The various Google Summer of Code slots have been awarded to the participating projects. As most of you will know, the Summer of Code is all about enticing programmers to contribute to open source projects. Students submit their ideas to mentor organisations (these mentors are approved by Google first), and after selecting the ideas the mentors like the most, the programmers work to complete their task. If they succeed, Google will grant them a stipend. Google selected 174 mentor organisations for this year's Summer of Code. Read on for a selection of interesting applications that have been approved.

Reviews of AmigaOS 4 are hard to come by, due to the rare nature of the operating system as well as the hardware it runs on. So, whenever a review does pop up, no matter how short, it's worth a look. This review, posted in the forums of Amigaworld.net, takes a quick (very quick) look at the classic version of AmigaOS 4, released early December 2007.

When it comes to dealing with storage, Solaris 10 provides admins with more choices than any other operating system. Right out of the box, it offers two filesystems, two volume managers, an iscsi target and initiator, and, naturally, an NFS server. Add a couple of Sun packages and you have volume replication, a cluster filesystem, and a hierarchical storage manager. Trust your data to the still-in-development features found in OpenSolaris, and you can have a fibre channel target and an in-kernel CIFS server, among other things. True, some of these features can be found in any enterprise-ready UNIX OS. But Solaris 10 integrates all of them into one well-tested package. Editor's note: This is the first of our published submissions for the 2008 Article Contest.

Ars' Peter Bright wrote an article today entitled "From Win32 to Cocoa: a Windows user's conversion to Mac OS X", in which he explains why he believes "Windows is dying, Windows applications suck, and Microsoft is too blinkered to fix any of it". These are rather harsh words, but there is a definitive element of truth in it. The article is part one in a three-part series.

PopularMechanics has performed three types of benchmarks on Apple and 'ordinary' PC machines, with the former running Mac OS X Leopard, and the latter Windows Vista. The first type of benchmark consisted of users giving ratings to things like design, ergonomics, web browsing experience, and so on. The second benchmark focused on real-world performance (launching applications, boot/shutdown times, and so on), while the third and final benchmark consisted of Geekbench and Cinebench runs. PM concludes: "The results gave us a clear winner in the performance categories, but the big surprise was how little difference we found in user preferences. Turns out, both platforms are capable and easy to use, but only one was the victor." Even before I got to the results, I noticed a whole set of problems with the benchmarks performed in this article, that would seriously skew the results.

Geek.com is running an opinion piece on the extensive reliance of programmers today on languages like Java and .NET. The author lambastes the performance penalties that are associated with running code inside virtualised environments, like Java's and .NET's. "It increases the compute burden on the CPU because in order to do something that should only require 1 million instructions (note that on modern CPUs 1 million instructions executes in about one two-thousandths (1/2000) of a second) now takes 200 million instructions. Literally. And while 200 million instructions can execute in about 1/10th of a second, it is still that much slower." The author poses an interesting challenge at the end of his piece - a challenge most OSNews readers will have already taken on. Note: Please note that many OSNews items now have a "read more" where the article in question is discussed in more detail.

Nokia will introduce Qt to the maemo platform in addition to GTK+. The first actual step will be the distribution of the Qt libraries for application development in maemo.org during 4Q2008. Nokia wants to explore cross-platform possibilities between S60 and maemo. It is interesting also to check the interest in the developer community for Qt in the tablets. This is also a way to attract more attention from the KDE community, a sensible move especially if the Trolltech acquisition gets completed.

Every now and then, the Haiku mailing lists explode with emails about something called the distribution guidelines. The Haiku guys set up a set of guidelines with regards to use of the Haiku trademarks and logos; the "Haiku" name may not be used in the distribution's name, official trademarks and logos must be excluded, but the Haiku icons and artwork may be used. In addition to these cosmetic and trademark issues, the guidelines explain what is needed in order to receive the official "Haiku compatible" logo.

Lennart Poettering of Red Hat, PulseAudio maintainer has blogged in detail about the impact of Real-Time Group scheduling in 2.6.25 kernel. The Real time patches come from -rt patchset maintained by Ingo Molnar of Red Hat which aims to make Linux the first general purpose operating system with hard real time features.

aDesigner is "a disability simulator that helps designers ensure that their content and applications are accessible and usable by the visually impaired. The new version adds support for OpenDocument Format (ODF) and Flash content; presentation simulation function for ODF documents." Ever since the first graphic designers started to try to bend HTML to their will, people have complained that many web sites subvert the standards that early web architects designed to make navigating easier for the visually impaired. Read more for more discussion...

Microsoft has "dramatically" changed because of open-source software, the company's Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie said Thursday as part of a wide-ranging discussion during the annual Most Valuable Professional summit in Seattle. He also talked about Microsoft's mesh concept and the importance of virtualization.

iTWire interviews the newly-elected Debian Project Leader, Steve McIntyre. "A few days back, the project concluded its elections for the year and Steve McIntyre emerged as the victor in a three-cornered contest. McIntyre may well be the most watched elected official of a non-profit group - the direction the project takes is of vital concern to a great many businesses."

A Geeks.com article examines the latest in virtualization technology, and the hypervisor, a hardware execution layer contained in modern processors from AMD and Intel.

When Vista was released, and the first reviews started to trickle in, it became apparent that Vista was a massive release - not only in terms of money spent on it by Microsoft and the amount of promotion, but also the operating system itself. It was huge, and it felt as such too. Despite what many have been saying the past year, Vista is, in fact, much more than just XP with a new theme. Basically every framework and feature has been rewritten, lots of new ones have been added, and, according to some, the process of modularisation has started with Vista (and Server 2008). It may come as no surprise that all these changes resulted in a whole boatload of bugs and breakage, which led many people to conclude that Vista was simply not as "done" as it should have been when released. Steve Ballmer confirmed these sentiments in a speech at Microsoft's Most Valuable Professionals conference in Seattle.