A group formed five years ago to promote the OpenDocument Format has abandoned ODF and will favor one developed by the World Wide Web Consortium known as the 'Compound Document Format', or CDF. The OpenDocument Foundation's format failed to meet market requirements, the group said.

"Best known for a recent series of posts on Sun's ZFS filesystems, Drew Thaler has worked on many projects at Infinite Loop in the last decade. One of his areas of expertise is filesystems and optical discs, on which he is working right now at Sony but which also is the underlying theme on his blog, aptly titled 'Recording artist'. We contacted him to ask some questions and he very generously answered providing a lot of interesting and background info and tidbits on Apple and its technologies and inner workings." And another Leopard review.

"The KDE Community is happy to release the fourth Beta for KDE 4.0. This Beta aimed at further polishing of the KDE codebase and we would love to start receiving feedback from testers. As KDE has largely has been in bugfix mode, this latest Beta aims to encourage testers to have a look at it to help us find and solve the remaining problems and bugs. Besides the stabilization of the codebase, some minor features have been added, including but not limited to much work on Plasma, the KDE 4 desktop shell. Sebastian Kugler notes: 'The improvements have been huge, and plasma is much closer to what it needs to be before the release. I am confident we will be able to finish it and present a very usable plasma to our userbase with KDE 4.0. We will then be able to extend on that and present truly innovative desktop interfaces throughout the KDE 4 lifecycle.'"

"Personal computing is currently in a state of transition. While traditionally users have interacted mostly with desktop applications, more and more of them are using web applications. But the latter often fit awkwardly into the document-centric interface of web browsers. And they are surrounded with controls - like back and forward buttons and a location bar - that have nothing to do with interacting with the application itself. Mozilla Labs is launching a series of experiments to bridge the divide in the user experience between web applications and desktop apps and to explore new usability models as the line between traditional desktop and new web applications continues to blur."

"Ars was at FOSSCamp this weekend. Think of FOSSCamp as an 'un-conference' without a set agenda where the minds behind open source projects get together and plot world domination (and, err, ways to improve their code). One fascinating session (and one that shows how FOSSCamp works and why it's so productive) was given by Mirco Muller, who discussed using OpenGL in GTK applications. Muller - the developer behind Cairo-Clock and the LowFat image viewer - talked about the state of OpenGL support in desktop applications and described various techniques that developers can use to make OpenGL content integrate better with conventional GTK user interfaces."

The Software Freedom Law Center and Monsoon Multimedia today jointly announced that an agreement has been reached to dismiss the GPL enforcement lawsuit filed by SFLC on behalf of two principal developers of BusyBox. As a result of the plaintiffs agreeing to dismiss the lawsuit and reinstate Monsoon Multimedia's rights to distribute BusyBox under the GPL, Monsoon Multimedia has agreed to appoint an Open Source Compliance Officer within its organization to monitor and ensure GPL compliance, to publish the source code for the version of BusyBox it previously distributed on its Web site, and to undertake substantial efforts to notify previous recipients of BusyBox from Monsoon Multimedia of their rights to the software under the GPL. The settlement also includes an undisclosed amount of financial consideration paid by Monsoon Multimedia to the plaintiffs.

"FreeBSD 7.0 will be the next release of FreeBSD, and is the first major release in 2 years. It's due out some time later this year (currently in pre-release and available for testing). FreeBSD 7.0 brings major changes to the BSD and open source operating system landscape." This document describes all the changes.

Microsoft has apologized for a Windows Server update that automatically installed the Windows Desktop Search tool on users' desktops without approval. The mistake happened because Microsoft reused the same update package for when WDS was first published in February as an optional update that was only applicable to systems with the search tool previously installed.

This is the second article in a series on common usability and graphical user interface related terms . On the internet, and especially in forum discussions like we all have here on OSNews, it is almost certain that in any given discussion, someone will most likely bring up usability and GUI related terms - things like spatial memory, widgets, consistency, Fitts' Law, and more. The aim of this series is to explain these terms, learn something about their origins, and finally rate their importance in the field of usability and (graphical) user interface design. In part II today, we focus on the pictogramme, popularly known as the icon.

"I recently read this article about how the Linux device driver project needs more work to do. I pondered this for awhile, and came to a realization. While Linux still does indeed lack drivers for some hardware, I believe that the lack of drivers is no longer the largest technological obstacle to Linux adoption. The thing Linux needs to focus mostly on now is completeness, not quantity, of hardware support." Read on.

Lisp is an excellent programming language that allows you to expand your knowledge of programming languages due to its largely typeless nature. Find out how to develop Lisp applications using the Cusp Eclipse plug-in. It can also help those seasoned in the Java language, PHP, or C/C++ think in new ways when developing applications.

Hi-Mobile.net sent us in an unlocked iPhone for testing. We used the iPhone for almost a month now and it's time to write an editorial-type article on the... unlockiness of it all.

Strong sales of new and old products alike led Microsoft to its fastest first-quarter growth in eight years, with the company reporting growth in all five business segments and both revenue and earnings per share that beat analyst expectations. Revenue for the fiscal quarter ended Sept. 30 was up 27 percent at USD 13.76 billion compared to USD 10.81 billion a year ago, Microsoft said Thursday. Consensus estimates from Thomson First Call analysts were for the company to generate revenue of USD 12.57 billion. Microsoft's EPS for the quarter was USD 0.45, which also soundly beat Thomson First Call consensus estimate of USD 0.39. Net income for the quarter was USD 4.29 billion, a 23 percent increase over the USD 3.48 billion reported a year ago. At USD 5.92 billion, operating income for the quarter also had double-digit percentage growth: an increase of more than 25 percent over operating income reported for the same period last year of USD 4.47 billion.

Today, Apple is unleashing Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard onto the world. It's already available to people in Australia and New Zealand (you liking it, Kaiwai?), and Europe and the US will follow later today. There's an article on what's new for Ruby developers, while others want to figure out what Leopard means to the 'enterprise' (I love those silly business terms). Update by AS: My copy of Leopard was slated for a 10AM delivery, but didn't arrive. I called FedEx and a CSR told me that an internal memo was just released; Apple has apparently waved the shipping deadline for all packages today and requested delivery be rescheduled at the end of the business day. Update 2 by AS: Ok, we've received our copy. How about you other US'ers?