"To the outsider, and even to me for some time, the various lawsuits involving the SCO Group follow a relatively simple story line. I'm not a lawyer, but after many interviews with the involved parties and lawyers, the case boils down to divergent interpretations of the subject matter." Read the editorial at ZDNet.

I already have a PalmV PDA with PalmOS 3.5. I never use it. I practically have absolutely no need for an organizer. Yet, I wanna buy a new one. That geek gene in me (that my mother unsuccessfully tried to kill over the years) what really wants is a "truly mobile PC" that just isn't a laptop. So, for the last few days I was shopping around the Internet for a new PDA (preferably a PocketPC this time) that would fit the kind of thing I am looking for. I was... horrified to find out that what I need isn't... invented yet.

In an effort to keep its customers secure following the recent Windows source code leaks, Microsoft has turned to the lessons it learned while taking a two month hiatus in early 2002 to clean house and eliminate insecure code from Windows. Also, Microsoft sent letters to several Internet service providers this week telling them that they have customers suspected of trading the stolen Windows 2000 and Windows NT code on peer-to-peer networks like Morpheus and Kazaa.

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.

Autopackage 0.4, codenamed "Better late than never ;)" is now available. Version 0.4 has most of the local architecture in place, with a terminal front end and a working GTK2 based GUI frontend. It can build, install, verify and uninstall packages of medium complexity (mplayer, gaim etc).

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!

Skolelinux is an ambitious project that aims to provide schools with a flexible and low-cost IT solution based on Linux and KDE. Waldo Bastian interviewed them to learn more about it and the role that KDE plays in it. In the meantime, the second part of "a Computer Lab with No Windows" was posted.

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.

CVS is a tool to record, manage and distribute different versions of files. In other words, CVS is a version control system. It allows easy collaborative work, as each of the contributors can work in his local copy at the same time, without fear of overriding each other modifications. It allows the recovery of past versions (useful for tracking bugs), the creation of branches (for experimental development or for releases) and more.

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."

MacMinute reports that according to BusinessWeek's Corporate Scoreboard, Apple reported the largest profit increase of all tech companies in 2003. Apple saw a 552% jump in annual profits to $137 M.

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.

Intel Corp. chief technologist Pat Gelsinger showed off the company's first reconfigurable silicon at the Intel Developer Forum this morning, together with a yet another way to improve the efficiency of the company's general-purpose microprocessors.

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.