Earlier in the month we made a call for contributions, and we had an overwhelming response. Hopefully we'll be seeing some new articles from OSNews readers in the near future. I'd like to announce that we've set up a mailing list for those readers who might be interested in contributing articles and reviews. I'd also like to make a public apology to those people who I mistakenly added to the list. "Read more" for details.

After years of backing only one format in the recordable DVD format war, Apple Computer is adding limited support of a rival format into its operating system.

A recent study said that many Windows users are planning on evaluating other platforms. What about the tech savvy OSNews readers? Are you staying with Linux, OSX or Windows, or switching to something else? Come in and vote!

Among the technology industry's historic monuments sits Xerox PARC, the almost-legendary R&D facility nestled in the heart of Silicon Valley. Xerox also has a big research center in New York, and researchers from that facility and from PARC recently held a soiree in San Francisco to show some of the company's key research efforts. Read the article at PC Magazine.

In interesting releases of web browsers lately, Mozilla 1.4.1 is out, Opera 7.21b for Unix, Firebird 0.6.1, iCab 2.9.6 and Epiphany 1.0.1.

With the one year anniversary of Microsoft's Windows XP Tablet PC Edition operating system approaching in November, several PC makers have released or will soon release new tablet PC models designed around the OS.

The rush to endorse open source alternatives to Microsoft's dominant Windows software has been criticised by senior technology executives who warned that companies risked falling victim to growing hype around software such as the Linux operating system.

Roderick W. Smith discusses how to resize and defrag the Linux filesystems.

"Seems the new version of Samba ups the ante in file/printer sharing options for Windows network, with a 2.5x performance gain over Windows Server 2003, according to tests by IT Week." Read it here.

Richard Seibt, boss of the largest European offerer of Linux operating systems, the Suse Linux AG, expects: "I believe that Apple computers in the future, will run the Linux operating system". He said so (Google translation) in the "citizens of Berlin newspaper" (Monday issue). Seibt also said that Linux will make it "really big" by the year 2013.

YellowTAB made a number of announcements regarding additional features to be found on Zeta 1.0 and the future: Java 1.4.2 support, C# support via Mono and support for thousands of scanner models via SANE. Additionally, Bernd Korz, CVO of yellowTAB, sheds his view and knowledge on recent developments involving BeOS and Zeta, and discusses the past and future of computers in general.

Apple is developing a distributed/parallel computing solution called Xgrid, according to ThinkSecret. Apple recently put up a mailing list, "xgrid-users". According to the page, the mailing list is for discussion regarding use and deployment of Xgrid. No archived messages exist. The page describes Xgrid as "Apple's solution for parallel and distributed high performance computing."

Macdevcenter has an overview of the features and benefits of Mac OS X 10.3. The essential question is asks is "Should I upgrade?" and it answers "yes."

In a recent conference presentation, Google's Craig Nevill-Manning notes that cheap and fast hardware is the key to Google's success. The software, he says, is written to assume that the hardware will fail, and work around that. That way, the company can use commodity PC hardware and not worry when it fails--just replace it.