The command line interface to the Windows Server OS will be changed to the new Monad Shell (MSH), in a phased implementation to take place over the next three to five years. This confirmation comes from Microsoft senior vice president Bob Muglia in an interview published today by Microsoft. 'Monad' Scripting Shell Unlikely to Debut in Longhorn says Mary Jo Foley though: Microsoft is planning to make its alternative to Unix and Linux command-line scripting available as part of Exchange 12, due next year.

"We received reports that GNOME was orders of magnitude slower than CDE on Sun Rays. To verify and measure this, I designed and ran some performance tests in order to compare the time and bandwidth usage of GNOME (JDS) with that of CDE on Sun Rays. The tests measure the time it takes to display data using various desktop applications: Browser, StarOffice and Terminal." Read more here.

The NetBSD Packages Team has frozen the development of new features for pkgsrc to prepare for the release of the next stable branch pkgsrc-2005Q2. The freeze period began on June 6th 2005 and is expected to last two weeks at the most. During this time, the developers will bring down the PR count and fix problems shown by the bulk builds. See Alistair G. Crooks's message to the tech-pkg mailing list for details.

Users of Microsoft's Internet Explorer don't have to wait until the release of version 7 to use tabbed browsing. Microsoft announced yesterday that with the newest MSN Search Toolbar, users can upgrade their current IE 6 and add the sought after functionality. You can read the story here.

After benchmarking an extensive set of Window Managers for X, we have found that Enlightenment DR17 comes out on top in terms of speed. The benchmark was performed on old (FVWM) and new (Metacity, new KDE / KWin) window managers and rated them in terms of window mapping and response time. The bechmark can be found here (both results and source).

The U.S. patent system will undergo its most substantial overhaul in decades if a bill introduced on Wednesday becomes law.

Dear Apple, I am among the many switchers you successfully brought to your platform. And now I plan to switch back. Simply put, after reading this press release, I no more think the Mac has any future as an interesting hardware or software platform. I further believe that you have made such a bafflingly shortsighted decision that I worry about the sanity of your management staff, enough to dread more of these moves. I also disbelieve most of the claims that have been made today as purely hilarious.

A Silicon Valley start-up called Transitive is supplying Apple Computer with a crucial bridge to enable the move to Intel-based computers, but skeptics worry about performance problems that have plagued similar products.

Xandros Corporation has released Xandros Business Desktop 3.0, an "instant alternative for Windows business desktops".

As part of its effort to assuage European authorities, Microsoft has made changes to its Windows XP N--the slimmed-down version of the operating system it was ordered to offer last year.

Instead of being put off by the announcement of Apple's imminent switch to Intel chips, developers attending WWDC seemed to take the announcement in stride, with many predicting a smooth transition to new processor.

Apple seeded a new build of Mac OS X 10.4.2 to developers. Build 8C27 addresses a few bugs from build 8C26 and features an "improved widget download experience." Individuals have submitted Xbench benchmark results from Apple's Pentium 4-based Power Mac systems. The benchmarks do not reflect native performance of the 3.6GHz systems, however, but rather provide an indication of how PowerPC-compiled applications will run under Rosetta on Intel-based systems.

SciTech Software, Inc. today announced that it has released SciTech SNAP Graphics 3.0 for Linux. It offers support for XFree86 and X.org. SciTech SNAP Graphics delivers advanced 2D acceleration for business users, Plug-N-Play support for hundreds of graphics cards and now provides advanced XVideo acceleration for ATI’s desktop and mobile graphics processor, making enterprise wide deployment and management easier and more powerful than ever.

According to this CNET report next week is the launch date for OpenSolaris. "After having dipped a Solaris toe into the open-source waters last January, Sun Microsystems will take the full plunge next week. The company's OpenSolaris effort will go live early next week, a Sun representative said.