Microsoft is appealing a record European Commission fine for not complying with a milestone European Commission anti-trust ruling.

Keep an open mind, says Spolsky, in a rant about both unwanted mega-architectures, and the way big companies snaffle up all the best coders.

Windows Vista is better at protecting against malware than XP but more easily infected than Windows 2000, according to a study by Australian anti-virus firm PC Tools.

The survey calls into question Microsoft's oft-cited claims that Vista is its most secure operating system.

Database tools vendor Embarcadero Technologies has snapped up Borland Software's unwanted tools subsidiary CodeGear for $23m - $127m less than initially sought.

As Microsoft encourages the shift towards Windows Server 2008, you might think that the previous versions immediately become obsolete. But demand has shown this to be false, and this is why we at Reg Books have decided to package together the key Windows Server 2003 MCSE and MCSA Online Learning products into cost-effective collections.

It’s also accepted that, if you are looking to upgrade your qualification from Server 2000 to 2008, the upgrade path is unquestionably easier to follow if you first train on Server 2003 and then move on to the 2008 material (not that a straight jump from 2000 to 2008 is impossible).

With this in mind the Online Learning collections below could prove to be the most cost-effective piece of spending you do all year, not only providing the knowledge you need but saving you thousands of pounds on training. Can you afford not to take advantage?

JavaOne Sun today announced the yet-to-launch JavaFX programming language will gather data on end-users activities to help developers monetize software, by selling ads for instance.

Google is spearheading a volunteer workforce it hopes will become the centralized authority for responding to security issues in open source software.

CommunityOne The relationship between business, vendors and coders has been tested at a Sun Microsystems conference in San Francisco intended to express oneness with open source.

The first supported first version of Sun Microsystems' OpenSolaris, AKA Project Indiana, makes its debut today with additional backing from Amazon's Elastic Computing Cloud.

PHP is the latest language getting the NetBeans treatment, with a PHP version of Sun Microsystems' open-source environment hitting early access today.

A Pittsburgh computer consultancy is paying $45,000 in civil penalties over claims it discriminated against legal US residents by advertising only for developers on H-1B visas.

In surreptitiously slipping Safari onto Windows by way of the Apple Updater, Steve Jobs and his minions have tripled the browser's market share.

It's messy, slippery and gets everywhere, particularly the high-quality stuff. Spam is still the scourge of the unwary company, and if you don't know your whitelists from your blacklists, you might want to check out our new primer for some spam management pointers.

Linux developer Hans Reiser's conviction for first-degree murder has re-ignited the debate about the future of Linux's various file systems.

In this post, Glen Stampoultzis posts a very interesting and clever sequence of steps by which he converts a piece of Java code into idiomatic Groovy code. I thought it was a nice article, so I'll do a very short spin on it: taking Glen's final Groovy code and converting it into idiomatic Ruby.

Register Books is offering big discounts on a range of A+ Certification titles that cover everything you need to know to pass the CompTIA A+ Certification exams.

Adobe Systems is throwing open its Flash and AIR file formats to speed delivery of Rich Internet Applications to billions of mobile devices with its tools and players.

Reg Tech Panel What makes systems and apps fail? More importantly perhaps, what makes them get back up again? Do you have faith in your organisation's application lifecycle management processes, or does IT operations have to slap expensive protective measures all over place just to ensure that the working day can be addressed with some degree of certainty?

Hands on Microsoft's deal with US media giant NBC Universal to stream this summer's Olympic Games online using Silverlight represents a major demonstration of the potential of Microsoft's emerging browser-based runtime and streaming service.

Adobe has been getting ahead of itself, hinting at features in future versions of its is Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) development environment while claiming its yet-to-launch platform is now feature complete.