While Microsoft's Security Essentials has been very well received because of its small footprint and unobtrusive nature, it didn't always rank among the very top when it came to its detection rates. Overall, I'd still say it's one of the best antivirus tools. Now, with version 2.0, Microsoft has improved the detection mechanisms, but of course, it'll take some tests before we can see how effective they are.

Opera 11 has been released. "Tab stacking is a better way to organize your open tabs. Simply drag one tab on top of another to create a stack. Extensions help you personalize your browser and enhance what Opera can do. With the flick of your wrist, mouse gestures let you navigate back and forwards, open new pages, close tabs and so much more. In Opera 11, you now have a handy visual guide to the wonders of mouse gestures. We changed the address bar, so you can make better sense of the security levels of the sites you visit. Opera 11 now displays a clear badge indicating the security level and allowing immediate, one-click access to security and trust information about the site."

Well well well well well, paint me red and call me a girly scout. I've been saying for months now that there's much more collaboration between Apple and Microsoft than their respective fanboys want to believe, especially when it comes to fighting Google and Android, which both companies partly do via patent suits. More evidence for this has emerged today. Remember CPTN Holdings, the consortium led by Microsoft which bought that bundle of patents from Novell? Which other companies are part of this consortium? EMC. Oracle. Apple.

MySQL 5.5 delivers significant enhancements enabling users to improve the performance and scalability of web applications across multiple operating environments, including Windows, Linux, Oracle Solaris, and Mac OS X. The MySQL 5.5 Community Edition, which is licensed under the GNU GPL, and is available for free download, includes InnoDB as the default storage engine.

"In addition to talking up Windows tablets and slates at the January Consumer Electronics Show, Microsoft execs also are expected to use the conference to give another push to Windows Phone 7. But the first 'major' update to the WP7 platform may not hit until August or September of 2011, my sources claim."

L0phtCrack is one of the most used tools by security professionals worldwide. After years of inactivity, version 6 was released in 2009 and development hasn't halted since. In a new video, L0phtCrack co-author Christien Rioux aka dildog talks about the upcoming version and introduces some of the new features.

"Giano is a framework for the full-system simulation of arbitrary computer systems, with special emphasis on the hardware-software co-development of system software and Real-Time embedded applications. Giano includes both software models for CPU, I/O, busses and memories, and HDL simulators. Full source and a number of full-systems examples are included."

Both Apple and Microsoft are betting on H264 for HTML5 video, while Firefox and Opera focus on WebM and Chrome does both. Microsoft, however, is kind of an oddball; they first stated they would limit HTML5 video support in Internet Explorer 9 to H264, excluding all other codecs, but later made an exception for WebM, as long as the user installs the WebM codec. Now there's a new move by Microsoft: a Firefox plugin that allows the browser to hook into Windows 7's native video framework to provide H264 support.

Hi, I'm Thom Holwerda and I jailbreak my iPhone. There, I said it. Some suggest all jailbreakers only do it to pirate applications, but those of us familiar with the practice know there's a whole load of other reasons, the biggest of which is customisation. The iOS isn't pleasing to look at in my book, and hence, jailbreaking allows me to make my iPhone pretty. Jay 'saurik' Freeman, the man behind the Cydia App Store, is going to bring Cydia to the Mac, to bring the kind of customisation options from Cydia to the Mac.

Today Microsoft released 17 security bulletins which address 40 vulnerabilities affecting Microsoft Office, Windows, Internet Explorer, SharePoint Server and Exchange. This brings the total count for 2010 to 106 bulletins. Of note, only two of the bulletins are rated Critical, 14 are rated Important and one is Moderate. In addition to the bulletins released today, Microsoft is announcing plans to extend the Office File Validation feature currently available in Office 2010, to Office 2007 and 2003. This will help protect those using older versions of Microsoft Office from file parsing vulnerabilities.

On his website, Jun Auza list his top 50 programming quotes. "Most of the programming quotes I've collected are made by some of the famous names in the industry, while others came from not-so-famous people. Nevertheless, they are all witty so I hope you will find them fascinating and enlightening."

It's hard to predict the future because we humans prefer to think in terms of familiar paradigms. Even the most brilliant of our species are subject to this flaw. Now, Microsoft faces its turn. The owner of the operating system that likely runs your personal computer, the company that achieved monopoly with Windows and ducked the Department of Justice's scythe to keep it, faces a midlife crisis as the world goes gaga over portable consumer devices. This is the story of what's happening to Microsoft in the handheld operating system markets -- and how it parallels the earlier, similar journeys of IBM Corporation and Digital Equipment Corporation. Can Microsoft achieve dominance on mobile devices?

FreeBSD developer Colin Percival announced on his blog today that FreeBSD 9-CURRENT now runs on Amazon EC2. A number of FreeBSD developers have contributed to this project. "There are some caveats to this. First, at the moment only FreeBSD 9.0-CURRENT can run under EC2; I haven't merged bug fixes back to the stable branches. Second, at the moment FreeBSD only runs on t1.micro instances, for reasons I can't discuss (NDA) but hope will be resolved soon. Third, this code hasn't received very much testing and is almost certain to have more serious bugs, so it should be approached as an experimental, not-ready-for-production-use system for now. "

For the most time, I've been firmly in the largest camp when it comes to the Mono debate - the 'I don't care'-camp. With patent lawsuits being hotter than Lady Gaga right now, that changed. For good reason, so it seems; while firmly in the 'ZOMG-MICROSOFT-IS-T3H-EVILL!1!!ONE!'-camp, The-Source.com investigated the five most popular Mono applications, and the conclusion is clear: all of them implement a lot of namespaces which are not covered by Microsoft's community promise thing.