Microsoft showed its new 'Softgrid' technology today that allows apps to run as if they were inside a second copy of Windows. But unlike traditional virtualisation apps, there's no second Windows desktop getting in the way. For example, Microsoft showed Office 2003 and Office 2007 running side-by-side, even though they can't actually be installed on the same copy of Windows. Initially, the technology is for corporate users only, but it has huge obvious benefits for home users as well. First steps towards this?

University of Cambridge researcher Robert Watson has published a paper at the First USENIX Workshop On Offensive Technology in which he describes serious vulnerabilities in OpenBSD's Systrace, Sudo, Sysjail, the TIS GSWTK framework, and CerbNG. The technique is also effective against many commercially available anti-virus systems. His slides include sample exploit code that bypasses access control, virtualization, and intrusion detection in under 20 lines of C code consisting solely of memcpy() and fork(). Sysjail has now withdrawn their software, recommending against any use, and NetBSD has disabled Systrace by default in their upcoming release.

Got a computer that's shared by the whole family? Or a computer in an office that has to support more than one user? Vista has a much stronger user accounts feature than XP. Here's how to set up Windows Vista so that everybody's happy.

This is a review of the new VMware Fusion 1.0 for Mac. The article takes an in-depth look at the new virtualization software from VMware and compares it to Parallels Desktop 3.0.

The release 2.8 of GPE is complete and available for download. The new release comes with a large number of bugfixes and improvements such as an improved calendar, many fixed import/export and synchronisation issues as well as support for Maemo in additional components like Starling (the new audio player) and gpe-filemanager.

Has Apple succeeded in setting a new mobile Web-browsing paradigm? InformationWeek examines how the Palm Treo, BlackBerry Curve, and HTC Wing stack up against the iPhone. Unfortunately, this article completely snobs the UIQ and S60 Symbian smartphones.

Microsoft has succeeded in fracturing the Linux and open-source community with the patent indemnity agreements it has entered into with several prominent vendors, Ubuntu leader and Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth told eWEEK. The strategy behind that was to drive a wedge into the open-source community and unsettle the marketplace, Shuttleworth said. He also took issue with the software maker for not disclosing the 235 of its patents it claims are being violated by Linux and other open-source software.

"KDE 4.0 is very exciting, though not yet production ready, and that shows with this weeks' release of the first beta. It's a beta release for a major software project (using the traditional definition of beta, and not Google's it's-production-ready-but-we-don't-want-to-support-it-officially-yet definition of beta) and thus, it comes complete with bugs, crashes, missing artwork, and other goodies one would expect such as new code, new technologies and fun toys. For those of you who are unaware, KDE is one of the largest open source projects ever conceived. A major milestone release such as 4.0 is a long time in the making. Here follows a number of things to look forward to for those of you brave enough to try this early beta."

"About half a year ago I was looking around me and seeing stagnation in the GNOME community. I was concerned that GNOME had lost its momentum and that we were just making boring incremental releases that added very little new functionality. I think I was very wrong. I'd like to take this time to list some things that are happening right now in the GNOME community that have me very excited. These are the projects that are actively improving the future of the GNOME desktop." Let's hope a punctuation checker will be part of GNOME too. One Aaron is enough.

Apple has an article on the core elements of Leopard. "The Mach kernel and related core technologies, including Bonjour and the file system, have all been significantly enhanced. Full POSIX compliance and UNIX03 certification means you can move all your critical UNIX applications to Mac OS X quickly and easily. Security, always a strong point of Mac OS X, gets even better with improvements to authorization and certificate management."

MidnightBSD 0.1 is now available. It includes several software packages such as ksh, sudo, OpenNTPD, gcc 3.4.4, BIND 9.3.4 (plus patch), and others in the base system. "MidnightBSD is a desktop operating system for x86 compatible, and soon amd64 compatible architectures. It was originally based on FreeBSD 6.1 Beta. The goal of the project is to create a BSD with ease of use and simplicity in mind."

Sun Microsystems plans to announce its new UltraSparc T2 microprocessor, along with plans for servers based on the chip. The UltraSparc T2, an eight-core, 64-thread microprocessor will hit the market in the second half of the year.

Hi-Mobile sent us over the Sony Ericsson W580i Walkman feature phone for a review, and we give it a whirl. It's been over a year since the last time we tested the non-smartphone Sony Ericsson platform and it's interesting to see the advancements in the software department.

The sixth major DragonFly BSD release, version 1.10, was announced today by project creator Matthew Dillon. Billed as "more stable than the 1.8 release", it includes improved virtual kernel support, a new disk management infrastructure, improvements to wireless networking, and support for the new syslink protocol. As to what all that means, KernelTrap has just posted an interview with Dillon. Going beyond today's 1.10 release, the interview explores DragonFly's new clustering high-availability filesystem which sounds superior to ZFS, the project's goals for the 2.0 release expected in six months, and a comparison of the BSD license versus the GPL.