With things like the Pirate Bay trial and the French three strikes law still very fresh in memory, it's easy to forget that sometimes, offence can be the best defence. In light of this ancient wisdom, Dutch website FTD.nu has filed a lawsuit against the Dutch variant of the RIAA, BREIN. FTD.nu is backed and supported by two key Dutch copyright lawyers. Note that most links in this story will be written in Foreign for most of you.

Whenever we talk about Windows 7 on OSNews, you'll always hear me advise you to change the UAC settings by setting it to its highest level, since Windows 7's default simply isn't secure. You might wonder why you should deal with additional prompts - what is the security risk actually like? Well, it's pretty big.

This article explains how to develop and implement trees in the Standard Widget Toolkit. Learn how an SWT tree is created and populated with data, how columns can be used to categorize data, how a tree can be extended to support row sorting, and how the tree's content can be searched.

Good news for plurality advocates in general, and Linux fans in particular: during a press event, Dell has announced a shift in its Linux strategy, one that seems to contradict recent moves by competitors who are de-emphasizing Linux models: Windows and Linux models will be made available simultaniously.

Microsoft has come one step closer to delivering a parallel programming language to developers. On May 8, Microsoft made Axum, the company's foray into parallel programming, available on its MSDN DevLabs portal. Axum is a .NET language for building parallel applications. According to a Microsoft description, Axum "is a language that builds upon the architecture of the Web and principles of isolation, actors and message-passing to increase application safety, responsiveness, scalability and developer productivity."

It seems like we're getting even more signs that netbooks haven't been doing very well lately. Research figures by IDC on the processor market seem to paint a not-so-rosy picture of sales of Intel's Atom processor, and then figures coming in from DisplaySearch seem to paint a different picture. What's going on here?

"Following up on our introductory article on Btrfs, Jeff Layton talked with Chris Mason, Director of Linux Kernel Engineering at Oracle and the founder and lead developer of Btrfs."

The NetBSD Project recently released NetBSD 5.0, the 13th major release of its Unix operating system. If you are not familiar with the BSD mentality, it's a back-to-basics approach. In this gallery we go from install to running a GNOME desktop in a virtualised VMware instance. This process is console-based.

Apple's latest Get a Mac commercial targets the recent laptop hunters ads coming from Microsoft. It shows a number of PC characters and Mac, with a woman in between who wants to buy a computer. She mentions a number of features she wants, and the number of PCs becomes ever smaller. Then she says she wants a computer without "viruses, crashes or headaches", which makes all the remaining PCs leave, with only the Mac left standing.

As was already revealed by eWeek earlier this week, the EU has imposed a massive fine on Intel for abusing its monopoly position. The fine is larger than the one given to Microsoft: 1.06 billion EUR, or 1.44 billion USD, opposed to the 899 million EUR fine imposed upon Microsoft.

As we happened to be talking about advertisements on OSNews yesterday, and the use of Adblock, I stumbled upon a blog entry by Adblock Plus' developer, who is trying to improve Adblock in such a way that it is less harmful to webmasters. His suggestion is surely intriguing, but will it fly wth Adblock users?

"Over time, many people have complained about the X Window system; the X Window system, or Xorg in its current most popular implementation, is the layer between applications and the graphics adapter. It has some fantastic features (like the ability to run application over the network) and some shortcoming. One thing is sure: it has evolved over the last year or so, immensely, especially as far as 3D and hardware acceleration."

InfoWorld's Neil McAllister looks ahead at the impending netbook revolution, one sure to be fueled by the introduction of machines based on ARM processors. As McAllister sees it, the move to ARM-based netbooks will have implications beyond cost and performance; it will also mean a new OS, opening the door for Linux, most notably Xandros and Ubuntu Netbook Remix. The emergence of ARM-based netbooks running Linux will represent a subtle shift in messaging on the part of netbook vendors. "Expect to see increased emphasis on netbooks as secondary machines or 'companion devices,' designed to be paired with a more traditional, full-featured notebook or PC, rather than standing on their own."

Steven Sinofsky has said that Windows 7 will enter the "release to manufacturing" stage in about three months from now, meaning August '09. This means that the actual Windows 7 release would be well in time for the holiday season. " If the feedback and telemetry on Windows 7 match our expectations then we will enter the final phases of the RTM process in about 3 months. If we are successful in that, then we tracking to our shared goal of having PCs with Windows 7 available this Holiday season."