Microsoft may not be willing to talk file-system futures, but it is working to back-port its future file-system technology to Windows XP.

Novell and OSNews are sponsoring the memory reduction project led by Novell's Ben Mauer by providing bounties to developers to help to clean up bloat in GNOME and related programs. If you are a developer and you are interested in some extra cash or prizes by making Gnome more usable on machines with 128 MBs of RAM (very usual configuration in developing countries or even European businesses), please read here. Related post here.

A quick look at what next major version of this popular open source office suite offers to end users.

Zones are one of the many useful new features in Solaris 10, both for adminstrators and developers. This article gives an example of using zones to replicate a multi tiered environment for use in development.

"This potential threat to first amendment rights and Apple's crackdown on Web sites that, in general, love the company and its products, do nothing to bolster Apple's image. In fact, the company's success of late has yielded accusations of bullying and potentially unlawful business tactics, not to mention complaints that songs purchased from its iTunes music service, the dominant digital music store, don't work with music players other than its own. To some, that might sound like its neighbor to the north," says Forbes.

The NetBSD Foundation has published a press release reporting on the benefits of the NetBSD/xen port, initially committed by Christian Limpach as previously reported. Since then, much progress has been made, and the NetBSD Project is now using NetBSD/xen internally. See the press release for further details.

The wireless USB protocol will be completed by the end of March and the access controller specification should be approved by the end of the year. Wireless USB is designed to be used at ranges of less than 10 metres and will allow peak data speeds of 480Mbps. Also, Intel has unveiled its first proposals for 802.11s, a new mesh wireless networking standard.

With a rapid succession of people moving towards Open Source, advocacy and evangelism is increasingly important in helping organizations to move over. The O'Reilly Network have started publishing a series of articles about Open Source by Jono Bacon that teaches how to approach advocacy sensibly and more productively. Read the first article here.

DTrace developers Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal have posted presentations covering Advanced DTrace Tips and Tricks and The DTrace pid provider on their blogs over the last few days. Update: RHEL benchmarks against Solaris.

MacWorld posted some basic benchmarks of Doom 3 on the Mac.

What is your main monitor's resolution? Take our poll inside!

Two of the biggest forces in the IT industry called on developers to begin porting their applications to x86-based 64-bit architectures. Microsoft and Intel said hardware and software pieces are in place to convert the computing industry away from a 32-bit Wintel ecosystem (define) to a world where all platforms, from servers and workstations through desktop and mobile, can run at nearly twice the speed with a larger address space. Elsewher, Microsoft's Longhorn Windows client product team will be led by G. Michael Sievert.

Close on the heels of the release of Linux 2.6.11 is the discussion of what should be included in the next revision. Andrew Morton who maintains the MM tree considered as the soft development tree from which things are later pushed to Linus lists the status for various new features here.

The IT industry isn’t as boring and technically obsessed as many outsiders believe. Viruses and malicious hacker threats in particular have been increasingly sensationalised in the popular press, squeezing the issues gradually into the public consciousness.