Windows makes it easy to quickly download files to iPods and other portable storage devices--a little too easy in the minds of many IT managers.

UserLinux has released its first beta CD and is widening the scope of testing. The project, led by long-time open source advocate Bruce Perens gives enterprise customers a certified version of Linux without the support price tag and restrictive licensing policies offered with commercial distributions from vendors like Red Hat and SuSE.

Here are a few interesting benchmarks on QEMU, Valgrid simulation, Bochs and native speeds on x86. Also, a new stable release, Valgrind 2.2.0, is available. 2.2.0 brings many improvements over 2.0.0, and includes the new Massif heap-profiling tool.

Menuet v0.78-pre3 was released yesterday. Besides some bug fixes, the main change is a new look to the user interface.

Microsoft's Chris Anderson responds to Novell's Miguel de Icaza and then Miguel responds back. Elsewhere, Red Hat's Havoc Pennington talks about Open Source software subscriptions.

Mark Mitchell recently announced the availability of GCC 3.4.2. Mark explains, "there are no new features in this release, but there are a lot of improvements for various languages and architectures."

The X.org Foundation has released the sources for Xorg 6.8.0. Announcement here.

The OpenGL Architecture Review Board has released the OpenGL 2.0 specification.

Of the 10 most reliable hosting providers in August, Netcraft finds that five ran Linux. One site ran Windows, another, Solaris...and two ran that still-rising system called... FreeBSD. Read the article.

The following is a short review of Xandros Desktop OS Open Circulation Edition 2.01 otherwise known as the OC release. This is the first time there has been a freely downloadable version of Xandros in the companies history and I believed it was worth writing a review on. The OC Edition is a limited version of Xandros Desktop that is freely distributable, so you can get it for free and give it out. Read the Review at DesktopOS.com. Also at DesktopOS, a Libranet 2.8.1 review.

AMD demonstrated a dual-core Opteron design a week before Intel was set to demo theirs. In other Opteron news Sun has become the first tier 1 vendor to offer Opteron workstations: the single CPU W1100z and the dual CPU W2100z. Update: AMD Athlon 64 3800 CPU Review.

Yesterday Apple released a security patch that addresses 15 issues, including a serious Kerberos vulnerability. The patch repairs issues in OS X versions going back to 10.2. The patch is available through Software Update, and an advisory can be found at Apple's web site.

Some intrepid soul has ported the SIMH emulator to the GBA and is using that to run the PDP-6 version of UNIX v6. Actually, looking at the stats of the (ARM-based) GBA, it would have been eye-poppingly advanced back in the late 60s. There's a great article about it at Kernelthread. Update: Thanks to Vanders on setting me straight on which version of UNIX was actually ported.

Intel's high-end Itanium chip is not making the kinds of inroads that Intel had hoped. It's Xeon chip still rules the roost for servers. In response, the company will be launching a program that lets potential users try out Itanium hardware before they buy. A ZDNet article covers where Intel's going with the Itanium and Xeon.