SGI has released IRIX 6.5.25 to individuals/companies with a support contract, 6.5.22m overlays are avaliable to all supportfolio members. In a few days the release notes will appear here.

On June 23, 2004, Sun published a whitepaper showcasing superior JavaTM 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EETM) web services performance when compared to Microsoft's .NET. Microsoft published a response on July 14th refuting claims and stating that in their tests .NET performance was higher than Java Web Services. More here and a reply from Microsoft here.

This article examines the role of code refactoring, and the refactoring techniques supported by Visual Studio 2005. Elsewhere, view the latest changes that are going to be a part of .Net.

Apple filed its quarterly report (SEC form 10-Q) with the Securities and Exchange Commission Thursday. In the filing, which is available as a 86-page PDF document, Apple discloses several details on net and unit sales, its retail stores, education sales, lawsuits and more.

Ars Technica has an article on the beginning of the PowerPC era with the usual coverage on CPU internals and the involvement of Apple.

Waking up rich and confused. That's how one analyst explained the recurring product delays at Microsoft, and the principle can describe similar problems at chip giant Intel. Instead of waking up sick and washed out, employees at these companies are seemingly dawdling a bit because of past successes and a hazy outlook, says C|NET News.

One of the most awaited features of Microsoft .NET 2.0 is generics. Generics promise to increase type safety, improve performance, reduce code duplication and eliminate unnessecary casts. The most obvious application of generics in the framework class library are the generic collections in the new System.Collections.Generic namespace. Much has been written about those, but they are not the topic of this article.

Mandrakelinux 10.1 beta 1 has been synchronizing to mirrors and includes many new packages. There is also a Mandrakelinux 10.1 beta 1 screenshot slideshow.

Yellow Dog Linux is coming closer to final release with the 4.0-RC1 release.

WindowSizer, the tiling window manager for Microsoft Windows, was released this summer and continues to mature.

One and a half months after its original beta launch, GnomeFiles, our GTK+ software repository, is now proclaimed v1.0. There are a few things still to do on the Developer's section (e.g. let devs upload application icons directly to our server), but the user's front-end is now feature complete.

What follows in the article is an analysis of the "dependency hell" problem in Linux and the issues surrounding software installation. I make a proposal of my own and critique the suggested "solutions" to these problems and point my finger at "the" (my perception) source of these problems.

To make sure the company gets "it right," Novell is taking its time with its Linux desktop, demoing only a version of it at LinuxWorld for the purpose of user reaction. Elsewhere, Miguel de Icaza has been accused of betraying the open-source dream, but Ximian cofounder Miguel de Icaza believes corporate partnerships are the best way to realize it.

Microsoft has issued a warning that the newest version of its software for managing customer relations will not work with the company's next Windows update. Also, Microsoft will finalize the code for Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) sometime today, release it via Microsoft Download Center and MSDN on the Web tomorrow, and then ship it to customers via Windows Update beginning August 25, though Automatic Update users will get it immediately on a staggered basis.