Closely following the update for the AmigaOS4 Pre-release, the updated Software Dev Kit (SDK) is now also available. Meanwhile some first people have been able to buy Mini-ITX MicroA1-C boards and last weekend at a British Amiga Party one was even raffled amongst its visitors. Also some first photographs of the Micro AmigaOne Industrial motherboard (aka u-A1-I) have been revealed at the party.

In this article I will analyze the features and costs to select which is the best operating system for servers as well as the services that each one of them brings to us.

The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is proud to announce the availability of FreeBSD 5.3-RC1. This will likely be the only Release Candidate before the final release of 5.3.

Trusted Computer Solutions is branching out from its Solaris roots with a secure version of Linux, due out in spring 2005.

What's one of Steve Ballmer's biggest headaches? It's not Linux or security breaches. It's piracy, the Microsoft CEO said Wednesday.

Now that Tiger is an official release, it's time to explore even more exciting differences between the 1.4 version of the Java 2 Standard Edition platform and 5.0 of the Java 2 Development Kit. In this installment of Taming Tiger, UI expert John Zukowski explores the newly available Ocean and Synth look and feels. Now, even non-programmers can develop custom look and feels without writing code or having the benefit of a good eye!

Keep your Web applications running when tasks lock up. High volume Web sites often require asynchronous or threaded operations to achieve target performance criteria. While threads in Web containers are considered bad practice, the alternative is for developers to make blocking calls to code they cannot control. It becomes important that dependencies of this nature fail-fast. This developerWorks article covers a homegrown short-circuit pattern that ensures threaded execution and completion of a process in a fixed window of time.

Here's an article titled 'Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger: Developer Overview'. It builds on the information presented on the Mac OS X Tiger Sneak Preview Site on apple.com and adds information that will be of interest to developers. Elsewhere, AppleInsider has new juicy details based on newer builds of Tiger.

D-BUS is an up-and-coming message bus and activation system that is set to achieve deep penetration in the Linux desktop. Learn why it was created, what it can be used for, and where it is going.

Martin Taylor, global general manager of platform strategy at Microsoft, talks to vnunet.com about how the company is handling the open source threat.

Rivals still fear Redmond and its deep pockets, but its clout is diminishing. The decision to unveil Office's source code is the proof.

This article provides a tour through some Mono programs, along with details about how you can start experimenting with them yourself. Not all of the programs featured here are finished products, but they're all exciting and show off interesting aspects of Mono. Even more Mono applications can be found at GnomeFiles.org: We should add to the list the excellent PolarViewer and SportTracker (they go together), and of course, GCursor#, CSBoard, Galaxium Messenger, SkyNET and GLyrics among others like Bless, fewnn, GFax, WoodPusher, CDCollect and Kurush.

Software vendors have been moving toward the subscription-type license over the past few years, and away from the perpetual license that had been the norm. Software firms note that companies generally upgrade regularly anyway, so subscription pricing spreads out the payment more easily. A win-win right? But companies don't like the feeling of bing on the hook for payments forever when they once felt like their fee was capped at a certain amount. Read more at PCWorld

Maybe you have to be a hard-core geek of a certain age to even see the wonderment of such a thing, but Jason Scott, who wrote the review, shares a delightful anecdote about Pac Man at the beginning to establish his credentials. He says that the off-broadway musical based on the 80's cheesy sci-fi movie is great. I just happened to catch The Last Starfighter on HBO a couple weeks ago, and it didn't disappoint my adolescent memories of it.