Apple today seeded build 7B53 of Mac OS X 10.3, Panther, to developers. "We are fast approaching first candidate build," Apple told developers in the build's seed note. As usual, the new build was posted to the Apple Developer Connection Web site.

"Much of what Microsoft has done over the past year or so might suggest a company settling into middle age. It has overhauled its management structure, tightened its financial controls, expanded its financial reporting, started paying dividends and abandoned the high-tech currency of stock options in favor of risk-free grants of shares to employees. " Read the story at SFGate.

From Mac news site MacMinute: "Bare Feats has published a performance comparison of all three Power Mac G5 models. "It looks like the Dual G5 2GHz has the best bang for the buck," the site reports. "The average speed advantage over the G5 1.8GHz is 45%. Yet it only costs 25% more (factory standard configuration).""

The WinNT-inspired OSS OS ReactOS released recently 0.1.3.

When .NET launched, one of the most talked-about feature was rich metadata. But what does that mean to the day-to-day developer? Shawn Wildermuth discusses why understanding the way metadata can be used in your types can open up development avenues you never knew existed.

L.A.S. Linux is a 'live CD' distribution of Linux (based on Knoppix) with a CD-bootable toolkit for information security professionals and systems administrators. Its small footprint maks it able to fit on a 185MB mini-CD. Despite its small size, L.A.S. contains over 100 security tools including basic desktop applications, an array or forensic, penetration testing, intrusion detection, sniffers, and administrative utilities. Changes in this latest version include the addition of Ettercap-GTK, Clam Anti-Virus, MiniCOM, SpikeProxy, MRTG, and many of the Cisco-centric Open Source Exchange tools.

Motorola is planning on selling its 19% stake in the Symbian Consortium to Nokia and Psion. The company claims that it isn't ending its relationship with Symbian nor will it necessarily cease to use the Symbian OS in its phones, but that its focus is on developing its Java environment, and the underlying OS isn't that important to them. Motorola recently developed a Linux-based smartphone.

It's semi-official: the next major update to Windows, which has already had its release slip from 2004 to 2005, will likely be even later. Microsoft executives are now reluctant to even discuss a release date. "We do not yet know the time frame for Longhorn, but it will involve a lot of innovative and exciting work," said Bill Gates at a recent financial analyst meeting.

A trade group has urged the US Department of Homeland Security to reconsider its recent decision to use Microsoft as its preferred supplier of desktop and server software, citing recent security problems. Quote from the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA) report: "Because of these recent developments, historical experience, and the inherent risks associated with lack of diversity, we ask that you reconsider your heavy reliance on a single, flawed software platform to protect our national security."

There is a group trying to develop an exokernel operating system for real world use, and it is supposed to be a hybrid with microkernels. There's not a lot at their SourceForge site yet, except for a cute slogan, but there's a comprehensive overview of the project's goals.

IBM researchers in Zurich, Switzerland, have developed novel worm-squashing software the company says it wants to turn into a product to help guard against computer-network attacks such as those that slowed Internet traffic earlier this month . . . The system uses a unique approach to detecting malicious software by looking at traffic flowing to Internet addresses that aren't assigned to specific computers, trying to isolate computers on a network that attempt to infect others

Citing the recent havoc caused by worms and security holes, three Asian powers are considering jointly developing an alternative to the Microsoft platform, probably using an open source OS as the foundation. From the Reuters story: The plan is to be proposed by Japanese Trade Minister Takeo Hiranuma at a meeting of economic ministers from the three nations in Phnom Penh on Wednesday, it said, adding that agreement was seen as likely.

According to Leo Laporte of TechTV, Paul Allen (co-founder of Microsoft) is considering selling his technology television channel which he bought it from Ziff-Davis in 2000. Two candidates are Viacom or Sony. Some people who think this is a bad idea have set up a petition at Petition Online.com.

On Microsoft's Protect Your PC page, there are some graphical representations of firewalls and virus protection, and the icon that they're using to represent external threats is a familiar-looking curly-cue that Debian GNU/Linux fans might recognize. Coincidence?