BeOS was the brainchild of former Apple executive, Jean-Louis Gasse, who founded Be inc. in late 1990. Read the article at Macreate, a quick intro to the BeOS world.

For those interested in a deeper, more technical look at Solaris Zones, the Solaris team presented a detailed paper on Zones at USENIX's LISA '04 conference. The paper is available for download.

Big update while moving over completely to the Haiku kernel:

The first release candidate of Python 2.4. Python 2.4 is now close to release- there should be few or no new features, merely bug fixes.

The operating system family that powers the lion's share of servers is losing ground to Windows and Linux. Unix is losing so much ground that IT research firm IDC is predicting Windows will take over as the dominant server operating system by the year 2008.

Linspire, Inc. today introduced native support for Windows Media Player versions 8 and 9 on its operating system. Beginning immediately, all Linspire versions in all languages will include Windows Media support -- users will now have in-line playback of audio and video on popular sites like FoxNews.com and Movies.com, all with codecs legally licensed and fully integrated in the OS.

Although the next version of Windows is still about two years from release, Microsoft on Friday offered developers an early look at the new graphics engine that will accompany it.

A quick Mandrake 10.1 overview on a PowerMac.

Redhat Magazine has a good introduction to Fedora core 3 for end users.

November, 15 2004. The Solaris 10/NC04Q4 Launch 2004. Dawn in San Jose, CA was a truly beautiful sight to behold on Monday. As the sun rose over the mountains and shed its light on the valley below - the city, which the night before had seemed so unimpressive, suddenly came to life in the shimmer of the sun's rays. It seemed a perfect morning for the launch of Sun's most ambitious project to date. The press and other attendees looked happy, hopeful. Sun's folks were excited - especially the engineers.

IBM has been winning the TPC-C benchmark war against HP for some time and has now really put some pressure on its rival to keep up. Not only did IBM obliterate HP's Itanium-based server record of 1m transactions per minute, but it also did so with a better price/performance system.

I've been using Linux since the Redhat days. Since then, it has grown from a curious look to a hobby, and more recently to my main operating system. Due to starting out with Redhat, I admit to being partial to the Redhat/Fedora series. Don't let that concern you though, as I've tried all of the mainstream distributions, even Lycoris and Linspire.

The first issue of Zeta's Magazine (in German), Zemag, is now online. ZetaNews has more details.

IBM's programming and scripting language, REXX, may have achieved a unique range of supported platforms, with success on everything from the Commodore Amiga to OS/2 to IBM mainframes. Over the years, REXX gained object-oriented features, and turned into Object Rexx, with programming interfaces to DB2, C, and C++ applications. A few weeks ago, IBM quietly released Object Rexx to the open source community. RexxLA — the REXX Language Association — targeting the first release of Open Object REXX for early 2005.