In the latest of his legendary keynote stage shows, Steve Jobs kicked off Apple's WWDC this morning in San Francisco by showing off the company's speedy new aluminum G5 desktop Mac.

Linus Torvalds, the founder and lead developer of the Linux open-source operating system, has some strong views about the legal dispute between The SCO Group and IBM, which he shared with eWEEK Senior Editor Peter Galli in an e-mail exchange last week.

Since Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates sent a memo 18 months ago urging the company to focus on making its software trustworthy, the company has devoted developers and money to security in its software products. But Microsoft has given short shrift to a second concern outlined in the so-called "Trustworthy Computing" memo - protecting privacy - except when forced by the government. With the hiring of a new privacy chief, the software company is hoping to improve its privacy record and keep government regulators at bay.

This is a significant milestone to be shared with everyone! Khairil Yusof reports that libkse is now running quite well on his FreeBSD 5.1+ current based SMP system. He has tested a bunch of apps on his system, taking the approach of enabling kse one app at a time. Read more at FreeBSDForums.

The specs for the G5 machines that were accidentally posted at the Apple store a few days ago were correct. Steve Jobs just announced G5 Powermacs at the WWDC conference. He's calling it the "world's fastest personal computer." They just finished doing a demo in which a Dual 2 GHz G5 vastly outperforms a High-end Dual Xeon. Read more for preliminary specs. Prices will be $2000-3000. Oh, and the Panther OSX update was announced, but we already knew about that.

Linux and other open source software has been widely used by government technologists for years in an unsanctioned way, but a recent Department of Defense memo officially puts open source software on the "approved" list. Government research contractor MITRE recently published a study that found that OSS was in wide use in the government, and warned that if it were to be forbidden, the costs and security fallout would be considerable. See this Forbes.com story for more.

Today was a big day for Microsoft's mobile devices software strategy. The company: (1) rolled out Pocket PC 2003 (and renamed it); (2) unveiled a new "Windows Mobile" branding strategy; and (3) launched a collaboration with three leading high-speed wireless service providers to provide easier access to more than 3,500 Wi-Fi wireless "hot spots" by Windows-powered PDAs throughout the US. All this (and more) is covered in this "special report" at WindowsForDevices.com (including a detailed list of enhancements in Pocket PC 2003).

If you have a mixed network like I do sometimes you have to compromise. At my job we run Windows, Linux and a sole Mac (Graphics dept.) and lets face it, when you do consulting work and if you design and develop custom applications you have to be able to develop for your clients platform and as much as I hate it, it's a Windows world. Before I used to have 2 workstations, one Windows and one Linux, or I had to dual boot. In the past, virtual machines have been lacking. Either they were too slow or lacking a certain pizazz to get the job done. Enter VMWare Workstation 4.

LindowsOS 4.0 is expected to be released this week and so the Lindows.com web site is down for upgrade at press time. In the meantime, the Lindows.com folks released a funky Lindows theme song called "Lindows Rock". To view the video clip, you will need Flash.

Three tech allies demonstrated a new storage technology that they believe will keep a venerable hard drive standard safe from extinction.

Here is a new Pegasos review, also reviewing the MorphOS in addition to the hardware.

The new OpenBeOS newsletter is discussing the new VM and file caching implementation for OBOS.

Symbian PLC will outpace Microsoft Corp. in the market for cellular phone operating systems, reaching double the market share in 2007, a research firm said Friday. Symbian, a software consortium formed by handset makers, will have 5 percent of the market in five years, with Microsoft coming in second with 2.5 percent and Linux third with 2 percent, the Probe Group, Cedar Knolls, N.J., said. Get more mobile computing news on our sister site, NMC.

With the Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT), you can develop a stand-alone Java application that feels and operates like a native application. If you've spent any time developing Java client-side applications for Windows, you've probably wanted to integrate some native Windows components into your applications. This article shows you how to use Eclipse to easily leverage and integrate ActiveX controls within a stand-alone SWT application.