The Leopard Report: The Alleged Rush to Beat Vista to Market

macOS 71 Comments
"If you can believe what some of the online tech prognosticators tell you, Apple's real 'Top Secret' plan is to have Mac OS 10.5 Leopard out by Macworld Expo in January, or perhaps shortly thereafter. If true, it would give Apple a chance to trounce Windows Vista, at least in times of mind share as opposed to market share, assuming the latter indeed comes out around the same time. I think some of the folks who expect an early release ought to reconsider what they're smoking or drinking."
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The EUPL: a License Worth Considering?

  Submitted by Luis Open Source 49 Comments
"There has been lots of talk over the past few years about open source license proliferation. I'm generally of the mind that if you can't solve the problem with the GPL, MPL, or BSD, it's not a licensing problem worth solving. I've therefore been interested to watch the progress of the European Union Public License (Draft here). The EU has stated its rationale (which the Free Software Foundation doesn't buy), but let me add one big reason of my own."
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Vista General Release Date Revealed

Windows 34 Comments
Microsoft has revealed a general release date for its upcoming operating system Vista - 5 December, 2006. Speaking to IT professionals, parliamentarians and senior law-enforcement officers at the Parliament and Internet conference in London on Thursday, Microsoft revealed its release plans. "We will officially launch Vista, Microsoft Office 2007 and Exchange 2007 on 5 December," said David Hipwell, a Windows client sales professional at Microsoft. On a very, very related note, the EC says that Vista will not be delayed due to regulatory issues. Also, the Shell: Revealed weblog has an item explaining why Aero Basic looks the way it looks. Update: ZDNet has removed the release date story, and since they are being rude by not offering an explanation, I have no idea what is going on.
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OpenSUSE 10.1 ‘Remastered’ Released

SuSE, openSUSE 27 Comments
OpenSSE 10.1 'remastered' has been released. "This release combines the 10.1 GM and all online updates that we have released for 10.1 so far, including libzypp, which should make the installing and working experience much smoother for everyone. We have created new CD ISO images and supplied delta ISOs from the goldmaster. The non-OSS DVD images will show up next week, we had to retract and will remaster. If you are running SUSE Linux 10.1 already, there is no need to download these images at all. Just do an update from our update repository to get all our security updates. This remastered media are useful for new installations."
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IE Market Share: What’s Going on?

Internet Explorer 54 Comments
Recent high-profile security problems with Internet Explorer have done little to dent its market share - or maybe not, according to conflicting reports on web browser use. Web analytics firm OneStat.com reckons that IE's global usage share is 85.85 per cent, an increase of 2.8 per cent since July 2006. Mozilla Firefox's open source browser claims second place with a share of 11.49 per cent, a decrease of 1.44 per cent since July 2006. Apple's Safari claimed 1.61 per cent (down 0.23 per cent), and Opera held 0.69 per cent of the market. However, statistics from websites tools firm Net Applications, cited by Ars Technica, paint a contrasting picture.
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Apple Seeds Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard Build 9A283

macOS 5 Comments
Apple Computer this week released to developers the first pre-release update of its next-generation Leopard operating system since the initial preview in early August. Build 9A283 delivers "Significant user interface changes to iCal" and "Basic editing in Preview," according to the report. It also adds "new Parental Controls for content filtering, apps, and curfews" and "3D audio cues to indicate locations of items on the screen in the VoiceOver screen reader."
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Microsoft Restructures Its Windows Core OS Division

Microsoft 11 Comments
Microsoft has restructured its Windows Core Operating System Division into five teams in a move designed to better focus on PC hardware and provide a richer set of customer solutions. The software giant is also making changes on the security front by bringing its security, Trustworthy Computing and Engineering Excellence teams together in one group, known as the Trustworthy Computing Team, Jim Desler, Microsoft's group public relations manager, told eWEEK Oct. 12.
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Vista Licenses Limit OS Transfers, Ban VM Use

  Submitted by Flatline Windows 68 Comments
Microsoft has released licenses for the Windows Vista operating system that dramatically differ from those for Windows XP in that they limit the number of times that retail editions can be transferred to another device and ban the two least-expensive versions from running in a virtual machine. The new licenses, which were highlighted by the Vista team on its official blog Tuesday, add new restrictions to how and where Windows can be used.
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Review: Mandriva Linux 2007 PowerPack Edition

  Submitted by Valour Mandriva, Mandrake, Lycoris 6 Comments
"Though delayed for a while and later to market than most Mandriva fans would probably prefer, the new Mandriva Linux 2007 PowerPack Edition is finally here, nearly a year after the previous release. 2007 is typical Mandriva through and through: attractively themed in KDE, easy to install without skipping the technical details, a little bug-ridden here and there, and full of new and interesting software technologies. This release does have its own identity, though; not only has the standard theme been redesigned for the first time in several years, but this is the first Mandriva release to include a legal DVD movie player."
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Review: SupportPlus/Sorell SV-10 PMP

Multimedia, AV 13 Comments
Geeks.com were very generous sending us over their SupportPlus SP-PMP51C (aka Sorell SV-10) portable media player for a review. This PMP is unique because among extended media features (20GB, A/V playback/rec, line-in, fm radio/rec, voice rec, text viewer, OGG support, lots of accessories) it also includes a 1.3MP swivel camera (with VGA video recording) selling at the fair price of $199 (use the promo code "GEEKPLUS" to buy the item for just $149).
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The Open Source CDE and Motif Petition

  Submitted by Peter Howkins Desktop environments 52 Comments
In an attempt to convince The Open Group that they finally want to fully Open Source Motif and CDE Peter Howkins has started a petition to help gauge how much interest there is. CDE, the Common Desktop Enviroment, was the default desktop on several commercial UNIX distributions. Motif is a X Windows widget API used in many programs, including CDE and other projects such as nedit and DDD. Howkins is not going to try to convince anyone to use either of them, but if you use them and would like to see them Open Sourced please sign the petition. For more background information about CDE and this petition visit the petition site or go straight to signing the petition.
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Windows Kernel Protection Expected to Break Soon

Windows 12 Comments
PatchGuard, a Microsoft technology to protect key parts of Windows, will be hacked sooner rather than later, a security expert said Thursday. Hackers will break through the protection mechanism soon after Microsoft releases Windows Vista, Aleksander Czarnowski, a technologist at Polish security company AVET Information and Network Security, said in a presentation at the Virus Bulletin event here. "It will probably take a year or so for it to surface publicly, but I believe it will be broken earlier," he said.
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Palm Launches Treo 680; Palm OS Dead

Wireless 15 Comments
Palm has launched a new sibling in its Treo smartphone line today, the Treo 680, using the PalmOS. "For people who are ready to move up to a full-featured mobile phone that includes everything needed to stay organized, Palm today announced the Palm Treo 680 smartphone, a GSM/GPRS/EDGE quad-band world phone. Customers will find the Treo 680 smartphone easy to use, slim and compact, yet packed full of features beyond its stellar phone capability, such as email, web browsing, messaging, multimedia, calendar, contacts and more." No Wifi though. At the same time, Palm OS died.
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How Do You Secure 100 Million Laptops?

  Submitted by Anonymous Penguin Hardware 16 Comments
If the plan is perfectly executed, Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child project will deploy 100 million laptops in the first year. In one fell swoop, the nonprofit organization will create the largest computing monoculture in history. Wary of the security risks associated with a computing monoculture - millions of machines with hardware and software of identical design - OLPC officials are seeking help from the world's best hackers to review the full specifications of the laptop's security model.
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My Dream Operating System

OS News 67 Comments
This article is a inspired by some of the ideas which seem be constantly floating around my mind whenever I think about or read about operating systems. Surely, every time-served OS-geek carries a mental list of this sort around with them? This is a summary of all of the features which I would like to see in my dream FOSS based Operating System.
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European Commission Boosts Open Source

  Submitted by elsewhere Open Source 7 Comments
"The European Commission has taken steps to promote the use of open source systems and software in the public sector. It has selected a consortium led by Unisys Belgium to create and manage the Open Source Observatory and Repository, the company announced. Other members of the consortium are the Maastricht Economic Research Institute on Innovation and Technology, consultancy GOPA Cartermill, and the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos of Madrid. They will provide an internet service and portal enabling European administrations to centrally store and share the software code of their open source applications and exchange open source knowledge."
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Longhorn Server’s ‘Improved’ Security

  Submitted by Dolphin Windows 34 Comments
'The most secure Windows ever' may be very secure from hackers and malware - but what do you do when Longhorn Server let's you install the OS, set up Active Directory, and initialize the domain without once asking you to even create an administrator password? "What happened to Windows Server? Where did all of the stringent security checks and ultra-protection of Windows Server 2003 go? Windows Server 2000 was quite insecure, and Windows Server 2003 turned over a new leaf... But it seems Microsoft is more than willing to flip that page back - even Windows Server 2000 required an Administrator password at the very least."
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