BareFeats is continuing their benchmark articles for the fastest workstation/desktop machines around.

Microsoft's Windows platform chief Jim Allchin last week told 50 top-tier OEMs to think more like custom-system builders. During Microsoft's annual OEM executive summit at company headquarters in Redmond, Wash., Allchin, group vice president of platforms, advised the vendors to shift development resources into creating computing "experiences" through which they can differentiate their offerings, rather than beating each other up mainly on price and spewing out product specs.

ExtremeTech previews the Ubuntu Linux distro. We will be featuring two reviews of Ubuntu this week. Update: Another Ubuntu review.

Unununium Operating Engine got its 0.1 official release on Sunday. This release boots with a minimal shell and... a python interpreter! You can download a floppy image or an ISO from the official website.

Xandros Desktop and Lycoris Desktop/LX want to power your next PC. Are they up to the task?

The long awaited Syllable 0.5.4 is now available. This release includes a completly new Desktop and Registrar server which adds important functionality to Syllable.

Apple is hinting that the immediate availability of Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) could be announced at the Macworld Expo San Francisco show.

This download contains different projects and source files which are designed to show how how some common Visual FoxPro functionally is created in Visual Basic .NET. Many of these samples are directly or indirectly based on existing Visual FoxPro 8.0 Solution Samples for comparison reference. Each project is self-contained and can be run independently of any other.

Windows XP SP2 is 99% great, but the 1% that isn't turns a gift into a bomb. If Microsoft wants to win hearts and pocketbooks, then the product teams need to relearn how to treat customers with respect. With minimal effort, Microsoft could show paying customers that they are valued partners, rather than adversaries. Karsten Schneider writes about his experience with SP2, and his ideas of what it would take to turn a rock into rocks!

Perhaps surprising, and certainly not obvious to many people, is that it's been possible to develop RISC OS programs under Windows for a long time. Historically, ARM's SDK environment was able to generate RISC OS binaries, although that support was removed some time ago. More recently (but has still been true for a number of years), it's been possible to build RISC OS programs using GCCSDK under Cygwin - although bugs in the version of the compiler packaged with it did make that problematic earlier this year.

KDE and GNOME, the open-source software projects that together form the face of most Linux installations, have undergone revisions that boost their usability and enterprise readiness - advances that build the case for Linux as a viable alternative to Windows on mainstream corporate desktops.

Hewlett-Packard, one of the most aggressive promoters of Intel's Itanium family of processors, is 86ing its line of workstations that use the chips. The decision by the Palo Alto, Calif.-based computing giant will likely be interpreted as a large symbolic blow to Itanium's fortunes.

A top Red Hat exec has attacked the open-source credentials of its sometime business partner Sun.

This article does a roundup of the Linux support to G5 machines. Elsewhere, Macworld's initial benchmarks on Apple's new iMac G5 show that the machine is 35 percent faster than the previous G4 model. "As you could probably guess, the new G5-equipped iMacs out-performed than their G4-powered predecessors," writes James Galbraith.