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Windows 8.1 is now the fifth most popular desktop OS, at least as recorded by Web tracker Net Applications. For November, Microsoft's latest version of Windows snagged 2.64 percent of all desktop OS traffic recorded by Net Applications. That number was a healthy gain from the 1.72 percent seen in October and the 0.87 percent in September. The rise also pushed Windows 8.1 just ahead of Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks with a 2.42 percent share and just behind Windows Vista with a 3.57 percent share. Windows 8.1 popped up in June as a preview edition before officially launching in...

We have truly entered the world of "Alice in Wonderland" when the CEO of a company that pays $16 million a day in taxes is hauled up before a Congressional subcommittee to be denounced on nationwide television for not paying more. Apple CEO Tim Cook was denounced for contributing to "a worrisome federal deficit," according to Senator Carl Levin — one of the big-spending liberals in Congress who has had a lot more to do with creating that deficit than any private citizen has. Because of "gimmicks" used by businesses to reduce their taxes, Senator Levin said, "children across the...

Gnome project cofounder and current Xamarin CTO Miguel de Icaza says he's done wrestling with Linux on the desktop, and that he now uses Apple kit exclusively for all of his workstation needs. De Icaza is well known in the open source community for developing a number of client-side technologies for Linux, including the Midnight Commander file shell, the Gnome desktop environment, and the Mono project. But in a blog post on Tuesday, de Icaza wrote that not only does he no longer use Linux for his day-to-day computing needs, but he hasn't actually booted his Linux workstation since October...

TAMPA — Every year on every NFL team, the Turk nervously ambles next to players in the locker room, dorm room or cafeteria, his role a designated dream killer whose only job is to signal the death knell to somebody's career. He delivers two messages: The coach wants to see you, and bring your playbook. Well, never again in Tampa Bay. Instead, he'll ask them to bring their iPad. That's because rather than producing thick periodicals the size of the Yellow Pages, the Bucs have downloaded their playbooks on iPad 2s and distributed them to each of their 90 players....

Two different graphs. Both happen to be published at Ars Technica, with one of them coming from a different source. Seemingly completely unrelated, but when you ponder the waterfall of recent lawsuit-related news, these two graphs suddenly tell all there is to tell. These two innocent little graphs illustrate why Apple is attacking Android so ferociously. Let's start with the first graph. Based on Apple's recent quarterly results, it shows where, exactly, Apple's revenue is coming from. It's not iPods, it's not iTunes, it's not even Macs; no, 68% of Apple's revenue in the past quarter has come from the...

Back on Friday we published Mac OS X 10.6 benchmarks and found it to offer some terrific performance improvements , but at the same time, there were a few notable regressions. Apple engineers have been working hard at pushing technologies like Grand Central Dispatch (GCD), OpenCL, full 64-bit support, and other changes to their OS X stack to bolster its performance capabilities and reduce the overall footprint. Now that we have tested Mac OS X 10.6, we are seeing how its performance compares to that of Ubuntu Linux. Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" will be out in October and does have...

The KDE Community is thrilled to announce the immediate availability of KDE 4.0. This significant release marks both the end of the long and intensive development cycle leading up to KDE 4.0 and the beginning of the KDE 4 era.

One of the first things we did with our latest upgrade was to get a view of Apple's market share by measuring the usage share of all Macintosh operating systems. This map jumped out at us as having a striking resemblance to the U.S. red/blue election map from 2004:

Many IT professionals are turning to Mac and Linux systems to avoid installing Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system as an upgrade, according to a survey conducted by King Research. Of 961 IT professionals polled, a whopping 90 percent expressed concerns about migrating to Vista. What's more, over half of those surveyed said they had no plans to use Microsoft's latest operating system at this time. Macs are currently the most favored alternative to Windows with 28 percent of respondents saying they would most likely to turn to Macs, rather than upgrade to Vista.

Just weeks ahead of its public launch, Apple Inc. has updated the minimum system requirements for its next-generation Leopard operating system to exclude 800MHz PowerPC-based Macs, AppleInsider has learned. The Cupertino-based company has yet to officially announce the hardware requirements to run Leopard, due out in October, but had long stated in developer documentation that the software would require "an Intel processor or a PowerPC G4 (800MHz or faster) or G5 processor."

Today I tried to help a Mac user save some pictures to a DVD. There were more than 1GB of photos, so it made more sense to use a DVD than two CDs. Unfortunately, Mac OS X thinks that you need to make movies when you insert a blank DVD disc -- it has no idea that you want to save data to it. What you, the user, want to do does not matter. All that matters is that you do what Apple says a computer should do. This is "the Apple way," and some people find it enjoyable.

This is a new feature in Beryl 0.2.0 and it simply looks wayyyy wicked! This is the stuff that makes OS X and Vista look dated.

Normally, we expect new Linux desktop users to come from the ranks of disgruntled Windows users. After all, they're the ones who have to deal with high-prices and endless security problems. Now, it seems that some Mac gurus are also making the switch to Linux.

In May 2005, a trojan called PGPcoder was discovered in the wild by Websense Security Labs. The trojan's purpose was to encrypt a user's files, then demand a ransom for their decryption. Although this scheme seemed novel, it is actually predated by over 15 years, by a similar scam in 1989. LURHQ's Threat Intelligence Group has now discovered a third such scheme involving ransomware which we are calling Cryzip. Unlike PGPcoder, which used a custom encryption scheme (which was subsequently reverse-engineered by LURHQ), Cryzip uses a commercial zip library in order to store files inside a password-protected zip. Although the...

Apple's newly acquired OS, NeXTstep was built on the Mach 3.0 kernel, the same microkernel used by GNU/Hurd. Though by then the Mach kernel was largely abandoned, another kernel, Linux, was gaining support and seeing rapid development. The project at Carnegie Mellon to develop Mach had ended in 1994, two years before Apple acquired NeXT. As early as 1991 papers were published documenting performance issues with the Mach kernel. At the time there was much debate over kernel design, 1992 marked the now famous flame war between Linus Torvalds and Andy Tanenbaum over monolithic vs. microkernel design. Even though Apple...

Familiarity breeds contempt, right? So it stands to reason that anyone who uses a product extensively can find fault with it. I’m no exception—my work requires me to use Mac OS X every day, all day long, and although I am generally thrilled with its capabilities and reliability, some things about it really drive me up the wall. Take a gander at my list of pet peeves; then share your own by posting to the Macintosh Weblog.

As far as the general user experience and graphical user interfaces are concerned, overall I put MacOS first, Linux/KDE second, Windows third. For networking and operating systems, it's Linux first, Apple second, Windows third. Since Apple appears to follow Microsoft's mindset closely, I don't see Apple's OS ever catching up to Linux. With this background, I don't see Apple making big inroads into the server market, but they have everything that is needed to win the desktop, something Linux has not been able to do because it only recently achieved a coherent GUI with the KDE desktop. If Apple would...

 Opinion: New Linux study suggests fundamental Microsoft credibility problems Nov. 17, 2005 Another day, another lame attempt by Microsoft to show that Windows is better than Linux. This time around, Microsoft commissioned a study to show that Windows does a better job of serving e-commerce applications than Linux. Of course, in the study, they didn't use the same e-commerce or back-engine DBMSs. OK, right there, without saying another word, anyone who really knows anything about benchmarking knows that the study is fundamentally flawed. You're not comparing apples to apples; you're comparing apples and oranges. It would be a different story,...

Apple can alter its business plan slightly and become the well-liked dominant force in the technology market. Everything Apple needs sits right in front of them for the taking. We're just sitting here waiting to restart global innovation and take the PC to the next step.

Signaling needs significantly more time in Mac OS X (Darwin) than on Linux. The processor plays a minor role: the Opteron at 2.4 GHz is a bit faster than the Xeon 3.6 GHz running exactly the same (x86) code. However, it is clear that the operating system plays a much bigger role: a 2.5 GHz G5 running Linux easily beats the identical system with a 2.7 GHz G5 running Mac OS X. Despite the FreeBSD heritage, the TCP signals are very slow (4 times slower!) on Mac OS X.