Nick McGrath, Microsoft's head of platform strategy, is at the spearhead of the software giant's attempts to head off the open source danger. Having helped launched both NT4 and XP into the UK, the 15-year Microsoft veteran now concentrates on combating the threat posed by organisations migrating to Linux. But, with an almost mockingly dismissive opinion of the opportunities brought about by Linux, McGrath is insistent that Microsoft is not losing ground. Instead he claims that Microsoft is winning key corporate and public sector deals on the critical battlegrounds of cost and security.

The EU has accumulated enough evidence to charge Intel with antitrust violations, according to the Wall Street Journal. Anonymous sources quoted by the paper claim that EU lawyers have prepared a draft of their case against the company, but are waiting to make it public until after an interior panel of legal experts meets to consider the arguments in the document.

"For years, most Linux distributions have been using an init daemon based on the one found in Unix System V. The init daemon is spawned by the kernel itself, and tasked with booting the rest of the system, starting all other processes, and taking care of them when they need to be stopped or when they die. While the System V init setup has worked well for Linux in the past, it hasn't aged well - which is why we're replacing the aging init system with Upstart in Ubuntu 6.10, codenamed Edgy Eft."

Japanese electronics maker Fujitsu said on Wednesday it would recall 287000 notebook PC batteries made by Sony, bringing the number of Sony batteries recalled to more than 7.5 million. After Apple, Dell, Toshiba, and IBM/Lenovo, and Sony itself, Fujitsu is the 6th company to recall Sony batteries.

"Few computers have more right to the term 'business machine' than the ThinkPad laptop series - and not just because the brand was developed by a company named International Business Machines (IBM). Traditionally ThinkPads have been built for speed and durability, but recently GNU/Linux users have discovered that the ThinkPad is built for compatibility as well. The latest in the ThinkPad T series is a landmark in several ways: it's the first to use a Core Duo processor; the first to be made and sold by Lenovo instead of IBM; and the first to offer official manufacturer support for GNU/Linux."

"We're seeing the mainstream use of Linux has spread," Red Hat spokesperson Leigh Day said. "It's difficult to calculate all the places it shows up and all the places it affects our revenue." Red Hat Linux is being used in wireless routers and medical devices, according to Day. It also is showing up in unconventional applications.

Trolltech today released Qt version 4.2. Highlights of the new release include support for styleable widgets and a new Graphics View 2D canvas framework.

This new chapter describes the overall philosophy behind Aqua icons and shows how to design application, document, toolbar, and other types of icons for Mac OS X. To represent your application in Mac OS X, it's essential to create high-quality Aqua-style application icons that scale well in the various places the icon appears - the Dock, Finder previews, alert dialogs, and so on.

"George Weiss, Gartner's open-source analyst, recently said that Microsoft Windows will not suffer irreparable damage on the server side at the hands of Linux over the next five years. He's right. Microsoft will fall flat on its face all by itself, and Linux will pick up afterwards. It's very simple."

"Running on almost twenty different architectures, and easily portable to others, NetBSD gained its reputation as the most portable operating system on the planet. While that may indicate high quality code, the ever demanding networked world cares about more than that. Over the past year, NetBSD evolved quite a bit in various areas. This paper will focus on those aspects relating to security."

As expected, Microsoft said Tuesday it has appealed a July fine by the European Commission with the Court of First Instance, the European Union's second highest court. It accuses the EC of prolonging the case while the Redmond company attempted to comply with the ruling. Microsoft vowed to appeal after the EC handed down the 280.5 million euro fine on July 12. Before that ruling, he regulatory body had never fined a company before for failure to comply with an earlier order.

A common complaint heard from people who tested Vista, is that maximised windows turn black. At the Shell Blog, a fix has been presented: "In the end, we decided that we like the black and think it is the right thing to do, but we want to respect the user's color choice for users who bother to make a change. So - starting in today's build, we have significantly backed off the amount of black that is mixed in with the user's color for maximized windows. This is not particularly noticeable with the default color, but with the more intense colors like Red and Orange, you will appreciate the difference."

IBM is rolling out new PowerPC processors aimed at the embedded space that are designed to improve performance while consuming less power than their counterparts. The new chips illustrate IBM's commitment to building processors that do not rely solely on speed bumps for performance improvements, but also are energy-efficient, said Ron Martino, director of Power architecture solutions for IBM's Technology Collaboration Solutions unit.

"Yes, it's true. It's not made out of wood, it's not behind bullet-proof glass at the Tokyo Game Show - it's a real live PS3 and we're really playing it. The two Sony reps that were kind enough to bring us the machine brought it in a bag, popped it out and placed it on our table. We connected it to our TV and we were away. Forget any dev-kit speculation and empty cases. PS3 is real and it works brilliantly."