"Windows Vista includes an extensive reworking of core OS elements in order to provide content protection for so-called 'premium content', typically HD data from Blu-Ray and HD-DVD sources. Providing this protection incurs considerable costs in terms of system performance, system stability, technical support overhead, and hardware and software cost. These issues affect not only users of Vista but the entire PC industry, since the effects of the protection measures extend to cover all hardware and software that will ever come into contact with Vista, even if it's not used directly with Vista (for example hardware in a Macintosh computer or on a Linux server). This document analyses the cost involved in Vista's content protection, and the collateral damage that this incurs throughout the computer industry."

This is a response to the article yesterday on the progress of GNOME and KDE. Aaron Seigo, a lead KDE developer, sets out the current state of progress with KDE 4, pointing out that KDE 4 is on track for a release in mid 2007. "Thom points to a quote from me that our goal is to have a 4.0 ready sometime in the first half of next year. That gives us until sometime in June and I'm still thinking we can make it."

More evidence: "Mac OS X Leopard (Build 9a321) features support for ZFS. The rumors were true, you can create disk images with a ZFS filesystem, well at least in theory, because Build 9a321 is far away from being stable. The DiskUtility itself crashes again and again. Trying to create an actual ZFS image produces kernel panics. There is no pool support to create stripes, mirrors or even RaidZ in DiskUtility yet. It seems that all the other rumor sites stopped right there, which is why we had to set up this website to show you how well ZFS is already implemented. We show you what works and what doesn't. After reading you will know what the deal is, with ZFS and the upcoming Mac OS."

VMware today released a beta version of the new VMware desktop product for the Mac, codenamed Fusion. It supports a wide variety of x86/x64 guests, and is cross-compatible with virtual machines created in VMware Workstation, VMware Player, VMware Server and VMware Infrastructure 3. It supports Virtual SMP, drag & drop of files between OS X and virtual machines, and supports all USB 2.0 devices. Even devices that do not have drivers for OS X will work in a virtual machine.

"I have tested, and continue to run in a production setting, two instances of Windows 2003 Server hosted by Parallels Desktop, running on OS X Server 10.4.8 on a 3 GHz Xserve. To skip to the punch line, it works, and it's as fast as all get-out. Parallels does not stretch the truth when it claims near-native performance; Xserve is capable of knocking off any two-socket Netburst (Pentium 4) Xeon server going back at least two years. Compared to Xserve, those Intel boxes eat more electricity and give off more heat than they give back in capacity for work."

Hans Reiser, the prominent Bay Area Linux programmer charged with murdering his wife, says he's seeking to sell off his open-source file system company, Namesys, to help pay mounting legal costs. In the first interview since his arrest, Reiser spoke this week about the future of his company and his legal travails from within the walls of Santa Rita Jail, where he is being held without bail.

HTC's eagerly anticipated entry into the ultra-mobile PC market has made an early, unscheduled appearance on the web, adding weight to the company's own admission that it could release a UMPC-like product as early as 2007. Mobile-Review has more photos of the device. Don't tell me you don't (secretly) want one.

Java can provide a simple way to submit z/OS batch jobs to run -- but that is just the beginning. You can also use Java, from any platform, to check on the status of your z/OS batch jobs. This article showes you how to use Java to access z/OS JES Sysout files. In addition, extending the Commons Net Library allows the specific JES file attributes to be encapsulated in Java objects.

GNOME 2.17.4 has been released. "This is our second development release on our road towards GNOME 2.18.0, which will be released in March 2007. New features are coming in at a nice rate, and that's great. A lot of bug fixes too. And some crashers are appearing here and there: that's the fun of unstable releases!"

In 2002, both KDE and GNOME released their last major revisions; KDE released KDE 3.0 on 3rd April, while GNOME followed shortly after with GNOME 2.0 on 27th June. For the Linux desktop, therefore, 2002 was an important year. Since then, we have continiously been fed point releases which added bits of functionaility and speed improvements, but no major revision has yet seen the light of day. What's going on?

"Irish Free Software developers Brian Brazil and Paul O'Malley have developed a new distribution, appropriately named gNewSense. Made with the philosophy of Debian and the structure of Ubuntu, it aims to be the freest distribution out there. It's so 'free', that it earned an official endorsement from the Free Software Foundation. Linux Online is grateful to Messrs. Brazil and O'Malley for taking time out of their busy schedules to answer a few questions about their project."

eSATA, an external version of the technology that's used to connect hard drives inside the PC chassis. Unlike USB and FireWire, eSATA (external Serial ATA) lets external drives communicate at the same speed as internal drives. Great for storing photos, video and music.

Project Looking Glass has hit the magical 1.0 mark: "This release is the culmination of 3 years of work, starting with Hideya san who originally conceived of a bold, new type of window system, through the initial shake down of the proof-of-concept demo by an internal Sun community, followed by the open sourcing of the technology, which generated such enormous interest that it brought down the java.net servers several times. From that point on many people from around the globe have contributed to the project; contributing to the core, contributing applications, performing testing, writing and translating documentation, etc. The project owners (Hideya, Paul, Krishna and myself) are very grateful for all of the great contributions we have received from you, the LG community."

"On November 30, Sophos issued its monthly report on the top ten threats reported to them in November of 2006. As a part of this, Sophos also studied Vista's vulnerability to these malware threats. I found the information and press discussion confusing, so I thought I would clarify what this really means for customers. In order to understand what was really going on here, I asked the team to go look at the technical facts behind the story, and that started in the lab. We began by observing first-hand how these various forms of malware affect a Vista system using a machine that was configured with the default settings and without any additional security software. What we found was that if you are using only the software in Vista (e.g., Windows Mail and no add-on security software), then you are immune to all ten of the malware threats that Sophos cited."