Starting Monday, Google will offer Google Apps for Your Domain, a free package of programs for businesses, universities and other organizations. Workers will be able to send e-mail with Gmail, Google's two-year-old Web-based mail service, but messages will carry their company's domain name. The package also includes Google's online calendar, instant-messaging service, and Page Creator, a Web page builder.

A landmark study on Department of Justice network crime prosecutions reveals most attacks used stolen IDs and passwords, resulting in far greater damages to affected organizations than previously thought: up to USD 10 million per occurrence and on average more than USD 1.5 million per occurrence. The report, "Network Attacks: Analysis of Department of Justice Prosecutions 1999-2006", concludes that 84% of attacks could have been prevented if, in addition to checking the user ID and password, the organization had verified the identity of the computer connecting to their networks and accounts.

The ReactOS team has released ReactOS 0.3.0. There's a massive changelog for this release. You can get 0.3.0 from the SourceForge page. "The ReactOS project is dedicated to making Free Software available to everyone by providing a ground-up implementation of a Microsoft Windows XP compatible operating system. ReactOS aims to achieve complete binary compatibility with both applications and device drivers meant for NT and XP operating systems, by using a similar architecture and providing a complete and equivalent public interface."

"Imagine if you will, a world where your ideas and perhaps, even your own creative works became part of the OS of tomorrow. Consider the obvious advantages to an operating system that actually adapted to the needs of the users instead of the other way around. Not only is there no such OS like this, the very idea goes against much of what we are currently seeing in the current OS options in the market."

"In this howto we will install 2 bind dns servers, one as the master and the other as a slave server. For security reasons we will chroot bind9 in its own jail. Using two servers for a domain is a commonly used setup and in order to host your own domain you are required to have at least 2 domain servers. If one breaks, the other can continue to serve your domain."

Start learning about an important programming concept, namely objects. The more you work with Visual C#, the more you'll hear about objects. Visual C# 2005 is a true object-oriented language. This chapter isn't going to discuss object-oriented programming in any detail—object-oriented programming is a complex subject and well beyond the scope of this book. Instead, you'll learn about objects in a more general sense.

"When OSDL announced the first release of its Portland initiative at LinuxWorld Boston in April, heralding it 'a breakthrough in desktop Linux', I muttered my skepticism to a co-worker. He expressed surprise at my reaction, noting that the initiative employs extremely smart people. I don't doubt their intelligence, or their sincerity, but I wouldn't bet a penny on the project living up to its initial claim, because you can't conjure a silver bullet out of intelligence and sincerity." KDE developer Kevin Krammer replies: "There is an article over at linux.com which predicts that the Portland initiative will fail to reach its goal of 'unifying the Linux desktop'. Unfortunately the author somehow missed that 'unifying the Linux desktop' is not the goal of Portland."

Ubuntu is developing the "upstart", a replacement for the init daemon, the process spawned by the kernel that is responsible for starting, supervising and stopping all other processes on the system. The article compares upstart to Solaris SMF, Apple's launchd, and initng.

The controversial discussion about the important of communications at the Haiku project continues, and seems to be heating up. The project recently announced a new marcom team, and now the team lead (Koki) is coming on strong to the developers. He claims that the new Haiku website now in development "looks awful, is disorganized, and it has no focus whatsoever", and proposes to fix it by organizing it into marketing and development areas managed by each group (plus an open community area). Read on for a short summary written by OSNews reader sogabe.

iRex used Linux and an electronic paper display to build a portable reading device that 'reads just like paper, and is perceived as such by the human eye'. The device can save students from having to carry around heavy stacks of text books, and might also be popular with doctors, lawyers, and technicians.

In this final installment on testing of the three part series, Brian Goetz examines another technique for smoking out bugs that violate design rules: aspects. The first two installments in this series, Part 1 covering testing in integrated frameworks and Part 2 on testing with leverage, show how static analysis tools like Find Bugs can provide greater leverage in managing software quality by focusing on entire categories of bugs rather than on specific bug instances.

Vista will be the last version of Windows that exists in its current, monolithic form, according to Gartner. Instead, the research firm predicts, Microsoft will be forced to migrate Windows to a modular architecture tied together through hardware-supported virtualisation. "The current, integrated architecture of Microsoft Windows is unsustainable - for enterprises and for Microsoft," wrote Gartner analysts Brian Gammage, Michael Silver and David Mitchell Smith.

Normally we try not to report on music players, but since this concerns Microsoft's direct attack on Apple's music player, it's actually somewhat interesting. "Microsoft's forthcoming Zune player is shooting to be the life of the party, allowing users to create mobile social networks and stream music to nearby friends or strangers, according to a government regulatory filing. A Microsoft representative confirmed that the filing is legitimate and that Toshiba will manufacture the Zune device, but declined to offer additional details or comment on the information in the FCC filing."

Microsoft has reached Pre-RC1 with this latest release, Build 5536. The screenshots taken show some of the new features in this build. According to a quick test, Pre-RC1 is very stable and fast. "This build is Pre-RC1 as the screenshots demonstrate. 5536 is surprisingly stable and fast compared to all previous builds."