The AROS Show has interviewed Marco van den Heuvel (also known as Blacky Stardust). He offers his thoughts on AROS, other VICE ports and what led him to become a VICE Developer.

"In response to Jeff Jones' Monthly Security Scorecard I did some research on Secunia and made some statistics to answer his. Jeff's Scorecard is quite minimal in my opinion and as pointed out by some of the comments, is missing some interesting facts. These facts include the outstanding advisories, for example, and of course the amont of software installed. Since Linux installs a lot more software the numbers are a bit skewed; however, even if I only take the numbers from Secunia with regard to advisories, vulnerabilites fixed, etc., things still look quite different then on Jeff's charts."

It's Sunday afternoon here, there is no better time to spend by having some fun with some of the abilities of operating systems. There is definitely quite some rocky road still for speech recognition and in extend natural language & artificial intelligence. Hopefully we will still be alive when that happens.

Thanks to improvements in PThreads support in the new version 0.6.3 of the Syllable desktop operating system, the Transmission BitTorrent client could be ported. Currently only the CLI version works. The project is looking for a volunteer to put a GUI on it, possibly by porting the BeOS GUI. Transmission is included in a new version of the Network Necessities package collection. Furthermore, there are new versions of the Developer's Delight and PERL Pit collections, with many updated packages. Most notably, GCC is now the new version 4.1.2. Also, a new version was released of the sIDE native integrated development environment. Lastly, there is now a driver for the popular SysKonnect/Marvell Yukon1 gigabit ethernet chips.

"With the release of Linux-based Xandros Server 2.0 Standard Edition, well-known Linux desktop vendor Xandros offers compatibility and other services that may give Microsoft SharePoint Server some competition. In the new server, due in April, Xandros will include Netherlands-based O3Spaces Workplace 2.0 office collaboration software. With Workplace 2.0, users will be able to use OpenOffice.org, StarOffice, and/or Microsoft Office to work on documents in commonly hosted Xandros workplaces. At the same time, Xandros claims, the system enables everyone involved in the project to track the work being done on it."

Microsoft's own bug hunters should cut Windows Vista some slack and rate its vulnerabilities differently because of the operating system's new, baked-in defenses, according to the developer who is often the public persona of the company's Security Development Lifecycle process. Michael Howard, a senior security program manager in Microsoft's security engineering group, said that the Microsoft Security Response Center is being too conservative in its Vista vulnerability rating plans. Because Vista includes security techniques and technologies that Windows XP lacks, the MSRC should reconsider how it ranks Vista when a vulnerability affects both Microsoft's new operating system and its predecessor, he said.