"In the US, France and a few other countries it is already forbidden to play legally purchased music or videos using GNU/Linux media players. Sounds like sci-fi? Unfortunately not. And it won't end up on multimedia only. Welcome to the the new era of DRM!" Update: Norway's consumer ombudsman has ruled that Apple's Fairplay DRM is illegal. This follows the news that France and Germany have sided with Norway.

When porting Windows CE to a unique embedded device, developers are occasionally faced with the need to modify the default behavior of the OS. In this extensive, richly illustrated article, Windows CE development team lead Kurt Kennett explains how to replace so-called Core DLLs with customized, application-specific versions.

Andrew Tanenbaum has introduced his latest metric: LFs - Lifetime Failures to describe the number of times software, particularly the operating system, has crashed in a user's lifetime.

Have you ever had your taskbar filled with 10 applications all doing something that involved waiting for a task to finish? Document Printing Progress, a K3b CD burning dialogue, Audio Encoding via KAudioCreator, File Transfers in Konqueror, Kopete, KTorrent, checking email in KMail... The new Jobs support in KDE 4 will unify the display of progress for these tasks, making it easy to see and manage what is happening on your system. Read on for details.

New computer software applications--in the labs and in the market--are using emotion as data input and responding to it. This CIO.com feature looks at current applications that focus on human emotion, and looks ahead to work being done on that subject, in computer labs around the world.

In Part 1 of this series you saw how programs on the POWER5 processor work using the 64-bit PowerPC instruction set, then in Part 2 you learned how the PowerPC instruction set addresses memory, and how to do position-independent code. In this article, you learn how to use the very powerful condition and branch instructions available in the PowerPC instruction set.

Microsoft disclosed Monday that over one in five Windows installations were deemed non-genuine through the company's Windows Genuine Advantage program, which requires users to validate their operating system before downloading updates from the company. Since WGA launched in July 2005, over 512 million users have attempted to validate their copy of Windows, Microsoft said. Of those, the non-genuine rate was 22.3 percent. 56000 reports have been made by customers of counterfeit software, which grants that user a free replacement copy of Windows.

Apple chief executive Steve Jobs was questioned by US investigators about stock options backdating at the company, according to several reports citing unidentified lawyers. Apple and Jobs' attorney did not immediately return telephone calls seeking comment on Tuesday. The US Attorney's Office in San Francisco was also not immediately available.

Retail giant Wal-Mart Stores is contracting with Microsoft and Novell - Microsoft's preferred Linux partner - to build out the company's Web operations, according to a Wal-Mart executive. On Tuesday, Microsoft and Novell are expected to announce that Wal-Mart is the latest customer to purchase both Microsoft software and support certificates for Novell's Suse Linux Enterprise Server.

"Linspire announced plans to standardize software installation across Linux distributions by expanding its popular CNR digital download and software management service to support several of the most popular desktop Linux distributions in 2007. Previously available only for Linspire and Freespire desktop Linux users, the CNR Service will begin providing users of other desktop Linux distributions a free and easy way to access over 20000 desktop Linux products, packages and libraries."

IBM has released an SDK for Java 6. Product binaries are available for Linux on x86 and 64-bit AMD, and AIX for PPC for 32- and 64-bits. In addition to supporting the Java SE 6 Platform specification, the new SDK also focuses on, Data sharing between Java Virtual Machines, Enhanced diagnostics information, Operating system stack backtraces, Updated jdmpview tool, platform stability, and performance.

A VMware appliance built on Ubuntu which allows for easy Nokia N800 Internet Tablet console and GUI development, including debugging in the nested Xephyr X server is available. This appliance is targeted at the N800's Maemo Bora 3.0 platform. This is of particular interest to developers who are thinking about developing for the N800 or wanting to do a quick port/recompile, and are unsure of or not willing to go through the install procedures.

In their joint announcement, Intel agreed to support the Solaris OS, while Sun will use a number of different Xeon processors in its x86 line of servers and workstations. In a collaboration that one CEO called 'historic', Sun Microsystems and Intel jointly announced a new partnership that will see both companies support the other's technology. The announcement, which had first been reported in the Wall Street Journal and formally detailed at a joint news conference in San Francisco on Jan. 22, will allow Sun to develop x86 servers using Intel's Xeon processors.

"Microsoft recently unveiled a new web site called 'Windows Vista Test Drive', designed to allow business users, consumers, and the merely curious to find out what running Microsoft's latest operating system might be like, without actually having to install it."