The Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 introduces a new transactional programming model in the System.Transactions namespace. See its features and capabilities, and advanced features such as asynchronous work, events, security, concurrency management and interoperability.

Novell today introduced the Mono Kickstart program to provide for the first time developer support to organizations using Mono for new application development or migrations. Mono Kickstart includes 25 developer support incidents along with one server or 50 desktop licenses for $12,995. Additional developer support incidents, server licenses and desktop licenses can be purchased separately.

The last time the Qt 4 Resource Center had a look at Qt 4 Designer there where some problems. Now, a follow-up article tries a later version and finds that Designer has improved dramatically.

The requirement for a fast CPU to decode H.264 HD video content will soon be a thing of the past. ATI (slides on Xbit Labs' site) is preparing a hardware-based decoder enhancement for future boards. With Texas Instruments, Analog Devices and other manufacturers releasing H.264 hardware decoders, it won't be long before NVidia and other manufacturers catch up, however ATi is not the first manufacturer to offer this specific feature.

The tools to analyze the performance of applications are varied and have existed in one form or another since the early days of UNIX. It is critical to understand how an application is interacting with the operating system, CPU, and memory system to understand its performance. This chapter will help you understand where the bottleneck in your system is occuring, and how to fix it.

NewsForge has a review of FreeBSD 5.4 up today. While it's better than the previous three releases, it still doesn't work as well as it should. Many bugs have been fixed, but some big ones still remain, especially on multi-processor and AMD64 machines.

A new video from the SkyOS site shows off the IndexFeeder and the Viewer displaying live results. The video was captured in VMWare showing a few queries made over a 40GB attribute and file content indexed filesystem. There is also a document explaining a few internals of the indexing system used in SkyOS.

Are sub $300 PCs the wave of the future or is this just another fad? Flexbeta examines the effects cheap PCs may have on Microsoft, hardware vendors and the rest of the computing industry.

Nokia will donate the proceeds from the sales of 500 Nokia 770 Internet Tablets to the GNOME foundation.

KDE 3.4.1 has been released. It is a maintenance release which "provides corrections of problems reported using the KDE bug tracking system and greatly enhanced support for existing translations and new translations. "

Software developed by S.R.D. (Systems Research and Development), recently acquired by IBM, allows huge collections of personal data (travel manifests, medical data) to be compared with other databases, such as terrorist watch lists, while not actually disclosing the data between two entities. What's actually compared is a one-way hash, and any "hits" between two lists, would identify a record number that would presumably lead to a request for the whole record. S.R.D. was originally funded by the CIA's In-Q-Tel venture capital arm.

Sun Microsystems is embarking on a $50 million ad campaign, associating its products and services with some of its prominent customers such as eBay, General Motors, and Major League Baseball. Responding to declining sales and influence in the industry, Sun is revamping its image, down to their packaging, office decor and even on-hold music.

Desert Spring-Time (DST) is an OS based on the OCaml runtime+native code compiler. Their goal is to build a robust system through extensive use of OCaml language features, such as static type checking. Currently, this is only a prototype, and is best tested with qemu. More information can be found here.

KernelTrap reports: Colin Percival continues the discussion regarding the shared-cache vulnerability inherent in multi-core processors, offering potential mitigation techniques in the form of fixes to the FreeBSD schedulers. Based on Percival's original discovery, information leakage between threads which share a processor core and the subsequent opportunity to monitor memory access patterns can be prevented by eliminating the co-scheduling of threads that have differing privileges.