If you put pit laptops running on the Mac OS, Windows Vista, and Linux against hackers, which OS do you think would last the longest? Apparently, it's Linux. In this year's PWN 2 OWN contest, no one was able to hack the laptop running on the Linux OS. Which of the other two went down first? Better read the full article to find out.

According to gadget news site Gizmodo, the iPhone Dev Team is making steady progress towards their goal of freeing the Apple iPhone from its AT&T network lock.

The team has announced that the software that controls the phone's radio communications has finally been reverse-engineered. Gizmodo noted, however, that total unlocking is still quite a ways away.

Apparently, the work done on reverse-engineering the software has revealed that the iPhone has two layers that need to be explored further to fully unlock it. The first layer is the phone's main operating system, Mac OS X.

The second layer is the Nucleus Real Time Operating System which runs on a secondary chip and controls access to the baseband's memory. According to the iPhone Dev Team, the latter is one of the fronts that they could possibly use to "access or disable the lock from within the system."

Rob Mead at Tech.co.uk shared some of the "secrets" that were revealed at the Apple shareholder's meeting at Cupertino, California.

Third-party apps for iPhone. First, it seems that the iPhone will be open to third-party applications. Apple CEO Steve Jobs had said that the Apple iPhone wouldn't be open to third-party applications, that it would be a closed system based on Mac OS X (the goal was to make sure that the iPhone wouldn't be buggy). But it now seems that Mac developers are free to make apps for the iPhone.

Leopard delay. Steve Jobs also said that the delay of the launch of the Mac OS X Leopard operating system, the next version of Mac OS X, was partly due to the iPhone. According to Jobs, the issue isn't money; the issue is talent. It seems that Apple has dedicated a lot of time and talent to the iPhone, and there just wasn't enough left over for the Leopard. "I wish developing great products was as easy as writing a check," said Jobs. "If so, then Microsoft would have great products."

The smaller and innovative iPhone. It looks like there's a smaller iPhone on the way. Apple has made an application to the US Patent & Trademark Office for a sleek little device with a display on each side (patent number 0070103454). This "Back-Side Interface for Handheld Devices" has a rather interesting concept:

An electronic device uses separate surfaces for input and output. One of the surfaces (e.g. the bottom) includes a force-sensitive touch-surface through which a user provides input (e.g. cursor manipulation and control element selection). On a second surface (e.g. the top), a display element is used to present information appropriate to the device's function (e.g. video information), one or more control elements and a cursor. The cursor is controlled through manipulation of the back-side touch-surface. The cursor identifies where on the back-side touch-surface the user's finger has made contact.

In other words, the new iPhone is a dual-screen set-up with a touch screen. Hm. That reminds us of the Nintendo DS (over 40 million units sold worldwide).

Apple and the mobile phone market. Jobs also said that Apple really has to look deeper into the mobile phone market. In 2006, there were 135 million MP3 players and 200 million PCs sold. But in that same year, there were 1 billion mobile phones sold. That's a big market to explore.

If Apple thinks that the mobile phone market is worth exploring, then we at QJ.NET wish Apple the best. Several of us love our iPods, and if Apple's iPhone can do for mobile phones what the iPod did for "mobile audio and video," then we don't mind the Leopard delay at all.

After an entire months-long game of hopscotch, peek-a-boo, and "What Will Jobs Do Next", Apple finally reveals the... iPhone. Steve, you can be quite the stubborn cookie - we shall now have to differentiate between the Apple iPhone and the Linksys iPhone. Anyway, what's probably interesting about the iPhone is not what it has out of the box, but what it DOESN'T have, for a phone that costs as much as a PS3 - 20GB and 60GB.

Let's keep it short: no 3G. As a cellphone, that could potentially be crippling to the iPhone (especially when Steve wants 10 million on the streets by next year). And if he tries to sell the phone to Japan - that country is true-blue (or blood-red) 3G country - it's going to be murder, so we're thinking that Apple might want to keep this as a North American release for now.

Still, the global (let alone NA) cellular industry isn't Apple turf - the iPhone is not going up against late entrants and also-rans (e.g., Zune), but against the monoliths of the cellphone industry: Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola. Steve Jobs says that the iPhone is five years ahead of any other mobile phone. Well, not in the 3G department, most definitely.

But we're not going to simply surrender to the belief that Steve Jobs' fair-haired boys didn't think of this when they drew up the iPhone's specs. They could always market it as a luxury product (at that price, it better well be). But for a company that has made its mark as a mass market trend-setter (even given the price of the 5G iPod), that could be a bit odd.

But we still think that the iPhone is, as our gaming cousins in the QJ network put it, FTW!!! 1st post W00t!!!. Find out why after the jump.

The New Yorker is definitely proud of its new accomplishment: it's now the very first in digital publishing to release its entire archive from February 1925 to April of 2006 on a portable hard drive.

You can now have over 4,000 issues of the said magazine right in the palm of your hand in an 80GB brush-aluminum hard drive that measures only 3"x5" which also happens to have room for extra storage where you can put whatever data you need. The hard drive is only accessible through a PC or laptop that has USB ports. But you shouldn't have a problem with that, everything comes with a USB port nowadays, right? (But if yours doesn't have one, there's something very very wrong with your PC or laptop - or you're just not keeping up with the times.)

You will first need to install The Complete New Yorker Program from the CD provided upon purchase. Then simply connect the New Yorker hard drive to a USB port and voila, you can access all the cartoon strips ever published on the magazine since 1925. Well, of course you can also access the news, stories, and articles, as well as poems, and cartoon strips.

System Requirements:
Computer Use Only
Windows 2000 or XP
Mac OS X 10.3 or higher
USB 2.0 port
750 MG hard drive space
1024 x 768 minimum screen resolution

The New Yorker is selling their hard drive archive for $299, worth every cent if you're a real fan of the mag.

From the Nimble company blog comes the story of an employee that used the Microsoft line of operating systems from the very beginning of his career only to make the switch to OS X after the years of frustration became too much for him to bear.

From DOS 2.1 to Windows XP he continued to suffer through instability, insecurity and lack of functionality. Finally, after losing one too many machines to a build up of malware, he decided to go Mac and not look back!

I may have been exaggerating his suffering (in a poor attempt at humor) but the underlying problems that pushed him away from Windows are real and cannot be ignored. The Nimblogger goes on to detail some of the differences between the two operating systems, along with some of the deficiencies that he found in Windows.

Many of the negative points that he makes about XP are legitimate but, he seems to have developed a permanently hostile stance toward Microsoft that cannot be changed. Although most of his assertions are common knowledge and their validity is not in doubt, some of his assertions simply express his now soured opinion of Microsoft.

The number of viruses floating around in the wild facing XP users, the level of style and design savvy apparent in the machines and the "it just works" factor are but a few of the reasons the author gave for making the switch.

Having been a Mac and a PC owner myself, I can attest to the fact that Macs actually do work out of the box better than PCs, and the Nimblogger seems to agree with me. Either way you look at it, more operating systems would benefit everyone; prices would likely be lower, consumers would have more systems to chose from and the competition would foster advancements in technology.

Regardless of what OS you use, learning about the causes behind an experienced computer users decision to switch operating systems can give you more to think about the next time you need to decide on a platform to use.