Apple appears to be accelerating seeds of Mac OS X Leopard to developers. After only 5 days since the last seed (9A500n), Apple has issued a new version of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard to developers. The latest seed is listed at build 9A527 (client) and 9A528a (server), and reportedly list a number of less significant 'known issues' compared to prior seeds.

"Late last night we started receiving reports from readers experiencing problems with Windows Genuine Advantage authentication. Users of both Windows XP and Windows Vista were writing to say that they could not validate their installations using WGA, and one user even said that his installation was invalidated by the service. We contacted our sources at Microsoft, who told us off the record that the company is aware of a major WGA server outage affecting users across the globe. Microsoft is telling users who are affected that they should 'try again' later, with some support techs telling readers that Microsoft is aiming to have a fix in place by Tuesday, August 28th."

It was a long time in coming, but Microsoft has finally acknowledged that its anti-Linux site had gone past the point of usefulness. On August 23, Microsoft pulled plug on the 'Get the Facts' site, replacing it with a new Windows Server 'Compare' site. "The goal of the site is to offer more in-depth information and customer-to-customer opinions about many of the issues IT administrators face," a company spokeswoman said. "It turns out people wanted 3rd party validation in addition to people's experiences making OS purchasing decisions so in addition to customer case studies, research reports that compare platforms the site will also offer guidance around best practices, web casts, etc."

Microsoft will launch several projects around Linux and other open source technologies for allowing Indian customers the option to run its products on different operating systems and technologies. The initiative, to be rolled out in around a month's time, is aimed at grabbing "more market share for the Windows platform by allowing interoperability with open source technologies such as Linux," said Radhesh Balakrishnan, director, platform strategy, Microsoft India.

"Microsoft has released a new showcase of its Silverlight web development frameworks, a graphical search engine called Tafiti. Tafiti, which means 'do research' in Swahili, is an experimental frontend to Microsoft's Live Search engine. It presents search options in three panes on the screen: the left pane is for entering search queries and switching between image, RSS, Web, and News, the middle pane contains the search results, and the right pane is used to 'dock' results using drag-and-drop for looking at later."

"In this article, I'll compare Ubuntu 7.04 with the upcoming release of PC-BSD 1.4. Having used both operating systems extensively, PC-BSD is the one I recommend and the one I install in desktop environments. If you've used Ubuntu before, but haven't tried PC-BSD, give it a try. The increase in responsiveness (i.e., everything seems to just run faster) and ease-of-use will surprise you."

"Details about the first OEM systems equipped with Windows Home Server are leaking out on to the 'net, and it looks like HP is going to get the ball rolling with its MediaSmart Home Server. Prices for the units were accidentally posted on several sites, such as PC Mall and onSale.com, and it looks like the server will have a US list price of USD 596 for the 500GB version and USD 745 for the 1TB version."

DragonflyBSD 1.10.1 has been released. It includes several bugfixes. "DragonFly is an operating system and environment originally based on FreeBSD. DragonFly branched from FreeBSD in 2003 in order to develop a radically different approach to concurrency, SMP, and most other kernel subsystems."

The Nivo is a new 'ultra thin' client device under development by British, not-for-profit organization Ndiyo. Its principle intended market is developing nations and the project is based upon a non-profit model. The aim of the project is to create hardware and software that can lower both financial and technical skill cost of computer service provision.

The third installment of Ars' series on the history of the Amiga begins with the third prototype and covers the rest of Amiga's history as an independent company. "Modern chips are designed using high-powered workstations that run very expensive chip simulation software. However, the fledgling Amiga company could not afford such luxuries. It would instead build, by hand, giant replicas of the silicon circuitry on honeycomb-like plastic sheets known as breadboards."

Bas de Lange has published the videos that he made at the 2007 Syllable Conference about the revival of the Syllable Development Newsletter. The recordings are in Dutch, but Bas made translations in English. There is a video of Ruud Kuin presenting the upcoming new design and also a personal interview with Ruud about his involvement in the Syllable project as a graphics designer, and now, publisher .

"Zonbu is a very simple system. It is geared for users who may not necessarily care what operating system they are using, but someone who just wants a functional system. Zonbu does exactly that. The software is very straightforward to use. Zonbu is very environmentally friendly. Not only does it not require a lot of power to run, it also does not contribute to noise pollution."

"Hoping to improve the state of server software, Sun Microsystems has confirmed that it will include support for transactional memory with the first generation of its Rock processors due out in the second half of next year. Sun's research and development teams have spent years working on a type of transactional memory that combines software and hardware aids. Now, the company looks set to be the first mainstream chip maker to build transactional memory hooks into its chips."

"Who's afraid of SELinux? Well, if you are, you shouldn't be! Thanks to the introduction of new GUI tools, customizing your system's protection by creating new policy modules is easier than ever. In this article, Dan Walsh gently walks you through the policy module creation process."