This series explores the sort of technologies we could use if we were to build a new platform today. In the first part I described a system with a multi-core multi-threaded CPU, FPGA and Cell processors. In this second part we start looking at the Operating System.

ArsTechnica brings you an introduction to Mono. For starters, they will dish up a basic introduction to Mono, MonoDevelop, and C#, and then branch out to GTK#, database access, ASP.NET, advanced C# topics, and conclude with a discussion of the future of Mono, and the C# standard. Not a Linux guy? Don't worry, all examples will work on Windows and Linux, with OSX support coming shortly.

To de Icaza, replicating Microsoft's hard work--much of which has been published to standards body Ecma International--will make other operating systems, notably Linux, more attractive to developers. And with the "universal virtual machine" of .Net, programmers can have a greater choice in languages. In his office decorated with small stuffed monkeys ("mono" means monkey in Spanish), de Icaza spoke to CNET News.com shortly before the company began shipping Mono version 1.0.

The latest release of Solaris Express is available for download. Tonnes of new features again, as listed on blogs.sun.com by the three A's, Alan, Alan and Adam.

.Net is fast becoming the developer's platform of choice --in spite of Microsoft's poor promotional job.

My first experience with Slackware Linux came with version 9.1, after 4 years of using various versions of Red Hat and SUSE Linux. I disliked the general direction these distributions were moving in and didn't see their increasing focus on the "big end of town" as auguring well for either myself or clients of my small one-person IT consultancy business. I quickly became a Slackware convert and have since used it exclusively for all my server deployments. Check in for more and 15 screenshots from Slackware 10.

Operator Overloading, new to Visual Basic 2005, simplifies the use & development of complex types by allowing you to specify your own implementation for standard operations such as addition & subtraction.

Continuing the earlier discussion about low latency and Ingo Molnar's voluntary kernel preemption patch, the conversation moved onto the affect a filesystem can have on latency. Specifically, 2.6 maintainer Andrew Morton noted that ReiserFS was known to have some latency issues in both 2.4 & 2.6 kernels.

Here's an interesting article by Seth Nickell, comparing Metadata Index Systems and Document Stores.

One of the ultimate goals of music is to provide enjoyment. Be it through association of memories, stimulation, rhythm or melodic messages, music fans all over the world enjoy listening to music.

"ReactOS is an open source (GPL) operating system built to be compatible with Windows NT applications and drivers. ReactOS is currently just a development platform; it is not a useful desktop system for the average user in any way, but it has potential." Read the review at NewsForge.

Although much has been made of the challenges Microsoft faces in readying the next version of Windows, CEO Steve Ballmer said that "big bets" like Longhorn are not a reason for concern.

Microsoft's "critical" security bulletins target holes in the Windows HTML Help system and the Task Scheduler. Still, researchers warn of new IE vulnerabilities.

"Last week we spent some time with Sergey Dmitriev who talked about his Meta Programming System, which he says fits Charles Simonyi's model of Intentional Programming. This generated a lot of interest, so I contacted Charles himself to see if we could talk with him about it and he graciously accepted to talk about his work at Intentional Software. He was also very speedy in his response to my questions, which allowed me to publish his interview this following week." Read the interview here.