"In an important new development, the administration of Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney has not only appointed a permanent replacement to State CIO Peter Quinn, but also dedicated the press release announcing that appointment to reconfirming its steadfast commitment to the implementation of the OASIS OpenDocument Format. The announcement that Louis Gutierrez would replace Quinn was made today by State Secretary of Administration and Finance Thomas Trimarco, the immediate supervisor of the State CIO. The appointment of Gutierrez will be effective on February 6, 2006."

The OpenVZ project has released a beta kernel based on 2.6.15 (their current stable kernel is based on 2.6.8). Kernel 2.6.15 brings in some new features like CFQv2 I/O schedulers, enhancements in memory management, ext3 online resizing, and so on. This kernel is already stable enough to be used for testing/evaluation. Some things such as 4GB split and Fair CPU scheduler are not yet ported, but they are working on it. For interested kernel developers, they have also released broken out patch sets for the 2.6.15-based kernels, available from here.

Dave Miller of Red Hat has published three presentations from his keynote speech at the LCA Linux kernel conference which cover the Linux port to the SPARC64 Niagara architecture (Dave Miller is a long term primary SPARC port developer and maintainer) as well as two presentations covering Kernel Developer Social Interactions and TCP/IP networking.

"It's cool to say you have a dual-core machine, but in the grand scheme of things, having it doesn't make much difference in performance. If, however, your software can share the computational burden across your collection of processor cores, it's a different kettle of fish. Then you actually get more work done in a given amount of time. The technique is called thread-level parallelism, more commonly known as threading, and it requires some mental adjustment on the part of the developer."

The NexentaOS project has released the 2nd alpha of their OpenSolaris distribution, which uses the Debian userland and tools. It includes a new installer (with auto-partitioning), the addition of KDE, WiFi drivers, full support from booting off of removable drives such as USB sticks, the complete Mono platform including Beagle, Java runtime environment, OpenSolaris build 30, and much more. You can visit the getting started page (screenshots included), read the changelog, and then proceed to the downloads.

GeekPatrol puts their new cross platform benchmarking tool to work and compares 12 machines including the new iMacs, PowerMacs, an Athlon64, a P4c, and a Xeon. "The PowerPC G5 is still a good processor. In fact, it’s still a great processor. Apple isn’t switching to Intel chips because Intel chips perform better, but rather because a G5 would melt through the bottom of a laptop. The Athlon 64 edged out the Pentium 4c on all the CPU tests, while the Pentium 4c edged out the Athlon 64 on all the memory tests. It seems to me that Intel and AMD have had their different strengths all along, so I don’t find this surprising. The Intel Core Duo is a great processor. It performed as well or better than the PowerPC G5 at similar clock speeds (1.8GHz and 2.0GHz), and has nowhere to go but up."

Microsoft will omit anti-virus protection in Vista, the next version of Windows, which it plans to ship late this year. As with previous versions of Windows dating back to Windows 2000 at least, Redmond is promoting Vista as a landmark improvement in Windows security. Jim Allchin, co-president of Microsoft's platform products and services division, told reseller magazine CRN that safety and security, improved user experience, and mobility features will be key additions in Vista. But there will be no anti-virus software, the Windows development supremo said during a questions and answers session with CRN. For unspecified business (not technical) reasons, Microsoft will sell anti-virus protection to consumers through its OneCare online backup and security service.

"It has been a while since the pre-beta release of Symphony OS, a user-friendly distribution with a rather unusual desktop called Mezzo. Back then, the project attracted quite some attention in the media for fearlessly developing a unique approach to performing general computing tasks. Replying to impatient queries about a new release, the developers finally produced a new downloadable ISO some two weeks ago. Labelled as 'build 122', I downloaded the new release to check out the progress the developers have made over the past few months."

IBM is set to deliver a free version of its enterprise DB2 database software on Monday, following in the footsteps of competitors Oracle and Microsoft as they fend off the adoption of open source offerings MySQL and PostgreSQL. IBM DB2 Express-C only limits the hardware that the database can run on, but is otherwise identical to the full-fledged DB2 release. The software can be installed on machines with up to two AMD/Intel processors, and utilizes up to 4GB RAM. There is no limit to the size a database.

"Over the past month, community member 'mmadia' has been re-working the site for his extensive BeOS Boot Floppy/CD Collection. The goal of the site is to provide every combination of necessary boot-time patches, such as the AMD Athlon XP patch, RAM Limiter, IDE replacement drivers, and so forth. The site allows you to choose various options and then it creates a downloadable file with which you can burn onto a CD or write to a floppy diskette."

LinuxQuestions.org announced that voting for the 2005 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Awards is now open. The Members Choice Awards allow the Linux community to select their favorite products in a variety of categories. Awards will be given out in 20 categories, including Distribution of the Year, Browser of the Year, Office Suite of the Year, Desktop Environment of the Year and Database of the Year. The polls will close on March 16th and winners will have the option of receiving their award at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo in Boston. Last year's winners include Firefox, OOo, and MySQL.

"We've have always wondered whether a professional card, such as the NVIDIA Quadro FX series, can let us play games with as much ease as its GeForce counterparts. The reason is that most of the games are designed for consumer-end cards, so it makes sense that if the very cards that design the games should be able to play those games as well."

"If you have to travel, whether its out of your cubicle, out of your home, or out of the country, you should do your best to make your new surroundings as comfortable as possible. While so many things are out of your hands, one thing you can do to make your travels easier is to bring your favorite programs with you. To do this, all the things you will need are: a USB flash drive (practically any size) and a few minutes. When you get to your destination you will simply need a Windows computer, something which can be found in almost any library, office, hotel, or internet cafe anywhere in the world."

The Amanith library is a cross-platform (Linux, Win32, MacOS X, FreeBSD and IRIX) open source C++ framework for vector graphics. The new 0.3 release adds a full SVG 1.2-compliant enhanced alpha compositing layer, supporting all 24 compositing operations (base and extended Porter-Duff) in pure OpenGL. This makes Amanith the first opensource and crossplatform library that supports all of them in hardware (15 of 24 are available also without fragment programs). In addition a full geometry caching system has been introduced to speed up all drawing tasks. Version 0.3 has been released today.