"So far this year, Apple users have been exposed to the kind of vulnerabilities that are more commonly associated with Windows. The Mac maker has plugged security flaws that could have resulted in OS X customers being 'owned' by basic actions such as visiting a malicious website, watching a video file or opening an email attachment. However, despite all these vulnerabilities, the Mac's resilient platform, its advanced automatic software update tools and the apparent lack of attention from malware authors means Apple users are far safer from attack than users of Windows." On a related note, Apple has released updates to iTunes and QuickTime. The QuickTime update eliminates the need to buy QuickTime Pro in order to play videos full screen.

"If you want an adaptable window manager that doesn't drain your resources, try Openbox. Its latest version, 3.4.2, released this month, has several visual improvements and dozens of new usable features. Since it's easy to customize, many people replace their stock window managers with Openbox. It can run inside both GNOME and KDE (but not Xfce), replacing their native window managers. It can also be used as a lightweight desktop environment on its own."

IBM has opened the AIX 6 beta program. "AIX 6 Open Beta participants will be able to download the AIX 6 beta code, Mozilla Firefox, and updates to enable previously purchased IBM compilers to run on AIX 6."

"The current beta build of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, released to developers at WWDC ‚'07, is not as polished as what people have come to expect of Apple's design team - users are still left with at best several disagreeable changes, and at worst a hideous hodgepodge of HIG contradictions. I have broken down 5 onscreen blunders that detract from the user experience and make Leopard the ugliest and most uncharacteristically 'Apple' OS to date." Thanks to MacWereld for pointing this article out.

"'Siag, it sucks less!' This is the slogan for Siag Office. This and the self-effacing name for the Siag Office Word Processor, Pathetic Writer, might leave you thinking that this office suite is a mere plaything, a university student's cobbled-together programming assignment. But don't be fooled by first impressions. Siag Office is a lightweight suite of applications which might be just the right set of office tools for you, especially if you have older hardware."

Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, has often been criticised for keeping their bug reporting and collaboration tool, Launchpad, closed-source. Today, Canonical has started opening up Launchpad by releasing its first open-source component, Storm. "Storm is an ORM that simplifies the development of database-backed applications in Python, especially for projects that use very large databases or multiple databases with a seamless web front-end", said Gustavo Niemeyer, lead developer of Storm at Canonical. "Storm is particularly designed to feel very natural to Python programmers, and exposes multiple databases as /stores/ in a clean and easy to use fashion."

The Linux kernel process scheduler, as you know it, has been completely ripped out and replaced with a completely new one called Completely Fair Scheduler. How fair it will be, remains to be seen. Here's what its original creator Ingo Molnar says: "80% Of CFS's design can be summed up in a single sentence: CFS basically models an 'ideal, precise multi-tasking CPU' on real hardware." Learn more about the new scheduler from the CFS design document.

"Have you ever wondered what really happens to those Windows error reports you can send to Microsoft whenever a Windows app crashes? How many reports it must receive before taking action? Or whether it's worth your time and effort to send duplicate reports if the error occurs repeatedly? I did, and I asked Microsoft. Unfortunately, after a week and a handful of assurances that they were working on responses, the software giant refused to speak with me."

"Now that Microsoft has declared itself untouched by any GPLv3 terms, everyone is trying to figure out if they have a leg to stand on. There is a whole lot of analysis going on, with some wondering if Microsoft is a distributor of software under GPLv3 by means of the voucher distribution and others wondering just what those vouchers included."

Under the name Sun ODF Plug-in for Microsoft Office, Sun has released its import/export filter for the OpenDocument format, which the ISO has recognized as a standard, for versions 2000, XP, and 2003 of Microsoft's Office suite; the plug-in can be downloaded via our software repository. The extension allows users of MS Office to read and create text documents, spreadsheets, and presentations in the free OpenOffice suite and its commercial version called StarOffice.

Dell is getting ready to launch systems with Ubuntu Linux, but is not yet releasing details of the final specifications. However, the company did say on Friday that as well as a consumer version of Ubuntu, it had plans to launch a small-business version 'in the future'. After some confusion over Dell's Linux strategy, the company said it felt the need to clarify things. "I wanted to be clear that Dell does have plans to offer Linux to more consumers in additional locations outside the United States," said Dell's Lionel Menchaca, digital media manager.

An effort by users to produce a charity that will support future RISC OS software development is beginning to take shape. Using a mailing list to coordinate the project, a group of punters eventually hope to create a website that will allow people to offer cash and skills to developers.

"After internal consideration in the Samba Team we have decided to adopt the GPLv3 and LGPLv3 licences for all future releases of Samba. The GPLv3 is the updated version of the GPLv2 license under which Samba is currently distributed. It has been updated to improve compatibility with other licenses and to make it easier to adopt internationally, and is an improved version of the license to better suit the needs of Free Software in the 21st Century. To allow people to distinguish which Samba version is released with the new GPLv3 license, we are updating our next version release number. The next planned version release was to be 3.0.26, this will now be renumbered so the GPLv3 version release will be 3.2.0. To be clear, all versions of Samba numbered 3.2 and later will be under the GPLv3, all versions of Samba numbered 3.0.x and before remain under the GPLv2."

"I was a huge fan of the Connections series, hosted by James Burke, when it aired on the Discovery Channel. Its basic premise: how seemingly unrelated discoveries influenced other discoveries, which ultimately led to some modern-day convenience. The moral, if you will, is that no advancement is made in isolation. Not surprisingly, the same is true for Language Integrated Query (LINQ). In simple terms, LINQ is a series of language extensions that supports data querying in a type-safe way; it will be released with the next version Visual Studio, code-named "Orcas." The data to be queried can take the form of XML (LINQ to XML), databases (LINQ-enabled ADO.NET, which includes LINQ to SQL, LINQ to Dataset and LINQ to Entities), objects (LINQ to Objects), and so on."