"DirectX 10 is likely to see a number of point revisions during its lifespan and the first of these, imaginatively titled DirectX 10.1, will be the first of these. It may surprise some of you reading this, but the features which will be added by DirectX 10.1 have already been decided upon and information made available about them, so in this article we'll be taking a look through what we can expect to see in DirectX 10.1 compliant hardware."

" a new white paper by VMWare that comes to the surprising conclusion that hardware-assisted x86 virtualization oftentimes fails to outperform software-assisted virtualization. My reading of the paper says that this counterintuitive result is often due to the fact that hardware-assisted virtualization relies on expensive traps to catch privileged instructions while software-assisted virtualization uses inexpensive software substitutions." Read more at Slashdot.

This chapter explains the ins and outs of non-standard FreeBSD installations. If you are installing FreeBSD on a system with another operating system previously installed, or if you aren't using a CD or DVD to install FreeBSD, you'll want to read this chapter before performing the installation.

NetBeans IDE provides a wide variety of tools to support Java application development, but it is the Source Editor where you will spend most of your time. Given that fact, a lot of attention has been put into features and subtle touches to make coding faster and more pleasurable. This chapter covers the ins and outs of the Source Editor.

The driver source code released for the Intel 965 Graphics chipset recently isn't as open as first thought. Keith Packard posted a reply on the linux-kernel mailing list detailing what parts were not available.

"Debian and Ubuntu. Ubuntu and Debian. How are they different? How are they the same? Well, most of the differences lie in the target userbase of the OSes. Debian is attempting the unattemptable by making a distro that's right for almost every use imaginable. Servers use it, workstations use it, monkeys I'm sure could use it too. That comes at a price." More here.

"Overall, FC6 looks and feels like a more solid, polished version of FC5 rather than a wholesale revamp. I look forward to the finished product this fall." Check the short commentary here.

Magnussoft has posted a news item to let customers know that the first games have been ported for ZETA 1.21. These are pretty important releases for Zeta's software base.

Between the full desktop version, the subscriber's ad-free version, the normal mobile version (via autodetection), the very lite mobile version and the WAP version of OSNews, here is one more: http://osnews.com/pda . This version is built around our RSS feed and it's geared towards cellphones (like the Motorola RaZR line) that can't quite manage to render our normal mobile front page (28 KB overall) while the very lite or WAP versions don't have enough information in them so they leave our readers with a bitter taste. Hence, we implemented this RSS-based middle-ground mobile version, like we also did for other popular sites yesterday (screenshots). The PHP source code that generates this mobile-friendly layout is freely available and ready to be deployed, courtecy of MoBits.com.

Sam of Port25 sits down with Miguel de Icaza, VP Development Platform at Novell and co-founder of Ximian. In this interview Sam and Miguel talk about the history behind Mono, the current state of the project and Miguel's thoughts on Mono as it relates to .NET.

The Haiku news just keeps on coming lately. "HaikuLiveCDScript is a shell script to build a Haiku live CD. It downloads, decompresses, and generates a boot image and drops files in a folder ready to be burnt. Just unpack the script files and execute 'makelivecd', and wait a while."

openSUSE 10.2 alpha 3 has been released: "I'm glad to announce the third alpha release of our 10.2 product. It's the first time that we call our distribution 'openSUSE' instead of 'SUSE Linux'." The full release announcement can be found at LinuxCompatible.

"Four short years ago, Microsoft unveiled its new framework/engine for programming and running applications in a virtual environment, and the world was stunned. Microsoft had introduced a run-time environment that was for the first time a true 'write once, run everywhere' implementation, but that was far from being the end. With .NET 3.0 on the loom, NeoSmart Technologies takes a look at how far .NET has come and just how long it can keep going."

"Blue Pill is the prototype resulting from a security study made by Joanna Rutkowska, which took advantage of new virtualization capabilities of AMD processors (known as SVM and previously as Pacifica) to inject a rootkit in a running Vista operating system. Ms Rutkowska claimed a malware using this method is undetectable. Virtualization.info met Anthony Liguori, Software Engineer at IBM's Linux Technology Center, and, most of all, one of the men behind the Xen hypervisor, to finally debunk the Blue Pill undetectabiliy myth."