ZDNet: “Despite its birthing problems, OS X will outgrow its awkward and callow youth to surpass the smoothness and sophistication of the mature Mac OS 9. The real future of Mac OS, however, lies in the development of Darwin, the open-source Unix foundation of Mac OS X, and in its eventual migration to the PC platform.”

ZDNet’s eWEEK Labs reviews Red Hat 7.1: “Built around the Linux 2.4 kernel and boasting several new configuration and usability enhancements, Red Hat Inc.’s Red Hat Linux 7.1 packs advances for the corporate server and desktop alike.”

Slashdot: “The developers of gaim have posted another article about the blocking of Jabber and gaim by AOL.”

ZDNet: “While the advocates of FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD continue to bicker over-er, discuss-the merits of each particular version of the BSD operating system, WindRiver purchased the proprietary rendition of the famous BSD Unix. But WindRiver, which has a reputation for being arrogant and difficult to work with, has marketed this purchase as a way to jump into the open-source fray. It’s a lie.

It’s also arrogance.”

IBM on Monday raised the curtain on its latest version of AIX. The most significant new features in AIX 5L, version 5.1 offer support for installing and working with Linux applications. Big Blue also unveiled two new midrange servers designed to compete with Sun Microsystems. With prices starting at $16,995 the new p620 and p660 are priced well below similar offerings from Sun. Full story at InfoWorld.

rev_matt writes: “A brief look at the latest from Mandrake, with an eye to its usefulness in migrating users from Win to GNU/Linux. Mandrake 8.0 First Look.”

An anonymous reader writes: “With recent news regarding lawsuits over emails, companies firing employees over using email services for their own use, mistrust, insecurities, etc., I often wonder why more people haven’t gotten hip to using encryption, or at least PGP signing email. An SSL certificate, PGP, something, anything to provide a definitive method of protection for themselves.

How important is one’s life to them? When people are ordering merchandise over the net, are they that naive to think that the world is a safe place? Aside from that, my biggest gripe is still focused on why many haven’t yet shifted to at least PGP signing an email as a standard de facto action.

Read more at LinuxNewbie.org.“

Frank Carlos writes: “Take a good look at the IBM Small Business Suite for Linux. It has all of the major software products IBM has ported to Linux, and at a cost a small business or just about anybody can easily afford($499 per server and $90 per desktop). The list of server and desktop software includes Lotus Domino Application Server for Linux V5.0.4, IBM WebSphere Application Server Standard Edition for Linux V3.0.2 (including IBM HTTP Server for Linux V1.3.12) powered by Apache. IBM DB2 Universal Database Workgroup Edition for Linux V7.1 (including IBM Net.Data for Linux V7.1) and IBM WebSphere Homepage Builder for Linux V4.0. If you want a complete, enterprise-grade software base for business solutions – robust, secure and scalable and you want to use Linux to do it, then take a serious look at the IBM Small Business Suite for Linux.”

Fairfax IT: “Ever since human beings began to claim ownership over property, other human beings have sought to take it from them. In the past quarter of a century, with the arrival of digital technology, both property and theft have taken on new forms.”

The Register: “A Californian airport was closed for six hours on Friday, following a bomb scare.

And the ‘culprit’? Step forward the Titanium Powerbook G4. Operators of an x-ray
machine installed at Burbank airport were unable to get a high-enough res look at
a machine trundling through security. They called in back up for some chemical
analysis. Swabs revealed “residues” which caused some concern The police and
the FBI were called in, flights were cancelled, and hundreds of customers were left
milling the booking hall.

After six hours, the police determined that the Powerbook was indeed a Powerbook
and not a bomb.”