An interesting article has been making its way around the internet the past few days, titled "Top 10 Usability Highs Of Mac OS". Mac OS X indeed does some things very, very right, just like many other operating systems and graphical environments do some things very, very right. The issue with the list of the article in question is that many of the items on the list are not exactly examples of "Usability Highs" at all.

"I recently had the opportunity to interview Andrew S. Tanenbaum, creator of the extremely secure Unix-like operating sytem MINIX 3. Andrew is also the author of Operating Systems Design and Implementation, the must-have book on programming and designing operating systems, and the man whose work inspired Linus Torvalds to create Linux. He has published over 120 works on computers (that's including manuals, second and third editions, and translations), and his works are known all over the world, being translated into a variety of different languages for educational use universally. He is currently a professor of computer science at Vrije University in Amsterdam, the Netherlands."

As we all know by now, netbooks are the latest craze in the computing world. Small notebooks, perfect for on the go, and relatively cheap. The interesting thing is that these netbooks are often offered with Linux pre-installed instead of Windows, and this prompts many to believe that it is the netbook niche where Linux will gain its first solid foothold among the general populace. "It does a lot to level the playing field. In fact, Linux looks to be quick out of the gate," said Jay Lyman, analyst with the 451 Group. However - is that really happening?

You thought Tcl/Tk stands for 'obsolete GUI'? You define the looks of Tk as 'prehistoric'? Or do you visualize ugly interfaces when reading this? I certainly do. Mats Bengtsson writes: "Tcl's windowing toolkit, Tk, has been 'known' to be ugly and outdated. With the 8.5 release last December the tile package, now named ttk (Themed Tk), is included in the core which brings true native widgets on Windows (yes, Vista too) and Mac." But what about Linux? Mats points at tileqt and the new tilegtk and notes: "Imagine that you can switch theme, and toolkits, on the fly without any program restart." Finally, he mentions progresses in both tkpath and support for WebKit. He concludes: "When all this comes together it will make Tk a very competitive toolkit."

It's been a couple of days since Akademy 2008 started, and a steady stream of news is coming through the KDE.news site. The general day 1 article described the atmosphere and two Keynotes. The first keynote was about increasing community involvement, and the refreshing ideas in there really set the tone for Akademy: innovation and integration. The second keynote was about Nokia, who discussed their long-term commitment to Qt and KDE. Tuesday, Nokia gave away 100 N810 internet devices to KDE developers to prove their point, and there is also an article about Nokia and Mozilla doing a Firefox port to Qt. Finally, there is the Embedded and Mobile day going on right now, with very interesting talks. Separate news articles started to appear, covering the many improvements in Qt 4.5, work by the KDE-PIM hackers, JOLIE bringing service-oriented computing to the Free Desktop, and an overview of what was discussed and decided upon during the meeting of the legal organizaton behind KDE, the e.V. During that meeting, the e.V. quarterly report was released, and it was decided to endorse the new Community Working Group, and a Code of Conduct.

Xandros has announced the end of Linspire. The company says that it had too many for-pay distributions running around in the company portfolio, so one was bound to be cut. Linspire didn't make it. "Xandros purchased Linspire, the company, earlier this summer. This week, the company announced that it was going to revamp community distribution Freespire, basing its next version on Debian instead of Ubuntu, and using it as a precursor for Xandros Desktop Professional, in much the same way Red Hat uses Fedora and SUSE uses openSUSE. But the company didn't need multiple for-pay desktop distributions, so Linspire is getting the boot."

There's a new hype going on in the world of computing. I used to call them 'tiny laptops', but somewhere along the way, Intel's marketing got at me and now I call them netbooks. Every self-respecting manufacturer has a netbook product line, or is about to introduce one (Apple?), so I figured I would take a look at what all the fuss is about: I bought a netbook.

Ars Technica has analyzed recently publicized Vista's security flaws. "Unfortunate, yes, but not as was reported in the immediate aftermath of the presentation evidence that Vista's security is useless, nor does this work constitute a major security issue. And it's not game over, either. Sensationalism sells, and there's no news like bad news, but sometimes particularly when covering security issues, it would be nice to see accuracy and level-headedness instead. ... Furthermore, these attacks are specifically on the buffer overflow protections; they do not circumvent the IE Protected Mode sandbox, nor Vista's (in)famous UAC restrictions."

"Microsoft, makers of most of the computer software in the world, tried to kill it with words, and Intel, maker of most computer chips, tried to kill it with dirty tricks. Of course, they don't admit to being attempted murderers. And when I introduce you to Intel's lovely spokesperson, Agnes Kwan, you'll realise how far their denials go. But the truth is the two mightiest high-tech companies in the world looked on Negroponte's philanthropic scheme and decided it had to die."

ACM has announced the availability of the SIGOPS Operating Systems Review, an Issue on Research and Developments in the Linux Kernel. It is available, for free, from the ACM Archives site. The issue has 12 papers about the advances that have been merged or are candidates to be merged into the Linux kernel, as well as new idea papers discussing promising experimental work.

One of the common complaints regarding Microsoft is that the company has problems eating its own dog food. Even though it promoted Windows Presentation Foundation as the programming framework for building Windows and web applications, it so far failed to produce any significant WPF applications itself. None of Microsoft's major applications use WPF (Expression Design and Blend aren't major), which does not help in promoting it as the Next Big Thing. This may all change in the near future, as a small but extremely popular Microsoft application is about to make the switch to Windows Presentation Foundation: MSN Windows Live Messenger.

The Genode OS framework, the reference implementation of the Genode operating system architecture, has seen its first release. "Genode is a novel operating-system architecture that enables dynamic workload while retaining security and robustness. The fundamental difference of Genode compared to other OS architectures is its strict organizational structure, which allows the execution of sensitive applications with a trusted computing base of a few thousand lines of code beside high-complexity workload. With its organizational approach, the architecture facilitates a clean separation of policies and mechanisms, and enables the definition and application of system policies in a natural and distributed fashion." The Genode OS Framework runs on Linux via libSDL, or on real hardware on top of the L4/Fiasco microkernel.

This week at the Black Hat Security Conference two security researchers will discuss their findings which could completely bring Windows Vista to its knees. According to Dino Dai Zovi, a popular security researcher, "the genius of this is that it's completely reusable. They have attacks that let them load chosen content to a chosen location with chosen permissions. That's completely game over."

From OpenSuse's automatic green-finding algorithm, to Fedora's long-winded concept explanations, examining each distribution's art process can tell you a lot about the distribution.