The latest OS X upgrade isn't a huge improvement, but it's faster and loaded with small enhancements that'll make your Mac purr, says BusinessWeek. In the meantime, Internet security company @Stake has warned of newly discovered vulnerabilities affecting Apple Computer's Mac OS X operating system. UPDATE: Apple Computer's latest version of its Mac OS X operating system, Panther (fourth release in 2.5 years), patches security flaws that affect previous versions of the operating system, leaving security experts wondering if users will have to pay the $129 upgrade fee to be secure.

Seen this at ActiveWin: A Microsoft employee has been fired for his blog posting titled, "Even Microsoft wants G5s", which includes photos of delivery of Power Mac G5s to Microsoft's Redmond Campus: "To my mind, it's an innocuous post. The presence of Macs on the Microsoft campus isn't a secret (for everything from graphic design work to the Mac Business Unit), and when I took the picture, I made sure to stand with my back to the building so that nothing other than the computers and the truck would be shown — no building features, no security measures, and no Microsoft personnel. However, it obviously wasn't enough." Check the picture and the blog here. We hope Microsoft will reconsider.

The first release candidate for KOffice 1.3 has been released. Story, announcement, ChangeLog.

Several hours ago, the FreeBSD team quietly released FreeBSD 4.9, the next version in the 4.x stable series. It features support for a number of new NICs, an improved ipfw, PAE support (allowing up to 64GB of RAM) and numerous other enhancements. Desktop users will be pleased to know that GNOME 2.4 and KDE 3.1.4 are included. Changelog here, mirrors here.

Despite the company's deep connections to Apple, Pixar Animation Studios only completed moving its computer infrastructure to Mac OS X eight months ago. More on the O'Reilly Conference at MacSlash.

In its lawsuit against IBM, the SCO Group has begun a direct challenge to the General Public License--the legal foundation for Linux, numerous other open-source programming projects and software SCO still ships today.

News.com spoke to Bill Gates on the first day of his company's software developers conference. In the meantime, eWEEK has a mini-review of Longhorn while here is a screenshot of a version of Longhorn that includes Avalon (not included in the PDC beta).

Everyone knows of Mac OS X's Finder file manager, but not many know of a third party file manager by CocoaTech called Path Finder. Path Finder is one of the most interesting products that I have come across lately. It's a file manager, but with a lot of extras. It can reside happily next to Finder, or it can replace it completely, drawing its own desktop, by unloading the Finder altogether.

"Sun has a desktop package that can be seriously considered by IT departments planning new rollouts". First look at Java Desktop System shows it has potential, ComputerWorld says.

There's a brand new SuSE Linux 9.0 PRO review on the UnixReview site.

Although MS is looking to rope in Longhorn developers now, the company knows it's in for a long ride.

ActiveState today announced the release of Visual XSLT 2.0 at the Microsoft PDC. Visual XSLT 2.0 addresses customer's demands for a flexible debugger and a Visual Schema Mapper. The Just-In-Time de-bugger doesn't need source code and automatically senses and debugs code; it is the first of its kind for XSLT. The solution also includes a Visual Schema Mapper that has "drag and drop" functionality.

At its Professional Developers Conference this week, Microsoft is taking the wraps off its Longhorn Windows, Yukon SQL Server and Whidbey tool suite. Check back here for news from the Los Angeles event. Articles here, here here, here (lots of good info about the new Longhorn features) and here. Longhorn SDK here, screenshots and video of Longhorn from today conference here, Longhorn Tweak Guide, special access to Longhorn/Whidbey PDC release code. Even more articles here, here and here.

Just a few days after the report that Mandrake 9.2 can fry some LG cdroms (workaround has being issued in the Linux kernel in the meantime), now users complain that Mac OS X Panther renders unusable/fried firewire hard drives, mostly some LaCie models and models that are both USB and FW. In the meantime, MacSlash has posted a collection of bugs found on Panther here and here, while backwards compatibility with Jaguar seems to not be great either. Hopefully 10.3.1 is not too far away!