Open Source Development Labs has cut a third of its staff, lost its chief executive and scaled back some technical work. That leaves a staff of 19, including Tom Hanrahan in charge of engineering, Diane Peters in charge of legal work, and top Linux programmers Linus Torvalds and Andrew Morton.

Today, we are proud to announce a new section of our website. After a story was posted on our website last month, readers let us know that they would welcome a job-related area of our website. So today, we are announcing jobs.osnews.com. Read on for details.

Microsoft has announced an integrated suite of tools for designers, as well as a new preview of the company's 'Flash killer' technology, putting Microsoft squarely into competition with Adobe. Microsoft on Dec. 4 announced its Expression Studio suite of tools for designers, consisting of four tools - three of which had been introduced heretofore and a new tool stemming from an acquisition the company made last summer. In addition, Microsoft announced a new CTP of its WPF/E technology, and there's also an app to show it off, while with some workarounds WPF can be used in Vista's Sidebar.

Magnussoft has published an update concerning Zeta. They announced SAMBA has reached beta status, while also announcing a (much needed) multi-protocol instant messaging application, which supports GoogleTalk, Jabber, AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, and MSN.

The root of the PHP and Lamp security problem lies in the way most Apache servers are configured. In this article, you will improve the Linux security of a LAMP by using the capabilities of Apache's Proxy's directive mod_proxy module to isolate potential Linux security risks while maintaining the flexibility that tools like PHP provide.

"OrangeCrate is pleased to announce an interview with Justin Steinman, Director of Marketing for Novell. Novell has announced a major deal with Microsoft in the last few weeks that has caused some in the community to question the validity of the deal announced, and has already been characterized by Microsoft as somehow verifying that Linux violates Microsoft's intellectual property. While I disagree with that statement from Steve Ballmer, I do understand that it is only fitting to offer Novell the chance to speak directly to the questions we all want addressed."

A cheeky programmer has produced an unofficial patch to allow the previously Iyonix-only Firefox 2 port to run on A9home computers. The hack intercepts low level ARMv5 instructions that the Iyonix's IOP321 XScale can execute, and converts them into instructions suitable for the ARMv4 Samsung ARM920T processor in the A9home. On a related note, RPCEmu has been updated to work with RISC OS 6.

Azul unwrapped its newest chip the 48-core Vega2 today. It is the successor to last year's Vega1. This Java processor triples performance from the year-old part and has an attractive feature set. Let's start out with the systems. Azul does not sell chips, only complete machines. There is a two-chip, 96 core, 48GB model 3210 and a four-chip, 96-192GB model 3220. Both are 5U machines, with the 3210 pulling about 580W max and the 3220 pulling about 1000W. There will be eight and 16 socket machines coming in 2007.

After my previous short first impressions 'review' of Windows Vista Build 6000, the final build, I promised you a full review which would look a bit deeper into the system, focussing on less obvious matters than appearance alone. Since there are so many new features in Windows Vista, it is very easy to lose track of them. Hence, this review will follow (where possible) a much linked-to page on Wikipedia: Features new to Windows Vista.

Quickly becoming a de facto standard C++ library, the Boost library includes a powerful graph data structure that's also easy to use. Jeff Cogswell discusses some interesting theory behind graphs, and explains the Boost library's graph structures.

Speaking to an analyst this month, executives for Apple Computer maintained that the company has no plans to incorporate virtualization technology into the final version of its Boot Camp software that will ship as part of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard next spring. "Apple indicated that it is very pleased with Parallels software and didn't feel the need to compete with its own version of embedded virtualization," Bear Stearns analyst Andy Neff wrote in a research note to clients this week.

In an upcoming version of WordPerfect due in 2007, Corel announced this week, users will have the options of reading and writing in both Microsoft Office Open XML format (introduced in Office 2007) and OpenDocument Format. Will WordPerfect become the ODF word processor of record? Corel's answer was surprising.

"There are many different methods to encrypt data using various encryption algorithms (ciphers). In this document I describe in short how to encrypt a device with one of the most contemporary methods, using dm-crypt and LUKS. Actually, devices cannot be encrypted. It's the block devices which are volumes that can be. This means that you can encrypt a hard disk partition, a ZIP disk, a usb flash stick, or even a volume within a file."

Parallels has released a new beta of its virtualisation product for Mac OS X. This new release includes one major new feature, something Parallels calls Coherency: "Shows Windows applications as if they were Mac ones. Try it and enjoy best of both worlds truly at the same time. No more switching between Windows to Mac OS." Screenshot.