System.Transactions is a new feature of the .NET Framework that will be included in Visual Studio 2005. Mike Clark shows how it provides a concise set of objects and interfaces for working with transactions as well as some interesting performance optimizations.

Microsoft founder Bill Gates, 49, talks about the thorny issues of computer security, competition, software bundling and how he lives with the downsides of his wealth and fame. In addition to being the world's richest man, Gates is the founder of the world's most powerful software company.

Following the NeXT tradition with mixed case, GNUSTEP is a livecd/distribution while GNUstep is an implementation of the OpenStep API. GNUSTEP is based on morphix, and use the GNUstep libraries and GNUstep-based applications to provides a NeXTSTEP-like environment that people can easily test and use. This new release comes 8 month since the precedent 0.5 release, and brings a lot of new GNUstep applications with it, as well as an upgrade of the GNUstep libraries and the development tools.

A source-code analysis of the MySQL database revealed few bugs compared with the number found in commercial code, testing company Coverity said Friday.

An interesting summary from the 2004 Annual NetBSD Group Meeting was posted to the NetBSD -announce mailing list. The report discusses past achievements as well as future goals.

"Anyone who dislikes the non-standard desktops of many distributions will feel right at home with Libranet, and the .deb packaging system will keep the Debian nerds happy. Those of you searching for a server-oriented distribution should look elsewhere, but if you're searching for a strong desktop/multimedia distribution, Libranet is one of the best choices available." Read more at NewsForge.

Linare introduced today its newest product, an AMD-based laptop for $498. A $598 model with more RAM, DVD-ROM and WiFi is also available. My Take: Good & fair prices for the features.

The EDE Team presents version 1.0.2 of the Equinox Desktop Environment and version 2.0.4 of the Extended Fast Light Toolkit (eFLTK).

W. McDonald Buck, retired CTO of World Bank, believes we need to take a more honest and frank look at the Cost Analyses it will take to put Linux on the corporate desktop. In Part I of Corporate Desktop Linux - The Hard Truth he says that a business can't buy a computer without Windows and save money in the transaction.

HURD developer Marcus Brinkmann made a historic step and finished the process initialization code, which enabled him to execute the first software on HURD-L4.

James Gosling has called Microsoft's decision to support C and C++ in the common language runtime in .NET one of the "biggest and most offensive mistakes that they could have made".

Bookpool.com has posted an excerpt from Knuth's long awaited The Art of Computer Programming: Volume 4. It is very short and discusses combinatorial searching.

This article describes changes and new features in IBM Cloudscape Version 10, also known as the Derby release, and the process of how to configure IBM WebSphere App Server to use this new version.

GTK+ is now the first major toolkit to depend on the Cairo vector graphics library which is designed to provide high-quality display and print output. Cairo will add 3 more dependencies to GTK: itself, glitz and libpixman (after atk, Pango, Glib, FontConfig and the standard X libs). The addition is now part of the HEAD of GTK's CVS. Some might argue that Cairo should have been integrated to X instead (as an extension or as part of the core), so all toolkits would get the benefits, transparently (if enough engineering was to go into this). I sent an email to selected GTK+ developers last May about this, and here is what Owen Taylor, GTK's project leader, replied: Update: GTK+ 2.6.2 released.