The European Union escalated its trans-Atlantic fight with Microsoft on Thursday, threatening new multimillion fines against the software maker over claims it fails to offer rivals a fair deal on licenses for helping servers work with Windows. In response, Microsoft charged that the treatment it receives from the EU is unmatched around the world and harmed Europe's efforts to become a thriving high-tech economy. The EU said Microsoft could face fines as high as euro3 million (US$4 million) a day, accusing the software company of trying to protect its interests by overcharging rivals for complete and accurate interface documentation - which would allow them to interoperate with Windows PCs and servers - on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms.

Today, we did a fairly major restructuring of our database categories. Before, we only added one or, in rare cases, two; this time, however, we have added three new categories, and also split one up. Read one for the how and why, and also how you can help in finding misplaced stories.

Simon Phipps writes on his weblog: "I'm in Berlin today opening the very first OpenSolaris Developer Conference. I'll be announcing that the new Get.OpenSolaris.org site that allows anyone in the world to order a kit containing DVDs of OpenSolaris distributions, documentation and source. With a nod towards the good folks at Ubuntu, Sun is sponsoring the kits so that they are completely free of charge, including global delivery. Hopefully this will mean even folks without the bandwidth to download DVD ISOs will be able to join the OpenSolaris community."

The latest ReactOS Newsletter is out. "I've been assured by our release engineer that there are only 2 blocking issues left and that will be released soon. That said, a kind user compiled the 0.3.1 branch and provided the isos for public trials here. I spoke with our project leader about future releases and he went on to say that future releases (0.3.x) will be made every month or 2."

A modified version of the code for Windows Mobile 6, which Microsoft launched less than two weeks ago at the 3GSM mobile phone conference, has hit the Net. It's the handiwork of 'Kyphur', a moderator at the discussion forums on XDA Developers site, who has released a hacked version of the code for Windows Mobile 6, aka 'Crossbow'.

"This tutorial shows how to set up a fileserver for small and medium enterprises with SME Server 7.1. SME Server is an open-source Linux server distribution (released under the GPL) based on CentOS that can turn a computer into a gateway, firewall, fileserver, printserver, mailserver (including webmail), etc. In this article we will focus on the fileserver aspect of SME Server."

GNOME 2.18.0 RC1 (2.17.92) has been released. "This is the last unstable release before 2.18.0. We've all added cool features, important bug fixes, great translations, or shiny documentation during the past six months. And it'll be soon ready for public consumption. There's still one week before the hard code freeze, so it's not too late to fix this last bug you're ashamed of."

Jeff Atwood explains why Vista uses so much memory. "You have to stop thinking of system memory as a resource and start thinking of it as a a cache. Just like the level 1 and level 2 cache on your CPU, system memory is yet another type of high-speed cache that sits between your computer and the disk drive. And the most important rule of cache design is that empty cache memory is wasted cache memory. Empty cache isn't doing you any good. It's expensive, high-speed memory sucking down power for zero benefit. The primary mission in the life of every cache is to populate itself as quickly as possible with the data that's most likely to be needed - and to consistently deliver a high 'hit rate' of needed data retrieved from the cache."

Ubuntu developers are finalising preparations for the release of the next version - dubbed Feisty Fawn - of the popular Linux distribution in mid-April. Overnight, Ubuntu developer Tollef Fog Heen announced Ubuntu's main software repository had been frozen - with no changes allowed to the code - as developers got ready to issue a fifth major test version ('Herd 5') of the next version of Ubuntu.

Sun Microsystems is the latest company to become a patron of the Free Software Foundation. The FSF's corporate patron program allows companies to provide financial sponsorship for the FSF in return for free license consulting services. High-profile FSF patron affiliates include prominent technology companies like Google, Nokia, IBM, Cisco, and Intel. FSF involvement represents Sun's latest attempt to take a more active role in the open-source software community.

This first article of a three-part series introduces PHP5's XML implementation and help those relatively new to using XML with PHP to read, parse, and manipulate, and write a short and uncomplicated XML file using the DOM and SimpleXML in a PHP environment.

Two more articles on Beryl. The first one is on drag and drop in Beryl: "What does Beryl add to the drag and drop picture? Well, for a start, if you've got a lot of windows open, it's easier to find the target if you can see all the windows at once. Also, if you want to drop a file/text on an application on another desktop, you can do this much more easily. This is a cool little feature that allows you to drag and drop files between applications on the same desktop, or different desktops." The second one is a performance tweak for Beryl.

Corel made a play for a piece of the Web 2.0 pie on Tuesday, releasing WordPerfect Lightning in beta, a free, compact version of its standard word processing suite that combines both online and offline functionality. The company is referring to the product as a Google Writely, Adobe Reader, and Microsoft OneNote competitor rolled into one. At 16MB, the entire program can be placed on a USB stick or burned to CD to allow for maximum portability.

Parallels has released an update to its Parallels Desktop software. The biggest update to the new version is Coherence, a feature that enables Mac users running Parallels to run and access Windows applications from their Mac desktops via virtualization rather than switching between operating systems.