Apple has just released a new web page with developer information concerning Mac OS 10.5, Leopard. Among other things, the list includes: OpenGL 2.1, resolution independence, the adoption of the Mandatory Access Control framework from TrustedBSD, Code signing, and much more. And yes, boys and girls, there are screenshots as well. Update: Apple also launched faster MacBook Pros today. Update II: Screenshots of Leopard from ThinkSecret.

"iXsystems is a leading provider of high-performance computing clusters, blade servers, rackmount servers, and storage solutions based on FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and Linux. iXsystems also recently announced its acquisition of the PC-BSD operating system. I had the opportunity to interview Kris Moore, founder and lead developer of the PC-BSD project, and Matt Olander, CTO of iXsystems, about the acquisition."

A benchmarking comparison of Solaris 10 and Windows XP (64bit) running on a Sun Ultra 20 M2 Dual Core Opteron 1210 workstation. "Overall, I'm pleased with the performance of the Sun Ultra 20 M2. While this model (with an Opteron 1210) isn't quite as fast as a low-end Mac Pro, it's less than half the price of a low-end Mac Pro. Models equipped with faster Opterons (like the Opteron 1218) will certainly be more competitive when it comes to performance."

"We have already used Fedora Core 6 Zod for several days now and have been extremely pleased by this release. The changes are extensive from default AIGLX + Compiz support to a great deal of performance improvements. Another nice feature is the immediate availability of Extras packages built for Fedora Core 6". More here.

The Mozilla Foundation has released version 2.0 of their Firefox webbrowser to their ftp site. The release notes are not yet updated, so you'll have to do with the release notes for the third release candidate, which will probably not differ all that much from the final notes.

El Reg reviews the Sony Vaio VGC-LA1, and concludes: "Sony has engineered a superbly attractive piece of kit in the LA1 but at this price point we expect something that is far more serious and ideally has a larger screen. As things stand the price would need to come down significantly to make the LA1 really appealing to anyone who values performance and functionality over looks."

A new nVIDIA display driver has been released which fixes the exploit reported last week. The driver was vulnerable to a buffer overflow that allowed an attacker to run arbitrary code as root. This bug could be exploited both locally as well as remotely (via a remote X client or an X client which visits a malicious web page).

"The security industry and trade press have directed a lot of attention toward the 'Zero-day attack', promoting it as THE threat to guard against. According to the marketing hype, the Zero-Day attack is the one that you should most fear, so you must put in place measures to defend your organization from it. The Zero-Day threat is born the moment a vulnerability is publicly announced or acknowledged. But what about the period of time that the threat existed before being announced. At StillSecure we call this class 'Less-Than-Zero' threat. In this two-part series I'll examine this Less-Than-Zero threat, compare it to the Zero-Day threat, and discuss ways to protect yourself from Less-Than-Zero attacks and vulnerabilities for which patches, signatures, etc., do not yet exist."

"A lot of people has been asking me about some performance comparison for the vector graphics framework we have. Rendering polygons, especially when we're dealing with stroke, tends to be the most expensive rendering operation performed in vector graphics. I constructed a little test, which tests raw polygon rendering power of Qt and Cairo. For the test I used the latest Qt main branch, and the master branch from Cairo's Git repository."

This is a review of Slackware 11.0 where the author explains what is in store for the Linux users who choose to use this Linux distribution. The article writes: "When you hear the name Slackware, you are at once transported to a world where Linux users feel more at home in setting the configurations by editing ordinary text files. In fact the credo of Slackware is to keep it as simple as possible. In popular speak, it is known by the acronym KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid)."

Fedora Core 6 has been released to mirrors, as Linux-Noob has found out. They also have a screenshot tour. Highlights of this release include support for Compiz/AIGLX, GNOME 2.16, KDE 3.5.4, a new theme, performance improvements, and much more, as can be found in the release notes. Update: More screenshots.

"Apple's recent quarterly earnings report blew past all expectations. More importantly, dramatic unit sales growth shows the company is executing a working strategy for building the Mac platform. That raises the obvious question: why has Apple's market share historically been so low, and why did Apple fail to make any progress in the 1990's? Here's a look at why Apple's platform fell into crisis, and why the solutions prescribed by analysts didn't work."

Mustang is galloping into town. Also known as Java SE 6, Sun's latest incarnation of the Java 2 platform should arrive in its first non-beta release by the time you read this article. Jeff Friesen shows you why the many new features (from console I/O and access permissions control methods, to the system tray API and table sorting and filtering) that you now get to play with make Mustang an interesting release.

There are plenty of programming languages around. David Chisnall points out the various factors that determine what makes a "good" language. But note his caveat: These principles don't always apply in any given set of circumstances!