Apple on Tuesday evening released to developers a new pre-release build of its Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard operating system, AppleInsider has learned. The new distribution, labeled Mac OS X 10.5 build 9A321, includes only minor changes and enhancements from build 9A303, which was released last month. Instant update: Apparently, this new build features iChat with an answering machine.

Microsoft on Wednesday took the wraps off its first commercial operating system for robots, with hopes of paving the way for a broader robotics industry and taking a central role in its development.

"On Friday, Lars Knoll and George Staikos from the KHTML project visited Yahoo! to give a talk on the history of KHTML and Konqueror and the connection between those projects and Apple's open-source WebKit." Here is a short summary.

"ExAmour is an exokernel, a kernel bound to ensure a fair access to hardware resources for applications. The management of those resources is up to the applications (called environment under ExAmour). Kernel specifications: it presently works on x86-32; each application can define its own memory management policy, its own scheduling policy an use its own drivers (hardware or logical); it is multi segmented, no pagination, no overlap between segments in order to avoid exploitation of buffers overflows, heap overflow or off by one; there is no drivers in kernel mode. (increases the security, reliability of the system)."

Google is open sourcing the same software that helped to produce popular sites like Google Maps and Gmail. The company has released the Google Web Toolkit under the Apache 2.0 open source license. Independent developers can now use the toolkit to make and debug their own Java applications.

MySQL quietly deprecated support for most Linux distributions on October 16, when its 'MySQL Network' support plan was replaced by 'MySQL Enterprise.' MySQL now supports only two Linux distributions - Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. We learned of this when MySQL declined to sell us support for some new Debian-based servers. Our sales rep 'found out from engineering that the current Enterprise offering is no longer supported on Debian OS.' We were told that 'Generic Linux' in MySQL's list of supported platforms means 'generic versions of the implementations listed above'; not support for Linux in general.

By focusing on the analysis of data captured using signal handlers, you can speed up the most time-consuming part of debugging: finding the bug. This article gives a background on Linux signals with examples specifically tested on PPC Linux, then goes on to show how to design your handlers to output information that lets you quickly home in on failed portions of code.

Microsoft released seven security bulletins, including fixes for three critical vulnerabilities, as part of its monthly Patch Tuesday update delivered on Dec. 12. The software giant shipped 11 security patches in total, including a cumulative Internet Explorer bulletin and an update meant to fix a flaw in the Windows Media file format.

The AROS team has published a new status update. "Our latest status update is about three months old, but in the meanwhile we didn't sit somewhere doing nothing. Lots of improvements and bugfixes have been made to several components of AROS, in order to make it work better."

ReactOS, the open source implementation of a Windows XP/2003 compatible operating system, just published a new interview in their series of interviews with ReactOS developers. Today's interview features the developer Johannes Anderwald, who has worked on source compatibility with Visual Studio Development Suite lately.

Longtime Windows development chief James Allchin wrote in a January 2004 e-mail to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and company co-founder Bill Gates that the software vendor had "lost sight" of customers' needs and said he would buy a Mac if he wasn't working for Microsoft. "In my view, we lost our way," Allchin, the co-president of Microsoft's platform and services division, wrote in an e-mail Jan. 7, 2004. The e-mail was presented as evidence late last week in the Iowa antitrust trial, Comes v. Microsoft. Update: Today, he wouldn't though.

"I'm a confirmed RISC OS user, enthusiast, promoter and what some may even say, evangelist. Why did I feel inspired to write this short article and share my views with people? Partly in response to an article and partly because there are a number of rather ignorant, yet arrogant, PC users inhabiting some of the comp.sys.acorn.* newsgroups who love to complain about RISC OS and prosthetalize about how good PC applications are to their RISC OS counterparts - usually without the skill set or experience to make a valid judgement. I'm all for argument, but when people argue through ignorance or though blinkers, I feel like shouting 'Oi! No!' in their faces, but instead I'll settle for writing this article."

"OpenOffice.org 2.1 is recommend for all users, as it represents a significant improvement over all previous versions. Among other things: multiple monitor support for Impress; improved Calc HTML export; enhanced Access support for Base; even more languages; automatic notification of updates."

"Todd Bishop, Robert McLaws and even I have been keeping a close eye on Windows SideShow, one of the last remaining features in Windows Vista yet to be thoroughly explored. Largely due to hardware constraints, not many people have seen SideShow devices let alone play with one. So apart from the infamous Channel 9 video, a few screenshots and concept art, we really don't know much about the experience. Or should I say, until today."