Sun Microsystems has polished off its cheapest and likely most attractive Opteron-based workstation to date. The hardware maker today introduced the world to the Ultra 20 a one-way (one socket) box that starts at $895. That price has to please a lot of Sun customers who complained when the much higher-end W2100z amd W1100z workstations arrived, costing thousands of dollars. With the Ultra 20, Sun is really delivering some of the price/performance benefits associated with x86 chips to the developer crowd.

In the next release of Java (Code named Mustang) user interface will use more native GUI components. Dimitri from Java2D team announced that in the latest relase of Mustang (Build 42) Gnome native widgets are used for rendering. You can see the related bug, change list for Build 42, and download the latest binary snapsot and code.

"Every time I hear another announcement on what Longhorn will implement or what new tricks it will learn to perform, I have the feeling that I’m watching a show where the magician pulls rabbits out of a hat." Softpedia has a lengthy piece discussing what Longhorn means to Redmond.

Transaction services are usually the main reason why Enterprise Services is used. This chapter opens with an overview of transactions, examines how you can task transactions programmatically, and finally turns to how you can use Enterprise Services transactions, and how you can access the new features offered with Windows Server 2003. Read more at Informit.

"Rivalry between different derivatives of OpenSolaris has already begun, two weeks after Sun Microsystems' initial code release."

While enabling the next generation is one thing, getting corporate customers and consumers on the Longhorn bandwagon may take some doing, say professors at Wharton.

Not everyone is cheering about RSS integration into Windows Longhorn and Internet Explorer 7. With the event of making RSS a native format for Longhorn, many software developers whom make stand-alone feed readers are crying out that Microsoft is once again shutting down a sector of business which in all respects is somewhat true. With the complete integration of the format within the OS, there is no need of stand-alone feed readers. Flexbeta has a nice write up about what MS is trying to accomplish with RSS integration into the OS.

If you're tired of all the reading, reading, reading, here's a chance to kick back and watch some TV. University of Washington TV recently ran a show produced by its computer science department called "Open Source: New Religion or Viable Business Model?" Their web site carries streams in various formats.

MLAgazine has a detailed history of the Amiga, from its beginnings as the pipe dream of a frustrated Atari engineer to it's beginnings as a revolutionary gaming console, through the mini-collapse of the gaming industry, and into the early days of the personal computer.

Apart from showing off IE7 at Gnomedex this year, spy-shots of Longhorn also show its current build: 5087. It is not known whether this build will be the Beta build that will be released to testers this summer.

Bink.nu is the first site to post some real IE7 screenshots that show, amongst other things, some suspiciously familiar RSS abilities.

A new acceleration architecture is being ported from kdrive by some QT developers, which will make composition managers like xcompmgr really fast and able to do some of the "display tricks" MacOS X has been doing for awhile.

"Sometimes System Administrators need to determine where applications spend most of their time, in order to tune their systems better. The traditional method, when the source code for the application and gcc are available, is just to recompile the application with the – pg flag and to use gprof to profile it. Other than the inconvenience of the recompilation process, the solution is pretty straightforward. But what happens when you don’t have the source code for the application? And what if you’d like to profile the system as a whole? That’s when oprofile comes in handy."

YellowTab recently announced the opening of a "job centre" on its web site, with three jobs listed: Bug hunter, Builder Engineer and RAD GUI. You'd need to move to Germany and know German, but there are few actual jobs in alternative OS development these days, so bust out those "Learn German in Three Days Under Hypnosis" tapes, and get going!