Look beyond the bells and whistles, and make sure the security's tough. That's the attitude of operating system makers, who aren't just focusing on features such as snazzy graphics and better networking tools when revamping products. Now they're also providing sturdier defenses.

Next installment in Epic Games' popular sci-fi shooter series will ship for the PC in 2006 and will be on display at E3 next week. Unreal Tournament 2007 will have a whole lot to offer: all-new gameplay on a massive scale, an entirely new line of vehicles, expanded community support, and graphics and physics that are truly a generation ahead.

CRYTEK AND AMD said that the 64-bit version of Far Cry, optimised for its CPUs, is now available.

Dashboard, one of the much-publicized features of Apple Computer's latest OS, Tiger, could be ripe for exploitation by porn scammers.

Microsoft plans to steal a march on rival Sony by unveiling its next-generation games console on Thursday with an all-singing extravaganza fronted by Lord of the Rings star Elijah Wood. The public's first look at the new-look Xbox machine, on the MTV music network, will come at least six months before the console actually goes on sale.

But in the all-important war of hype, Microsoft will be the first on the block.

Mutagenix is a suite of four livecd variations from which to choose. It comes in basic Rescue CD, KDE 3.4, xfce, and gnome (freerock .2.0) versions ranging from 99mb to almost 600mb. Quite the bold undertaking for our hero I must say. He defines Mutagenix as "A dynamic and mutable variant of Linux; Any one of several LiveCDs based on Slackware and Linux-Live." Today, I thought I'd boot up two versions of the latest release, Mutagenix 2.6.10-1.

The Apache Foundation has proposed creating an open-source version of Java on the desktop, a plan that Sun Microsystems has initially welcomed, although questioned the need for it.

They're popping up all over this morning. Here's one at extremetech and another one at pcworld.

UPDATE: Here's yet another. Dang, I wish AMD would send me a set to review!

Almost one million net addresses owned by UK cable firm Telewest have been blacklisted by an anti-spam group.

Case Study: The Aloha state's commerce and consumer officials turn to open source for a major financial data access fix. "One thing that really impressed me about it was that it's just Linux."

How does AMD's new dual-core Athlon 64 X2 processor stack up against Intel's Pentium Extreme Edition 840? We have some preliminary - and dramatic - benchmarks.

When you run a .EXE file from that site, it opens a KDE window in a separate browser screen. It only works if you're running Windows, but if you're running Linux, you wouldn't need to try it out, would you?

Microsoft blogger has published screenshots of what he claims is an upgrade to the infamous 'blue screen of death' which can appear when Windows crashes. "I am not sure I would class the change as an improvement."

Today we’re a step closer to the launch of Athlon 64 X2 but it’s not here quite yet - you’ll have to wait until June for that pleasure. Until the official launch happens we won’t be able to get our hands on a fully fledged Athlon 64 X2 PC, so what we have here is a technical preview based on an AMD press kit of an Asus A8N SLI Deluxe motherboard, an Athlon 64 X2 4800+ and 1GB of Corsair 3200XL Pro memory.