In November this year, Sony will launch the PlayStation 3. Apparantly, Sony has high expectations for the Linux-powered device, and Sony even claims it will render the PC useless. "We believe that the PS3 will be the place where our users play games, watch films, browse the Web, and use other computer functions," said Sony exec Phil Harrison. "The PlayStation 3 is a computer. We do not need the PC." Let's see how Sony's Vaio devision feels about this.

Microsoft has taken another step in its effort to bring Windows in the world of supercomputing, having finished development of its computer cluster operating system. It has finalized the code for Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003, which is designed to allow multiple servers to work together to handle high-performance computing (HPC) tasks. Such work, long handled by systems from SGI and Cray, has increasingly been tackled by Linux clusters, though Microsoft has been planning its entry for some time.

"UnixLite is a lightweight UNIX/Linux compatible operating system written in c++; it is open source and released under the GNU General Public License. The complete operating system is made up of a kernel and applications; just like Linux, UnixLite is only the kernel. The kernel itself is written from scratch and the biggest part is written in c++; however, the library used by UnixLite comes from uClibc and applicaitons running on UnixLite come from the GNU project."

The widely used uIP TCP/IP stack is a very small implementation of the TCP/IP protocols, designed for memory constrained networked embedded systems. Version 1.0 adds a number of features such as a new socket-like API, rudimentary IPv6 support, and a DHCP client, as well as fixes corner-case bugs in TCP that have been found through many years of real-world testing.