Windows Server 2003 R2 makes it easier and more cost effective to extend connectivity and control to identities, locations, data, and applications throughout and beyond your organization. Experience the difference yourself by downloading the Windows Server 2003 R2 trial software.

Interested in tuning your C/C++ applications for Linux on POWER? This article compares the optimization options for both Linux on POWER C/C++ compilers: GCC and IBM XL C/C++. This paper also reviews tactics, such as Interprocedural Analysis, Profile Directed Feedback, and High Order Transformations, which are used by one or both of the compilers to extract higher performance from the Power architecture.

Performance test tools can sometimes work better than traditional functional test tools for functional testing, Mike Kelly says.

EMC's vitual machine software edges out Microsoft's in overall features, says Microsoft Magazine.

The Eclipse open-source development platform has far outdistanced Sun Microsystems Inc.'s NetBeans in terms of developer and vendor support, but Sun has vowed to continue to innovate around NetBeans while practically everybody else in the Java world is supporting Eclipse, says eWeek.

"To save power, the hard drive stops spinning between uses. That's fine. What's not so fine, however, is that it takes six seconds to spin up again and feed its data into the palmtop's memory so you can use it. As a result, your work is frequently interrupted by maddening, six-second visits to the dead zone. Everything is frozen on the screen, no button works and your workflow comes to a crashing halt." Read the full review of PalmOne's Lifedrive at News.com.

Apple felt threatened by the pending release of Windows 95. It had preemptive multitasking, and was heralded by many magazines as "easy to use as Mac". Apple started he Copland project to respond. It was to have had live searches, full multitasking and all of Apple's next generation technologies. The project was canned in 1996 at the behest of Gil Amelio, though many of its technologies were eventually included in the OS. Read about it at MLAgazine.

The Icon Bar has got a live show report from the floor of this weekend's RISC OS show. So far seen there is the A9 Home machine, which runs RISC OS on an ARM9 processor, VirtualRiscPC for MacOS X, allowing MacOS users to run RISC OS on their Macs amongst other things.

Can a proprietary Unix be a desktop OS that competes with Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux desktops? Although it may lack the visual effects of OS X, and installation is tricky in parts, Irix is a stable desktop OS -- possibly because it runs only on SGI's own hardware. Read the rest at NewsForge.

Castle logoCastle have provided a beta ROM image of RISC OS 5.09 for Iyonix users, prior to an official post-Wakefield roll out of the new version. The beta release includes "updated USB" support.

Partition Logic is a standalone graphical partitioning tool that boots from a single floppy disk or CD, intended to become a free-software alternative to certain well-known proprietary offerings. It's also an experiment in finding ways that a hobby OS (Visopsys) can be made useful/interesting to the sort of people who don't read OSNews. Release announcement here and download page here.

OpenBSD 3.7 is the first release to support newer wireless chipsets, especially for 802.11g, thanks to a big activism campaign lead by project leader Theo de Raadt. It's now possible to create a portable access point with a tiny PDA using the Zaurus port, too. As usual, there are a lot of other big and small changes, such as the import of Xorg, the jump towards gcc3, and a feature to update your installed packages automagically. Discover the details behind the scenes in this interview that Federico Biancuzzi had with several OpenBSD developers.

PCBSD 0.7 was released. This release is built from the FreeBSD 5.4 core, and fixes many bugs from earlier versions, as well as updating the package manager/creator.

Java Swing comes with "pluggable look-and-feel technology", which essentially boils down to the fact that interfaces can be "skinned" (although this is simplifying a tad) and is therefore, extremely flexible. By default, Java ships with a cross-platform look-and-feel (LAF), which means your apps can look consistent across all platforms, or LAFs that mimic the look of a specific platform, say Windows, for example. However, one of the chief complaints of Java desktop applications is its "look". It basically stems from two issues: