This document attempts to give a hacker over-friendly answer to the question "What is Mac OS X?".

"I've heard a lot of negatives about LindowsOS since its debut. I've heard the installation procedure encourages users to run as root, and worse, to do so without a password. I've heard the company doesn't adhere to the GPL by providing access to the source code for LindowsOS. I've also heard the company didn't play nice with others at a desktop Linux trade show last year. From personal experience I know company reps are a lot more eager to talk to the Windows trade press than to the Linux press." Read the review at NewsForge by Joe Barr.

There is now an Exposé-clone available for Windows-users to purchase. Exposé is a new function of managing open windows on Mac OS X Panther.

The C programming language defines two standard memory management functions: malloc() and free(). C programmers frequently use those functions to allocate buffers at run time to pass data between functions. In many situations, however, you cannot predetermine the actual sizes required for the buffers, which may cause several fundamental problems for constructing complex C programs. This article advocates a self-managing, abstract data buffer. It outlines a pseudo-C implementation of the abstract buffer and details the advantages of adopting this mechanism.

A lot of waiting and criticism has being wasted on Gnome/GTK's new file selector window. I decided to give my two cents on how I would personally perceive a good GTK+ file selector and make an honest suggestion. Special thanks to Tigert who gave me the motivation to work on this earlier today.

Martin Hansen draws parallels between our 8bit ancestors and today's computers.

On the eve of the giant annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Microsoft is set to deep-six its short-lived Windows XP Media Center Edition, according to industry reports received by The Register.

"The recent release of Xandros Linux 2.0 marks an important milestone in the company's short history. Not only is the Linux desktop market growing and changing in ways we never imagined, but the inner workings of the distro have been completely updated to more modern standards. Xandros has caught up with the rest of the Linux world and things couldn't be better. In this market, they should turn into a major contender for the Windows conversion revolution." Read MadPenguin's review here, ours is here.

Mandrake Linux 10.0-preview edition pretty much defines the shape of things to come in Linux land in 2004. With Kernel 2.6, KDE 3.2 beta and XFree86 4.4 beta, it doesn't leave much to be desired. This article refers to cooker snapshot as of December 31, 2003. Please note that this release is not a beta release. This is not even an alpha release. Its just something put together to show what we can expect from Mandrake 10.0. This release comes on only two CDs so some of the packages are missing. And as there are bound to be lot of bugs in this kind of release, I'll be concentrating more on the usability aspect. So let's see if it is worth drooling over.

As of this writing Steve Jobs' keynote is taking place, he has already announced a new Final Cut version, a new XServe, a new MS Office for Mac, iTunes and iLife 04, GarageBand, iPod Mini and more. View the keynote live or go to MacMinute for up to the minute updates.

Software maker PalmSource confirmed Tuesday that it delivered on its promise to provide its partners with a new version of its latest operating system for mobile devices before the end of 2004.

Beyond3D had the opportunity to speak with Chris Donahue of Microsoft recently. Being the Lead Evangelist for Windows when it comes to convincing developers that Windows is the best there is, we decided to ask him a variety of questions, ranging from what he actually does, to DirectX and its importance, to companies like NVIDIA and ATI , to the next major Microsoft operating system codenamed Longhorn. Chris was previously the manager of Developer Relations at NVIDIA so he should provide some interesting insights about working with the independent hardware vendors as well.

The OpenBeOS Translation Kit BETA 3 is now available. Many bugs have been fixed, including one in the Translation Kit which caused some applications to crash and prevented others from loading bitmap resources. Elsewhere, Waldemar Kornewald from the Networking Kit recently changed a file in the OpenBeOS CVS and posted a comment which is pretty self-explanatory.

"Contributors to Linux are nothing short of dedicated when it comes to offering their coding efforts, but as many are aware, much of that effort is wasted in the way of duplicated work, a great deal of which happen to only be the "sexy" parts of the code base. The problem is not so much in getting developer support, but in getting the masses organized and motivated to tackle the otherwise neglected aspects of the open source operating system." The following osViews editorial contributor has some interesting ideas to not only help Linux development but also the platform as a whole and even its promotion.