"OS X 10.5 Leopard is the best operating system released by Apple so far and runs neck and neck with Ubuntu's Gutsy Gibbon as my favorite operating systems to use. In the past I wanted to get an iMac, but not because of OS X but rather because of their sleek hardware. Now after using Leopard, I want to buy an iMac to run Leopard. Nice job Apple." More here.

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.

Gobe Productive v2.0.1 now works in Haiku. "I've played with GoBE Productive for half an hour now, and it seems remarkedly stable. Gobe Productive is a unique piece of software, and one of the darlings of BeOS software. This will surely fill a much needed gap in the office suite department, despite the software's age! It's also testament to the vision of enabling backwards compatibility to BeOS application, and how good Haiku is at it."

Neuros Technology did it again: one more of their interesting media products hits the market, and this time it uses Linux. We used the Neuros OSD this past week and here's what we think about it.

"Experts say that migrations from Unix to Linux have slowed down because all the low-hanging fruit has now been picked. Linux growth in the U.S. x86 server market has, over the past six quarters, started to falter and reverse its positive course relative to Windows Server and the market as a whole." More here.

This is the first 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. We start off with spatial memory - my personal favourite.

A thread on the OpenBSD -misc mailing list began by discussing whether or not XEN had been ported to OpenBSD, "is it planned at some point to release a paravirtualized xen kernel for OpenBSD 4.3 or 4.4?" Later in the discussion it was suggested that virtualization should be a priority for security reasons, "virtualization seems to have a lot of security benefits." OpenBSD creator Theo de Raadt strongly disagreed with this assertion, "you've been smoking something really mind altering, and I think you should share it."

Three reviews of Mac OS X Leopard, to be released coming Friday. David Pogue writes: "Leopard is powerful, polished and carefully conceived. Happy surprises, and very few disappointments, lie around every corner. This Leopard has more than 300 new spots - and most of them are bright ones." Walt Mossberg concludes: "Leopard isn't a must-have for current Mac owners, but it adds a lot of value. For new Mac buyers, it makes switching even more attractive." Edward C. Baig of USA Today writes: "With Leopard, Apple's operating system widens its lead aesthetically and technologically. Whether the sixth major release of OS X in as many years puts a dent in Microsoft's dominant market share is another matter entirely." Thanks to MacWereld.nl for pointing these reviews out.

The Completely Fair Scheduler was merged for the 2.6.23 kernel. One CFS feature which did not get in, though, was the group scheduling facility. Group scheduling makes the CFS fairness algorithm operate in a hierarchical fashion: processes are divided into groups, and, within each group, processes are scheduled fairly against one another. At the higher level, each group as a whole is given a fair share of the processor. The grouping of processes is done in user space in a highly flexible manner; the control groups (formerly 'process containers') mechanism allows a management daemon to classify processes according to almost any policy.

"The purpose of this article is not to emphasize the strengths and merits of Ubuntu user experience, but instead to shed a brighter light on areas that have been neglected due to shortage of time and resources, usability testing, and various software and artwork defects. I hope those who are sometimes overprotective of open-source software will take my recommendations with a pinch of salt and see this article for what it really tries to be: a vocal user experience report and constructive criticism."

In a blog post, Sun's Jonathan Schwartz has announced that Sun will counter-sue Net App, after negotiations proved to be fruitless. "So now it looks like we can't avoid responding to their litigation, as frustrated as I am by that (as I said, we have zero interest in suing them). I wanted to outline our response (even if it tips off the folks at Net App), and for everyone to know where we're headed. First, the basics. Sun indemnifies all its customers against IP claims like this. Second, Sun protects the communities using our technologies under free software licenses. Third, we file patents defensively."

Microsoft has released its Virtual Machine Additions for Linux. "Virtual Machine Additions for Linux are designed to improve the usability and interoperability of running qualified Linux operating systems as guests or virtual machines of Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1." Red Hat and SUSE are the obvious supported guests.

Helios Labs sent us in their H4000 Upscaling DVD/DivX player for an introduction. While at OSNews we are mostly focused on system software, it is interesting to check out such devices from time to time, because of their added video features over the stock products usually found in the market.

At the last minute, Apple has changed the appearance of the Dock in Mac OS X Leopard when it is placed on the sides of the screen. If so, the dock will lose its much-criticised 3D appearance in favour of a more traditional 2D look. When placed at the bottom, the dock does retain its 3D appearance; however, a smart hacker has already found out that via a single command in the terminal, you can give the bottom dock the same 2D appearance. In other words, everybody who criticised the new dock (including yours truly): rejoice!