The Safari 4 beta is having a little bit of trouble cleaning up after itself, as has been revealed by C. Harwic on his blog. Safari 4 is still in beta, so it's easy to forgive the browser for this rather sloppy housekeeping, which left gigabytes (!) of browsing data in weird places all over your filesystem, even after cleaning the caches or history. Still, this does raise a few questions.

Over the years, we've occasionally run an "Ask OSNews" feature, wherein a reader asks us a question and we answer it publicly. Lately I've really been enjoying Slate's Dear Prudence advice column and the ever-interesting Straight Dope, and I thought we should see if we can get more OSNews readers to submit questions, and turn Ask OSNews into a more-regular thing. If your question falls outside of our domain expertise, we'll try to track down an expert to help out. And of course, our responses will always be supplemented by further advice from OSNews readers in the comments. Questions are welcome on any topic ranging from OSes and computing to science and geek culture. Contact us with your questions. (Please include "Ask OSNews" in the subject). Today's question is from a young student in Hungary who's seduced by the faraway siren song of Apple's marketing and wonders, "should I switch?"

After Syllable Desktop 0.6.6 already brought a number of improvements to standards support, Kristian Van Der Vliet has now implemented the POSIX interface to memory-mapped files.

No expense was spared (and no effort was spent) in celebrating our podcast surviving into double digits! It's an even game of four quarters as we discuss Vmedia drives, Palm Pre, Java on OS X and the eternal struggle between Microsoft and open source.

Mid-April, the four founders of The Pirate Bay were found guilty of being accessories to breaching copyright law; they aided in breaching copyright of 33 files. As a result, they were sentenced to one year in jail and a 2.75 million EUR fine. However, it was quickly revealed that the judge in the case was heavily biased, and ever since then there's been a search for a judge who is actually not involved with any pro-copyright groups or with the lawyers working for the entertainment industry in this case. Turns out that's actually kind of hard.

Eeebuntu 3.0, the Ubuntu distribution especially custom-built for the EeePC, just last week saw its third release of the Base edition-- the edition that includes a minimal amount of apps and features for more advanced users to customize. Though nothing's really been said on the matter, I suppose we can expect the Standard and NBR editions to be updated soon as well.

Windows 7 Starter Edition, a sort of My First Operating System, always carried with it a massive braindead bug feature that limited the amount of applications you could simultaniously have open at just three. Yes, past tense, because someone over in Redmond apparently looked up and smelled the roses, and suggested removing this silly limitation. And so they did, according to Paul Thurrot.

It appears that UMPC-maker OQO is in the process of going under. "Like so many other companies that hadn't quite hit their stride by the time the economic downturn swept in last year, OQO is now apparently beset by financial difficulties that are so severe that it has shut off all support service and closed its phone lines."

InfoWorld's Roger Grimes offers a spreadsheet-based calculator in which you can key in your current password policy and see how your organization's passwords might hold up against the number of guesses an attacker can make in a given minute. As an example, Grimes assumes an eight-character password, with complexity enabled, a 94-symbol character set, and 90 days between password changes. Such a policy, typical for many organizations, would require attackers to make only 65 guesses per minute to break -- not at all hard to accomplish, Grimes writes.

Keith Curtis worked at Microsoft for 11 years, coding on Windows, Office, and at Microsoft's research department, before leaving the Redmond giant. Call it a revelation, call it giving in to the devil's temptations, but he's now a complete open source and Linux advocate, and in his new book, "After the Software Wars", he explains why open source will prevail against Microsoft's proprietary model.

After about 8 months of work, Google has "released Chrome 2" to the general public. Technically, this just means they moved the version of Chrome in the beta channel up to the stable channel. "We're referring to this as Chrome 2, but that's mainly a metric to help us keep track of changes internally. We don't give too much weight to version numbers and will continue to roll out useful updates as often as possible." There's lots of decent goodies in Chrome 2.

InfoWorld's Paul Venezia reviews VMware vSphere 4, what the company has billed its 'virtual data center OS.' The bottom line: "VMware vSphere 4.0 touches on almost every aspect of managing a virtual infrastructure, from ESX host provisioning to virtual network management to backup and recovery of virtual machines. Time will tell whether these features are as solid as they need to be in this release, but their presence is a substantial step forward for virtual environments."

OSNews regular Kaiwai, who we all love and hate at the same time, has written a fairly detailed article about the latest Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard build, seed 10A355. He covers the changes made, the status of the transition to 64bit, and more.

There is a crying demand among mobile phone vendors for talented ARM programmers, and there's plenty of work to be done. This article provides a starting point for understanding the software side of embedded systems development by describing one set of commonly used tools: the GNU ARM toolchain.