To further prove that analysts' projections are just informed guesses, two major analyst firms just presented a completely different outlook on the netbook market and where it is going. Even though both project major growth, one of them sees a very bright future for non-Intel netbooks, while the other sticks with Atom.

Mark Cox, Red Hat's director of security response, has published his usual risk report, which includes very detailed statistics and other information on security issues and how they were handled in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4. Red Hat remains the only OS vendor to directly publish such information and provide the raw data as well. "Red Hat is continually developing technologies to help reduce the risk of security threats, and a number of these were consolidated into Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4. The most significant technologies were SELinux and Exec-Shield. Exec-Shield is a project which includes support for the No eXecute (NX) memory permission, simulating NX via segment limits, Position Independent Executables (PIE), gcc, and glibc hardening. For more details, a table of the major security technology innovations in Enterprise 4 is available."

The usually already overactive Apple rumour mill has been spinning like crazy the past few days due to rumours about apple possibly entering the netbook market. The rumours are vague and not exactly definitive, but that doesn't mean mulling a possible apple netbook isn't interesting. If the Cupertino company built a netbook, what would it look like?

eWeek has taken a look at the recently released RC of Windows Vista/Server 2008 SP2. "Microsoft fulfills its promise of a quick delivery of a Release Candidate for SP2 for Windows Vista and Windows 2008 Server. Unfortunately, enterprises will see few worthwhile upgrades. There are some hardware and wireless improvements, but users and administrators will see the most beneficial upgrades to the search capabilities."

Jeremy White posted the CodeWeavers' Outlook for 2009, explaining what the group has been working fervently on the past eight months as well as plans for the coming months of 2009. CodeWeavers develops and sells CrossOver, an application based upon Wine that can run Windows applications on Mac OS X and Linux, specifically certain games and office applications. They're also the leading corporate backer of the Wine Project. In the road map, White explains that the past eight months have been spent on unattractive, under-the-hood improvements to Wine, particularly "things like .NET support, work on a DIB Engine, Gdiplus, and a lot of Direct X work. We've also spent a lot of energy focusing on issues with Microsoft Office 2003 and 2007, in an effort to bring those applications fully up to 'Gold' level." He goes on to say that DirectX 9 support is coming along nicely for the CrossOver Games project, and DirectX 10 is around the corner. The plans for the upcoming months include shipping CrossOver 8.0 for both Linux and Mac, which will include many improvements, the juiciest of which are centered around Photoshop CS3, Microsoft Office, and Quicken 2009. Aside from adding more and better application support in Wine, the GUI of CrossOver is supposed to get a hefty overhaul by the CodeWeavers team.

This weekend, we learned that Apple's upcoming Snow Leopard operating system would have a minimal user interface for the QuickTime movie player. Thanks to AppleInsider, we now have more information on the new interface, and it seems like Apple is again - just as with the Safari 4 beta - using some radical interface ideas.