Linux guru and convicted murdered Hans Reiser was handed a prison sentence of 15-to-life Friday, putting a final capstone on a case that began as a murder mystery, and ended with Reiser leading police to a makeshift grave a short distance from where he strangled his wife.

Quite often, Steve Jobs is given all the credit for the original Macintosh - but in reality, it wasn't Steve Jobs who made the largest contribution to the project; in fact, he didn't even come up with the idea. Jef Raskin envisioned an easy-to-use computer with a graphical user interface, and somewhere in 1979 he got the green light to start the Macintosh project, and together with Bill Atkinson he put together a team to develop the hard and software. It wasn't until much later that the project caught Steve Jobs' eye, who realised the Macintosh project had more potential than his own brainchild, the Lisa. One of the people on the Macintosh team was Andy Hertzfeld, and O'Reilly News interviewed him a few days ago.

Firefox 3.0, released not too long ago, was generally well-received. It added a load of new features, while also providing much-needed speed improvements and better memory management. Some new features, however, have met more resistance - one of them is the rather complicated user interface thrown at users when they reach a website with an invalid or expired SSL certificate.

Bordeaux is a commercial User Interface to the Wine software that allows Linux systems to run Windows software. The Bordeaux Technology Group distributes this software and provides professional support to companies and individuals running Windows apps on Linux (and soon FreeBSD). I interviewed Tom Wickline to get some details and find out what they're up to now.

Mac clone maker Psystar plans to file its answer to Apple's copyright infringement lawsuit Tuesday as well as a countersuit of its own, alleging that Apple engages in anticompetitive business practices. Miami-based Psystar, owned by Rudy Pedraza, will sue Apple under two federal laws designed to discourage monopolies and cartels, the Sherman Antitrust Act and the Clayton Antitrust Act, saying Apple's tying of the Mac OS to Apple-labeled hardware is "an anticompetitive restrain of trade", according to attorney Colby Springer of antitrust specialists Carr & Ferrell. Psystar is requesting that the court find Apple's EULA void, and is asking for unspecified damages. Psystar's attorneys are calling Apple's allegations of Psystar's copyright infringement "misinformed and mischaracterized". Psystar argues that its OpenComputer product is shipped with a fully licensed, unmodified copy of Mac OS X, and that the company has simply "leveraged open source-licensed code including Apple's OS" to enable a PC to run the Mac operating system.

OSNews reader rom508 sent us a note that apparently, Sun has ceased selling all of its UltraSPARC-based workstations, with only their x86 workstation offerings remaining. The Ultra 25 and Ultra 45 workstations, both UltraSPARC-based, are still listed on Sun's website, but are marked as 'end-of-life', with the notice that they are "superceded by the next generation Sun Ultra 24 Workstation ". One must wonder if this means the end of Sun's UltraSPARC workstation line. As a proud owner of an indestructible Ultra 5, I must say, that would be rather sad.

Dropping profits and stock prices have analysts speculating that Sun could be a target for either acquisition or a restructuring in which the company would sell off parts of the business and focus on a smaller set of technologies. In a July 31 report, the 451 Group analyst firm raised the possibility of Sun being acquired: 'Sun's sunken stock price creates a relative bargain considering its roughly $4 billion cash on hand, sizeable intellectual property and patent portfolio, and of course, its respected technology and products'.

"Not all user-friendly desktop operating systems are based on Linux; as demonstrated by PC-BSD, it is entirely feasible to turn a "geek" project into a piece of software that can be installed and used by even less technical computer users. Distrowatch talks to Kris Moore, PC-BSD lead developer, about his love affair with FreeBSD and the upcoming PC-BSD 7.0."

Dynamically linked shared libraries are an important aspect of GNU/Linux. They allow executables to dynamically access external functionality at run time and thereby reduce their overall memory footprint. This article investigates the process of creating and using dynamic libraries, provides details on the various tools for exploring them, and explores how these libraries work under the hood.

XML is a communication format for exchanging structured documents and data. Too often, an XML format is chosen arbitrarily during development, without much planning or design. Learn how to design a format less likely to require change and agile enough to incorporate new requirements with the simple addition of new extensions instead of full changes.

What makes this Vista article any different? The title provides a clue: it's as much about providing practical working solutions to resolve some of the commonly-quoted Vista annoyances as anything else. That in itself should give all Vista users a reason to read it. However it doesn't matter whether you use Vista or not, because this article does something that most of the others don't: it takes an objective and up-to-date look at the current state of Vista, with a range of facts, clear examples and informed opinions aimed squarely at debunking a lot of the myths and FUD we've been gagging on for the past year. So for those of you still considering whether to make the switch from XP, for those of you who want to abandon Vista and go back to XP, for those of you who used Vista a while ago and who are wondering whether it's worth using again now - this article puts things in perspective with the latest facts.

Periodically, there's a review of text editors for a particular platform. Linuxlinks' latest post is pretty thorough though, covering 21 different Linux/Unix text editors. "In many users' eyes, a text editor should be lean and mean, fast to start up and shut down, without fancy splash screens or a graphical user interface. The choice of editor has long stirred up strong emotions. To provide an insight into the quality of software that is available, we have compiled a list of 21 high quality Linux text editors. There's a mix of graphical and console based applications included.

Linux distributor Red Hat has issued a statement (Ed: via their errata) revealing that its servers were illegally infiltrated by unknown intruders. According to the company, internal audits have confirmed that the integrity of the Red Hat Network software deployment system was not compromised. The community-driven Fedora project, which is sponsored by Red Hat, also fell victim to a similar attack. More news is available around the web.

"Antivirus software on your personal computer could become a thing of the past thanks to a new "cloud computing" approach to malicious software detection developed at the University of Michigan. The researchers' new approach, called CloudAV, moves antivirus functionality into the "network cloud" and off personal computers. CloudAV analyzes suspicious files using multiple antivirus and behavioral detection programs simultaneously. Traditional antivirus software that resides on a personal computer checks documents and programs as they are accessed. Because of performance constraints and program incompatibilities, only one antivirus detector is typically used at a time. The researchers see promising opportunities in applying CloudAV to cell phones and other mobile devices that aren't robust enough to carry powerful antivirus software."