Haiku, the open-source BeOS replacement project, turns five years old today. Founded in August 2001 as OpenBeOS with the intention of replacing BeOS due to the lack of action by the then-ailing Be, Haiku has seen five years of change in the BeOS market but continues to progress.

LXer has an interview with project lead and creator of the Open Graphics Project, Timothy Miller. "I'm not sure exactly how large that market is, but we seem to be creating a movement. Individuals and businesses interested in open hardware are coming to me all the time, asking about it."

Slashdot published an interview with Fedora Project leader Max Spevack where he answers questions on everything from what has changed since the birth of Fedora Project and its goals, driver support in Linux up to what he considers the worst aspect of the Fedora.

Microsoft is set to deliver a new Windows Vista build - possibly Build No. 5506 - to testers some time in the next few days, according to Vista testers who asked not to be named. The forthcoming build will embed links to a number of Microsoft's Windows Live services. Microsoft is gunning to release the new build some time the week of August 14, testers said. That build may be 5506 or a slightly later build, they said. On a related note, two of Microsoft's security patches this month are for Vista.

BareFeats updated its Mac Pro test page with results from the 3.0Ghz version. Should you make the leap to the Mac Pro? "Should you buy a new Mac Pro or a closeout or refurbished Quad-Core G5? If cost is a factor and you use non-UB pro apps, then we think the Quad-Core G5 is still a valid choice. If you are running Universal Binary apps, can handle the cost of the new Mac Pro plus the expensive memory, and can tolerate the hidden gotchas of 'version 1' of the Intel towers, then you would benefit by making the leap to the Mac Pro. The main frustration in the short term will be the 5 week wait for the optional Radeon X1900 XT or the scarcity of correct memory from upgrade sources."

Dell's quarterly profit plummeted 51 percent in the second quarter, and the company disclosed it was the target of a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation into the ways it is reporting its revenue. The PC manufacturer said it would look to improve its financial situation, possibly explaining its broadened relationship with AMD, also announced Thursday.

Gus Robertson, vice president of Red Hat Asia-Pacific said open source has helped lower the cost of IT but there are far more strategic reasons for choosing open-source software over proprietary competitors. However, Dion Wiggins, research director and vice president of Gartner in Hong Kong, advised businesses against having a strategy specifically for open source.

A final release of Gideon Designer for GTK+ 2.8 is available. Gideon is a modern professional RAD tool for GTK+. Most notable features include a tree-based property explorer, advanced support for multiple selections, and a flexible GuiXml resource format.

There is a general dissent growing at the popularity that Ubuntu enjoys among the Linux users. Considering that Ubuntu has maintained the number one slot at distrowatch.com for a whole year now, the feeling is a bit expected. This article tries to explore what is it that makes Ubuntu so popular among its users and how other linux distributions can take a leaf from ubuntu to effectively leverage their position in the popularity chart.

Apple announced that they are using the LLVM optimizer and JIT within their Mac OS 10.5 'Leopard' OpenGL stack. LLVM will help in delivering better performance of the GL stack.

Were you to walk around LinuxWorld in San Francisco this week, for almost every person you'd see sitting, you'd see a laptop in front of them. And, if you're a snoopy person, like me, you'd also see that about half of those laptops were running Linux. That doesn't sound like that much? Think again. Even a year ago, Linux-powered laptops were a rarity. Find out why Linux journalist Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols thinks the Linux desktop is poised for success.

Transitive, a start-up specialising in software that translates software for one chip so it can run on another, plans to release software this quarter so programs for Sun Microsystems' Sparc chips can be used on Intel Xeon chips.

There are some new clues that Mac OS X Leopard will drop G3 support. Its ReadMe file does not mention it, its web pages do not mention it and Apple even made a deliberate change to their 64bit webpage to remove the G3 mention recently. My take: This was not unexpected. For each new version Apple required one more additional feature in order to work (in the past it has been USB, then firewire etc) and now it's G4+. I bet that the client version of OSX after Leopard would require a supported 3D QuartzExtreme-compliant graphics card in order to boot up.

Telephia released some very interesting research numbers on mobile web browsing in USA (both on feature phones and smartphones). Openwave (free simulator) leads with 27% and together with Motorola they make over 50% of the US mobile browsing market. Apparently, Americans mostly care about Mail, Weather and Sports when it comes to mobile browsing. Opera Mini is pretty popular lately, but it seems that Telephia only counted the pre-installed browsers in their survey. When we are talking worldwide numbers and only about smartphones though, Nokia's S60/80/90 phones are beating everyone else with over 64% of the smartphone worldwide market share (please note though that smartphones make up only about ~10% of the overall phone market but their numbers are growing fast).