"Talking with quite a few people at OLS last week, it seems there are still quite a few misconceptions about just how patched various kernels were throughout the history of Red Hat. One particularly egregious statement I heard was 'Early Red Hat kernels had ~2000 patches'. Here's some hard facts on exactly how many patches were in each release."

As the number of Linux kernel contributors continues to grow, core developers are finding themselves mostly managing and checking, not coding, said Greg Kroah-Hartman, maintainer of USB and PCI support in Linux and co-author of Linux Device Drivers, in a talk at the Linux Symposium in Ottawa Thursday. In the latest kernel release, the most active 30 developers authored only 30% of the changes, while two years ago, the top 20 developers did 80% of the changes, he said.

"The more I think about Microsoft, the more I realise that they are, possibly for the first time, seriously cornered (or surrounded, depending on how you want to see it). A little history will clarify why I think so - and why I think that this might really be the beginning of the end for Microsoft."

"When we launched Windows Vista in January 2007, we identified Windows Ultimate Extras as a unique series of add-ons that would be available to Windows Vista Ultimate customers. To date, we have released four sets of Extras - Windows Hold'Em, 16 Language Packs for the Windows multi-language user interface, Secure Online Key Backup, and Windows BitLocker Drive Preparation Tool. We want to let our Windows Vista Ultimate customers know that we are actively working to deliver the remaining Extras that we identified in January."

"Late this spring, Palm, Inc. took the wraps off the Foleo, the first device in its new third product category. When it debuts in the next few months, this won't be a handheld or smartphone, instead it will something Palm is calling a mobile companion. I recently spent some time with a prototype unit, and I'd like to share my first impressions." More here.

The issue between WINE and Parallels has been solved. "On July 2nd, Parallels sent the modified sources to me (Stefan Dosinger). I looked at them, and they are functionally mostly unmodified, except of some changes to get wined3d to compile on Windows(nameless unions, and similar things). What is yet to be verified is if these are the sources used to build the libs shipped in Parallels Desktop for Mac."

The Syllable team has released a development build which includes the new ABrowse. "This week's development build is now available and includes the new version of ABrowse. It will only run on 0.6.4, so if you've been waiting to try it, now is your chance! Note that there is no way to upgrade from a previous release of Syllable using a development build, so unless you're happy to replace your existing installation, wait for the official release of 0.6.4 or use a virtual machine i.e. VMware or Qemu."

Apple has released two updates, Audio Update 2007-001 and Mac OS X 10.4.10 Update v1.1 (Intel). "The Audio Update 2007-001 addresses an issue with version 1.0 of the Mac OS X 10.4.10 Update in which a 'popping' sound might be heard with some external speakers on Intel-based Mac. This update is recommended for all Intel-based Macs running Mac OS X 10.4.10."

"To put things short, Gconf is a system built in GNOME 2 which stores applications' preferable configuration data as well as graphical environment variables in its own files. I'd like you to get familiar with the Gconf tool's functions, engineering, and usage with this article."

Five months after its introduction, Microsoft is discontinuing a program that offered some Windows Vista purchasers the ability to buy additional copies of the operating system at a substantial discount. Since Windows Vista went on sale to consumers at the end of January, US and Canadian buyers of Vista Ultimate have had the option of buying up to two additional copies of Vista - albeit the Home Premium version - for an additional USD 50 apiece. The company had said it would re-evaluate the 'Windows Vista Family Discount' after 30 June. In a posting on the Windows Vista Team Blog, Microsoft product manager Nick White said the program would 'sunset' as of 11.59pm PDT on 30 June.

Sometimes, Apple's (or any other software maker's) complete lack of respect for usability never ceases to amaze me. Take today for example. Apart from the close, minimise, and "maximise" widgets Apple places on window decors, there is also a fourth widget programmers on the Apple platform can use. This widget resembles a sort of dash, and is placed on the top right corner of the window decor. This widget is used in many applications, both from Apple as well as from various third parties. It has one function: toggle the visibility of the window's toolbar.

SWSoft, the company behind Parallels Desktop for Mac, is possibly violating the LGPL license by using LGPL libraries from the WINE project without providing access to the source code. The WINE project first discovered the violation early this June, and after several failed attempts at getting the source code to the libraries, they set up a wiki page to keep track of the ongoing violation. The WINE project wants to resolve the issue "without starting legal action". Thanks to MacWereld for pointing this out .

"The last time we had written an article on Nouveau, the community project working on developing an open-source 3D display driver for NVIDIA hardware, was this past January after being enlightened by glxgears finally being able to run on NVIDIA's NV4x GPUs. Since then many developments have occurred with this open-source NVIDIA driver as we have covered in several news postings. In this article today we will share with you where the Nouveau project stands today from a user perspective as well as testing out the driver on a few more NVIDIA systems."

"One of the greatest features of the Linux operating system is its networking stack. It was initially a derivative of the BSD stack and is well organized with a clean set of interfaces. Its interfaces range from the protocol agnostics, such as the common sockets layer interface or the device layer, to the specific interfaces of the individual networking protocols. This article explores the structure of the Linux networking stack from the perspective of its layers and also examines some of its major structures."