German BeOS Usergroup Alive Again

  Submitted by Matthias Breiter Haiku 38 Comments
Despite trolls' claims to the contrary, BeOS is still alive and well, and no one shows it more than active BeOS usergroups . The German BeOS User Group, DeBUG, has reformed and reorganized and the next BeGeistert is planned for mid-October. More details within.
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Netcraft: Red Hat Poised to Lose Marketshare

Red Hat 42 Comments
Red Hat is making no secret of the fact that it's trying to focus on revenue-generating enterprise customers, even if that means losing throngs of small users who provide little to no revenue. Many of the largest hosting companies use Red Hat Linux, but as the company changes its focus, that may change, especially if Red Hat is slow to release important patches for non-paying customers, says a Netcraft report.
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Windows Emulation on Mac Hits Snags

  Submitted by Rob Potts macOS 82 Comments
Popular Intel-PC emulation software VirtualPC will not run on the G5 Powermacs. Microsoft, the new VirtualPC owner, says that compatability will have to wait until the next full version of the software, a year away. In other news, FWB, the makers of once VirtualPC-rival RealPC, will not be porting their product to Mac OS X. The current management decries the former management's hyping "vaporware" by promising a new version of RealPC.
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Secure Programmer: Developing secure programs

General Development 13 Comments
This column explains how to write secure applications; it focuses on the Linux operating system, but many of the principles apply to any system. In today's networked world, software developers must know how to write secure programs, yet this information isn't widely known or taught. This first installment of the Secure programmer column introduces the basic ideas of how to write secure applications and discusses how to identify the security requirements for your specific application. Future installments will focus on different common vulnerabilities and how to prevent them.
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Contiki Videos

  Submitted by Paul Gallant OS News 20 Comments
Contiki is a usable (internet-enabled) OS for Commodore 64 hardware. System requirements for Contiki is about 20K RAM for the base functionality and about 50K for full functionality (desktop icons, web browser, web server, etc.) See the videos of Contiki in action.
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Macintosh Browser Smackdown at Arstechnica.com

  Submitted by Prognathous Internet 33 Comments
For an alternative OS to be a viable desktop contender, it must have a good web browser. Mac OS X's biggest stumbling block at its introduction was its limited selection of (slow) web browsers. Things have changed. Now there are more than 9 to choose from. Ars Technica has a head-to-head comparison. Gecko-based browsers stand out in speed and functionality, but look like ports, while Safari earns the top spot for just being well put together. In a similar vein Mac P2P outlines the various P2P options for Mac users.
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Websites Down Due to Patents

Internet 142 Comments
Multiple readers submitted this newsbit: Linux related websites all over the net are down "due to software patents. Spotted so far are: the Gnome website, the KDE website, and Knoppix homepage. All pages point a visitor to http://swpat.ffii.org. Update: This topic seems to need clarification. These sites are down in protest of a proposed patent law in the EU that many people believe is too broad and will hurt rather than protect the rights of software developers. Read the "swpat.ffii.org" site for more details.
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Possible Linux 2.6.0 Release Date

  Submitted by Matthew Baulch Linux 20 Comments
As we all anxiously await the release of Linux 2.6, we hear speculations on the final date ranging from early September to late December. A fellow optimist from comhem.se has posted this graph showing predictions based on the kernel's current rate of progress. It was composed using the compile statistics from John Sherry of OSDL. This chart suggests a release date of the 12th of October.
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Jupiter Research: No Longhorn Until 2006

Windows 68 Comments
Jupiter Research analyst Joe Wilcox believes that Microsoft's upcoming major OS release will not be generally available until 2006, a year later than what Microsoft is currently predicting. He believes that the changes planned are too far-sweeping to be rolled out quickly, when you take into account that developers need time to prepare their software.
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1st International DotGNU Collaborative Coding Competition

  Submitted by Norbert Bollow General Development 23 Comments
The DotGNU project is holding an international competition in the area of collaboratively implementing the System.Windows.Forms namespace in the C# class libraries, a GUI framework that will allow developers and end users to run and develop applications on many different platforms, anything from GNU/Linux, MS Windows, OS X to even handhelds. Participants will have a chance of winning one of fifteen monetary prizes totalling US$ 4500. The full anouncement is here.
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Apple switching from tcsh to bash

  Submitted by Wontz macOS 62 Comments
According to MacNN, sources are reporting that the latest developer release of Mac OS X "Panther" has changed its default shell from tcsh to bash. From ISPs using both OSX and Linux, it's kind of good news. It seem that Linux's popularity gives some kind of "prefered shell" status to bash.
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Report on the Future of Qt

  Submitted by John Werner Qt 19 Comments
The dot is running a piece on a recent presentation given by Matthias Ettrich, director of Qt development, author of LyX, and founder of KDE, in the annual KDE Developer's Conference in Nove Hardy, Czech Republic. He details what will be new in Qt 4.0, which will be used as a base for the next major version of KDE after 3.2. New features will include much faster startup speed and memory usage as well as a general cleanup of Qt's architecture, including the splitting of GUI and non-GUI related classes in Qt.
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