in Europe. Such a ruling would be a significant setback for Microsoft after it overcame its most serious legal challenge by settling a sweeping antitrust case in the USA in 2001.

"I do not think any company except a few of the largest companies can offer any reasonable insulation to their customers from these types of judgments. You would need a market cap of more than a couple billion to just survive in the OS space." A very interesting read from S2's CEO about the legal side of OSes today. And it seems he is not far off the truth at all.

Rony Klein explains a few of the reasons why he prefers Gnome over KDE, an article accompanied by screenshots illustrating his case.

A. Domo has released a new version of his NTFS driver for QNX. The new version runs as a daemon.

MirOS announced the release of a new snapshot of MirOS BSD #7-current. Read more.

InnoTek GCC for OS/2 is a commercial distribution of the GNU C/C++ compiler suite and associated utilities for the IBM OS/2 platform. InnoTek maintains an OS/2 platform port of the GNU C/C++ compiler suite and provides comprehensive support for the compiler environment to enterprise customers. Read more at eComStation's web site.

The software industry is very fearful of open source software, but this fear is irrational. The software industry can quite easily combat OSS as similar challenges have been met successfully in other industries. Part II of "Why Good Ideas Fail" discusses the future evolution of the software industry, and the implications of this evolution for innovative ideas.

Houston Chronicle reviews the Firefox browser and for the most part it gets a glorious review.

The PDF online magazine Technoids issued v5 with a number of articles including an interview with BeOS MAX 3.1 people, 20 years of Macintosh and a review of the latest Zeta (all in German).

Most modern Unix-based operating systems (e.g. Linux, MacOS X, and BSD) come with a little console-mode utility called GNU Screen. It's a powerful tool in the hands of the console warrior, a veritable Swiss Army knife of text-mode human-computer interaction.

This release of Subversion fixes about 25 small bugs discovered during the six-week code freeze for 1.0.