"I got my new iBook a couple of days ago, and finally tried this “Mac OS X” thing for the first time. After doing all the software updates, this is what I found." Well-known usability hacker Mattew Thomas (mostly of Mozilla fame) gives his two cents on Mac OS X.

Don't have room in the budget for all the bandwidth you'd like? Users griping about Internet wait times? What's an IT mom to do? What parents of modest means have always done: Plug the leaks, patch the holes, and stretch the meals with bread. In the meantime, Windows Server 2003 overtakes NT4: The number of website hostnames running Microsoft's newest operating system, Windows Server 2003, overtook those running on Windows NT4 earlier this month.

The first and second articles in this series about .NET security covered the basics of .NET identity-based security, and showed you how to implement custom authentication and authorization schemes. In this last installment, you get the missing piece of the puzzle: Learn how to implement identity flow and identity impersonation across.NET-distributed multilayered applications.

A new OBOS-Newsletter is out: In this Issue you can read about an "OBOS App_Server Overview", "How to Write a BeOS R5 Printer Driver" and "Against Directories".

SkyOS is now able to handle and display text from all languages. Because of the recently introduced keyboard/UNICODE mapping and UTF8 handling in the entire GUI and applications you can type and view text from languages like English, German, Chinese and more. Check the news & shots here.

The Part two of the interview with Hillel and Tjeerd focuses on Microsoft's user experience work and corporate culture, the Mac competition, balancing current products with future developments.

"After using LindowsOS for some time, many troublesome issues regarding the future of this particular flavour of Linux continually flood my mind whenever the subject of Lindows surfaces. I've followed both the company and its flagship product, LindowsOS, since its introduction over two years ago." Read the review at DesktopOS.

PROMELA is not a programming language. PROMELA is a language for building verification models. As a result of this specialization, PROMELA contains many features that are not found in mainstream programming languages. These features are intended to facilitate the construction of high-level models of distributed systems. Gerard Holzmann provides an overview in this chapter from his book, "The SPIN Model Checker: Primer and Reference Manual."

It's easy to get lost in the world of "little languages" -- quite a few have been written to scratch some itch of a company, individual, or project. Rexx is one of these languages, with a long history of use on IBM operating systems, and good current implementations for Linux and other Free Software operating systems. Rexx occupies a useful ecological niche between the relative crudeness of shell scripting and the cumbersome formality of full systems languages.

"I love my black cat. It has served me well since October with its new Finder, refined interface, Fast User Switching, and Exposé. I love Panther so much that I am willing to debate until the wee hours of the night with PC Zealots and die hard Classic supporters about its merits. Even in all of its glory, however, there is always room for improvement." Read the suggested improvements article at MacZealots.com.

This article is the second in a series of whitepapers on using the new Linux 2.6 kernel by William von Hagen of TimeSys. von Hagen's whitepapers place special emphasis on the primary issues in migrating existing drivers, applications, and embedded Linux deployments to a Linux distribution based on the 2.6 kernel.

eWEEK.com caught up with PalmSource CTO Larry Slotnick at this week's developer shindig to get an update on the new Palm OS, forthcoming plans and how the company "integrated" the BeOS ideas into the PalmOS.

The Mono Project has released a small bug-fix release of Mono, 0.30.1. They have also a new document that describes some common tricks to improve the performance of your Mono or .NET application. These are a summary of techniques that we employed to tune our own C# compiler.

"The worst part about this is that the MCSEs involved are right: Linux can never be as good a Windows 2003 server as is Windows 2003. Linux isn't a cheaper form of Windows; direct substitution without change in thinking fails initially from a technology perspective and fails in the longer term from a cost perspective", says Paul Murphy.