Thomas Hazlett, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, looks at the various competitive pressures (Apple, Firefox) facing Microsoft and wonders whether its era of dominance might be on the wane in an editorial at the Financial Times.

The RC2 for x86-32 is available with mostly bugfixes. The RC1 for x86-64 is merged with 10.2 for i586, integrated graphics on i915-based motherboards are now supported. Packages fixes and additions: kdevelop, nut, pinentry, ripole, rosegarden4, xdelta2, ypserv.

Although the hard disk is much slower than RAM, it is also much cheaper and users always have a lot more hard disk space than RAM. So, Windows and other OSes are designed to create this pseudo-RAM or in Microsoft's terms - Virtual Memory, to make up for the shortfall in RAM when running memory-intensive programs.

While XQuery was designed for querying large document bases, it serves as a fine tool for transforming simple documents as well. Whether simplifying complex pages for display on small screens, or extracting elements from multiple pages to aggregate them together on a home-grown portal, or simply extracting data from Web pages because there's no other programmatic way to get the data. This article shows how XQuery offers a fast and easy way to scrape HTML pages for the data you need.

Two researchers surprised the audience at a computer-security convention last month with their finding that a version of Microsoft Windows was more secure than a competing Linux operating system. This week, the researchers released their finished report, and it included another surprise: Microsoft was funding the project all along.

Microsoft has provided a version of the March 2005 Indigo and Avalon Community Technology Previews for the general public. .NET luminaries discuss themselves, their technology expertise, and whatever else comes to mind, released twice a month.

A Foxborough, Mass., company has developed technology that plugs a human brain into a desktop computer, the Chicago Sun-Times reported.

This article will try to show you how easy it is to setup Novell's Suse Linux Enterprise Server as a Window Domain Controller (WPDC) - all by just pointing an clicking - no text editor is required. After implementing these instructions, you will have a fully featured WPDC that includes setting up an LDAP user/machine database as well as utilizing Dynamic DHCP and DNS Servers.

Virus and Trojan warnings have been coming fast and furious from anti-virus researchers, but some say the market for cell phone anti-virus software does not yet exist.

AnandTech investigates the advantages and disadvantages of the new market trend: multi-core CPUs. Will dual core enhance your gaming experience? Tim Sweeney, the leading developer behind the Unreal 3 engine, was kind to answer their questions about multi-threaded development with concise answers.

Some developers are concerned that the introduction of the third version of the GNU General Public License could split the free software world - but the FSF is confident these fears are unfounded.

Wishful thinking? Yes, but let's consider the possibilities. The last couple years have seen significant advances in hardware production and design. One of the more interesting (and potentially revolutionary) developments to take place this past year is the announcement of a new CPU, the STI (Sony, Toshiba, IBM) Cell processor.

The new Treo smartphone is GNU/Linux compatible and comes with Bluetooth connectivity--here's how you can set it up for your network.

Mono 1.1.5 has been released; Major highlights include Nullable Types and Fixed Size Buffer features in the compiler; Much more improved Windows.Forms implementations; Increased performance, reduced memory usage.

It took Red Hat 16 months to produce the newest version of its premium Linux product, which went on sale in February for as much as $2,499 per computer per year. It took a group of programmers less than two weeks to release a free clone. But the move could help Red Hat as much as it appears to hurt it.

This is a partial list of new features & systems for OpenBSD 3.7, scheduled to be released in May.

Foresight Linux is a distribution which showcases some of the latest and greatest from GNOME. Some of the things that may not be mature enough for some of the other distros. Some of the more innovative things are included, like Beagle, f-spot, howl, and the latest hal.

After a seemingly quiet period of little to no activity concerning IronPython IronPython 0.7 has been released and is available here. From the IronPython list, by Jim Hugunin himself: "This is the release that I should have made about 2 months after IronPython 0.6 and joining MS". Elsewhere, Nemerle released a preview before 0.3.0, which is planned in a month or so. It brings a total rewrite of the type inference engine and the parser (which is about half of the compiler).

Seth Nickell posted some screenshots and videos showing the experimental Luminocity window manager & Cairo which enable a XOrg-based desktop to get accelerated GL eye candy graphics. update: more here.

New to linux? Dont worry, Linspire Five-O makes Linux as easy as Windows. Linspire Five-O features over 1200 upgrades from version 4.5. You can get it preinstalled when buying new computers from several vendors. But is it worth throwing away Windows for this OS? Are you ready to try Linux?