With each successive generation of technology, we collectively make each leap faster and with slightly less pain. However, as a music fanatic, the jump from tape to CD/mp3 was a tough one for me. Enter the Plusdeck2 Tape-RW PC Cassette Deck. This fantastic device, supplied by geeks.com, has been one of the best devices I've had the pleasure of reviewing. Read on for the complete story.

Sun has rejected notions that bundling the Google Toolbar with Java Runtime will be anticompetitive, especially since users will still have the option to install other toolbars such as Yahoo.

"Theo announced on -misc today that work is in progress to add G5 support to the macppc port. G5 machines will be running in 32-bit mode but there is the possibility of a macppc64 port to follow to take advantage of these 64-bit processors. All Apple models are being targetted (iMac, Power Mac, and Xserve) so if you have such a machine and wish to run OpenBSD NetBSD OpenBSD on it, your dreams are about to come true. As Theo stresses, this is very much a work in progress and not everything is supported or stable at this point in time."

FreeBSD's Murray Stokely says that the FreeBSD Project is pleased to announce the launch of the new website today. The new design was created by Emily Boyd, a student at Smith College that they had the pleasure of working with through Google's Summer of Code program. The old website is available here.

The new Visualizer feature in Visual Studio 2005 lets you see the data as the user sees it, or as the application uses it. And that will save you time and frustration. This article shows how it's done.

The Servlet-Based Content Creation Framework is an easy-used and easily-understood compact, content creation framework utilizing hamlets; a servlet extension that reads XHTML and uses the simple API for XML. Read this article on introducing Hamlets and learn how they can be used to separate Java and HTML in the same source file.

The first point release of the stable 2.12.x series of Gnome has been released. This release includes the latest bugfixes and other improvements such as updated translations.

With the first beta for Microsoft's upcoming Windows Server 2003 Compute Cluster Solution barely out the door, the development team is already thinking seriously about features and functionality designed to make the next version of the product even easier to use and manage than its Linux competitor.

I've been wanting to try Gentoo for some time, but always had to roll my eyes at the pages and pages of installation instructions. This time, however, I rolled up my sleeves and buckled down. Minutes later, I was on my way.

Don't expect hegemony from a single Linux vendor on the desktop comparable with Microsoft's Office, as rival frameworks and implementations tackle different markets. That's according to Red Hat fellow Alan Cox, who said research indicates users are adopting KDE and Gnome to serve different scenarios. Evidence from different reports suggests KDE is more widely used in Europe and Gnome in the US.

"The time it takes to log in to GNOME has not improved much in recent years and does not compare favourably with other systems, especially closed-source systems. This work attempts to determine what causes GNOME startup to be slow and what can be done to address the problem."

The Apache Software Foundation has announced the release of Beehive 1.0, its component toolkit for J2EE and Struts. Beehive is aimed at making it easier to develop Web applications in Java by reducing the amount of coding needed to produce a working application.

"This installment takes a fairly detailed look at USB drivers. The primary application is of course the Mac OS X driver architecture, but the test program I used was actually developed in parallel on Mac OS X and NetBSD."

"Apple has updated its .Mac suite of online tools, giving subscribers more for their $99.95 yearly fee. They'll now get more storage (1GB, up from 250MB), a new service called Groups for creating instant online shared spaces, and a simplified backup tool. .Mac has always been good, but Apple has never committed the resources to make it great. More storage and top-notch backup and antivirus tools would seem essential. The suite no longer offers an antivirus utility either."