In the new article "Developing 64-bit Applications" of the "Tiger Developer Overview Series" published on ADC, Apple states that the Cocoa and Carbon GUI application frameworks will not be ready for 64-bit programming. Even the kernel will be compiled in 32-bit address mode and will be provided in only one version for all the machines. The only 64-bit system framework which will be provided in a "fat" format will be libSystem which command-line applications, servers and computation engines will be linkable to. The 32-bit GUI clients will be capable however to communicate with the 64-bit server processes by using several IPC techniques.

Since the decision to demote ULE in favor of the 4BSD scheduler as the default for FreeBSD's 5.3-Release, many improvements to both schedulers have been committed. At the time it was marked broken, ULE was especially needy in light of the status of its maintainership, performance issues, and its unreliable nature in conjunction with threading and kernel preemption. Having resolved these problems, Jeff Roberson announces to -current that the ULE code is now in working order: More information can be found on kerneltrap.org.

The ubiquity and utility of Ant as a build tool for Java projects is virtually unsurpassed. Even Maven, the new, upstart utility in the build arena, owes much of its power to lessons learned from Ant. This article introduces Groovy's builder utility, which makes it especially easy to combine Groovy with Ant and Maven for more expressive and controllable builds.

The debian project has some interesting developments related to its GNU/Hurd port, including a solution to the annoying limitation mentioned above.

After much development and four previous releases, FreeBSD-5 has finally gone stable with version 5.3. But don't mistake a stable codebase with stable software. While the development team will no longer accept major changes to the base system, FreeBSD 5.3 still has bugs and problems. NewsForge has the review.

Version 1.1 of FreeSBIE, a FreeBSD Live CD, was released last week, and here's a first look. Update: Screenshots via OSDir.com.

Fedora PPC is now in test stage, a Fedora Core 3 test was released last week. Here few impressions and screenshots on this test release.

I guess shelling out big bucks for a New York Times ad is paying off. The New York Times has published an article about Firefox in their technology section, outlining its provenance, its recent rise in fortune, and the competitive landscape of the newly-competitive-again browser wars. (Firefox users can take advantage of the Bugmenot Extension to handle the NYT login).

Interview with David Lee, CEO of Cambridge (Mass.)-based Advent Consulting, "A recent Jupiter Research survey shows a growing number of small and midsize businesses (SMBs) using open-source alternatives to Microsoft (MSFT ) products. About 9% of SMBs are using Red Hat (RHAT ) Linux on the desktop, and 7% are using the OpenOffice productivity suite, which contains word processing and spreadsheet programs."

Microsoft Office is fast becoming a software platform unto itself. There are a growing number of programs being developed that run on top of Office, much the same way that Office and other programs run on Windows.

The first Release Candidate for FreeBSD 4.11 has been made available. Please see the full announcement on the FreeBSD-STABLE mailing list here. The full 4.11 release schedule is here. For the "ULTRA" conserative, this appears to be the last release cycle for the 4.x branch.

I noticed that IBM released a new Redbook this month: "Linux Client Migration Cookbook -- A Practical Planning and Implementation Guide for Migrating to Desktop Linux" Among the most interesting topics which are focused on the desktop deployment and technology are the chapters about "Migration best practices" and "Desktop automation and scripting".

For a theoretically free operating system, Linux is -- and will continue to be -- a cash cow, a research firm said Wednesday as it predicted the OS will bring in more than $35 billion in revenues by 2008. Framingham, Mass.-based IDC said that overall revenue for servers, desktops, and packaged software running on Linux will reach $35.7 billion in the next four years. Currently, IDC pegs Linux's global total take at just under $15 billion.

University students tasked with finding flaws in Unix applications as homework have uncovered 44 bugs. But since the University of Illinois at Chicago students were asked by tutor Daniel Bernstein to find 10 bugs each, most will likely flunk his Unix Security Holes course. The assignment counted for 60 per cent of the marks available to the 25 students taking the course.