"This is an in-depth look at fish, the friendly interactive shell. Fish is a GPLed commandline shell, written for Linux and other Posix-like systems. I felt there was a need for this article after all the attention that has been given to Monad, Microsoft's upcoming shell. Unlike Monad, fish is not a new way to look at the shell concept. Fish is based on the same ideas as other Unix shells like bash and zsh, but contains many user interface improvements and makes shellscript into a proper programming language."

"There is a lot of confusing information about the GNU/Linux operating system, open source and free software, and related issues in the press today. Many of these technologies and concepts are difficult to understand because they deviate from the standard historical traditions of the software industry. There are also a number of sponsored reports and other corporate propaganda published around the Web that smear the image of Linux and free software. In the interest of making a few basic concepts clear, this article will bring light to the darkness perpetuated by uninformed journalists, campaigning CEOs, and misleading advertisements."

"The Power Mac G5 Quad is, simply, the most powerful Mac workstation to date. Offering four 64-bit 2.5 GHz processors (in a dual dual-core configuration), this top of the line system also sports numerous other improvements in architecture and various components, such as dual independent gigabit Ethernet interfaces, PCI Express and support for the workstation-class Nvidia Quadro FX 4500 512 MB graphics card."

Microsoft is crafting a tool dubbed LUA Buglight that will call out potential software conflicts with a security feature in Windows Vista, related to the new Least User Access, or LUA that lets people run the operating system with fewer user privileges.

David Kanter has just written an article on IBM's eCLipz project, the upcoming POWER6 MPU and its performance characteristics. The eCLipz project is aimed at sharing hardware between IBM's UNIX, OS/400 and mainframe servers; the POWER6 is just one element of this project. The article discusses the microarchitecture of IBM's POWER6 which is due out in 2007, and provides performance estimates for SPEC CPU 2000.

Adam Leventhal (one of the DTrace developers) was in volved in making DTrace work for BrandZ. He's written a blog entry on using this combination to have a look at the "top issue" (why is it that whenever you run top, the top process is top?). The blog entry shows how using DTrace and OpenSolaris (the only way that you can currently d BrandZ), can be of benefit to Linux.

Channel9 met with Bill Hill and the ClearType team again and see what's the latest with the fonts in Windows Vista. They talk about trends in display resolution, research done in aesthetics and quite a few other things.

"I've received several emails and seen several articles asking whether any eventual decision by Massachusetts to approve two different document standards (e.g., Microsoft's XML Reference Schema (XMLRS) as well as the OASIS OpenDocument Format) would be a serious blow to the goal of achieving long-term access to documents. The quick answer is that this is not a binary situation, because there are different types of standards that serve different purposes, as well as different situations that have different dynamics."

This chapter covers several methods to measure execution time and real-time performance. The methods give different types of granularity, from the program’s complete execution time to how long each function in the program takes.

Without much ado, the FreeSBIE team has released a beta of their upcoming version 2. "You can download the beta from the torrent. You can log in as user 'freesbie' (no password) and try 'startxfce4' or 'startfluxbox'. You won't find the preconfigured menus and settings as Dave's still working on them, but you can run `openoffice.org' from a terminal. All you readers are strongly welcome if you can give it a test and report feedback, we are working hard for the new release." Note: Let's try not to get knickers in a twist over the icon this time, shall we?

"Clustering allows an application server to support multiple nodes with failover, session data sharing, and load balancing across many network nodes. This article provides details, direct from Apache Geronimo clustering effort team leader, Jeff Genender. Find out who is working on the details, how they work together to get the code written, and the ramifications these efforts are having on the open source community."

Matt Asay, who quit Novell recently, has written an opinion piece on the differences between Red Hat and Novell in the Linux industry. "Red Hat has long dominated the Linux market. In part this has resulted from serendipity - the company raised gobs of cash in a boom-time IPO and so was the first big player to market - but it also results from the company's rabid focus on customers. Importantly, Red Hat has never wavered from a core understanding that the low-hanging fruit is Unix."

Windows testers will get a new beta version of Windows Vista, dubbed the December Community Technology Preview beta build, just before next week's holidays, according to tester scuttlebutt. New to the December release, testers say, will be a number of features and user-interface tweaks. a new defrag module; tight integration of Windows Defender (formerly known as Windows AntiSpyware); and a functional parental-controls filter are all rumored to be in the December Vista build.

The AROS-Max team has released version 0.4.8 of their AROS-based live-CD. Their website is hopelessly outdated, so don't count on that to give you any information. A direct link to the download can be found here, and oGALAXYo has put up some screenshots of this new release (1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8).