NewOS now features automatically created bootable images on its web site. Users who would like to try out the latest version of the NewOS kernel can easily rawrite/dd it on a floppy disk and boot with it. NewOS is the preffered kernel for OpenBeOS, but OpenBeOS uses a modified older version of NewOS.

This is a sample preview chapter of a book in progress, titled Inside "Indigo," to be published by Microsoft Press. Elsewhere, Visual C# "Whidbey" will include several IDE enhancements including a first-class code editor with rich editing features, a powerful debugger, and drag-and-drop visual designers. Additionally, these presentations describe the architectural vision that drives the "Longhorn wave" of technologies from Microsoft, and introduce a set of key initiatives that will form the pillars of the Longhorn solution architecture. Presentations require the Windows Media Player.

The (unconfirmed) info says that Mac OS X 10.4 will go "further than anticipated", introducing not only a "database-driven" new Finder (possibly similar to BeOS' Tracker) --although the file system itself will still be HFS+-- but also a wide support for file metadata. Please note that both the BeFS (and quite possibly this Apple implementation) is not similar to Longhorn's WinFS (apples & oranges). All this is not a surprise for us, as the people who were behind the same realization on BeOS --Dominic Giampaolo and Pavel Cisler-- today work at key positions at Apple Computer in the file system and Finder areas respectively. Pavel is also known for the Gnome Nautilus work while Dominic's legendary book "Practical File System Design with the Be File System" was recently released for free as a PDF. Enjoy!

Last year Microsoft approached Julian Smart to open discussions about the wxWindows name, in relation to the 'Windows' UK trademark owned by Microsoft. The wxWindows multiplatform toolkit project had to change its name to wxWidgets after both parties' agreement on how to resolve the issue.

UK based security firm mi2g has analyzed 17,074 successful digital attacks against servers and networks. The results are a bit surprising. The BSD OSes (including FreeBSD and Mac OS X) proved to be the systems least likely to be successfully cracked, while Linux servers were the most vulnerable. Linux machines suffered 13,654 successful attacks, or 80% of the survey total. Windows based servers enjoyed a sharp decline in successful breaches, with only 2,005 attacks. "Read more" for our take.

Release 0.99 of the Open Source IDE SharpDevelop for the .NET platform has been released today. The most important change is a Forms Designer and Code Completion for Visual Basic .NET, another useful addition is the SharpQuery Database add-in. The Mono version of the free IDE, MonoDevelop, is scheduled for a first release in a few days.

With the announcement of udev 018, Greg KH noted that at this time he is running with udev managing the /dev directory on his primary email and development server. He says, "this is a major milestone for udev and it proves that it is a viable solution," going on to add, "udev development isn't done, but for anyone who has not checked it out yet, I suggest you do so."

On Monday, the Subversion project is scheduled to release version 1.0 of their version control system, under development for several years now. Subversion was intended from its inception as the CVS replacement and it comes with many important features previously found only on commercial VCS like Perforce. It was designed for better remote performance, and it is multi-platform with a GUI/CLI front-end.

OpenBSD team members, lead by Dale Rahn, have been actively porting OpenBSD to the StrongARM processor. You can see the result of their work on the "cats" platform page. This port is based on the NetBSD port to the platform.

Opera Soft. released Opera 7.50 Preview 2 for Windows and Unix with a lot of fixes and improvements.

No, I'm not going all "New Age" on you, this time I'm looking at how computers are going to get a 3rd dimension and how this will change the way we interact with them. The previous parts of this series have been based on extrapolations or previous history. This time I'm looking further forward, when technologies currently in long term development become available and open up a whole new realm of possibilities.

Not one to buck the trend, Mandrakesoft have been fined €70,000 and told to change its name by a French court after a case brought by King Feature Syndicate of America, who own the trademark of "Mandrake the Magician" There have been no clues yet to what they'll change their name to, but for those who can read French, there's an article by the french IT news site Le Monde Informatique here. Update: MandrakeSoft has a suspensive appeal that could last 3 years, at least, and until a new trial they can keep their rights and domain names.

On Wednesday, Apple provided developers with a new pre-release seed of OSX 10.3.3, sources said.

The Y Window System Project have started while XFree86 4.3.0 now makes it in Debian Unstable.