OpenSUSE 10.2 Beta 2 has been released. "I'm glad to announce the second beta of openSUSE 10.2 codename Basilisk Lizard. It contains a large number of enhancements and updates done by the open source community and Novell's development teams. For Beta 2 we updated to OpenSync 0.20 and would ask for some testing by the community. We have prepared some testcases for specific mobile devices, like mobile phones which synchronize with SyncML, IrMC and other protocols. The testcases also include simple connection tests for Palm Devices. We would really appreciate any help and hopefully many success reports."

InfoWorld reviews Apple's latest Xserve, and concludes: "An objective reviewer's job is to find fault, and I've done my job. But the sum of Xserve's flaws is overwhelmed by the system's unique leading-edge, user and administrator-centric engineering. Xserve is far better than the commodity server that the Intel x86 market expects. But what really blasts Apple's competition is OS X Server. The present Tiger release is more than a match for much more expensive commercial Linux, and far more capable out of the box than Windows 2003 Server."

During a telephone conference with reporters yesterday, outgoing Microsoft co-president Jim Allchin, while touting the new security features of Windows Vista, which was released to manufacturing yesterday, told a reporter that the system's new lockdown features are so capable and thorough that he was comfortable with his own seven-year-old son using Vista without antivirus software installed. Elsewhere, bigg boss Bill Gates says that antitrust authorities did not make Microsoft remove any features from Vista, but he expressed anger with competitors who embarked on noisy public campaigns to 'castrate' the operating system.

Paul Thurrott takes a long look at Vista. "It's hard to put Windows Vista in perspective. On the one hand, the product has been in development for over five years, which means that Vista had one of the longest development cycles in the 20+ year history of Windows. Paradoxically, Windows Vista is both revolutionary and evolutionary. While it includes modern OS features, such as a new hardware-based graphical user interface, Vista will also feel like familiar territory, for the most part, to anyone that's already familiar with Windows XP. And Mac advocates can claim, truthfully, that many of Vista's best features appeared first on Mac OS X, sometimes years ago."

"Yesterday, I read what I consider to be a provoking piece at ZDNet. It pointed out that while there is no question that Macs are not the malware targets that Windows machines are, they're most certainly not immune to an attack of the right variety. It went on to backup its point with a real world scenario in which a University of New South Wales Mac server had been hit by malware. Disturbingly, the server had apparently been running the latest updates from Apple and still managed to get hit. It mentioned that, in the author's opinion, Apple was 'misleading people' into believing that their OS was more secure than it really is. Whether or not that is true is frankly immaterial to me. It should be noted that no OS is 100 percent bulletproof, and I believe this is what it was driving home at. Unfortunately, some people within the Mac community felt differently."

Mozilla has released updates for its Firefox browser, Thunderbird e-mail application and the SeaMonkey application suite to fix 'critical' security vulnerabilities. The vulnerabilities affect 1.5 versions of Firefox and Thunderbird as well as version 1 of the SeaMonkey suite, Mozilla said in its security advisories. The bugs do not affect Firefox 2.0, the latest version of the browser released late last month.