Steve Jobs is not attending the Macworld event in Boston this week, though a panel moderator laid a black turtleneck and jeans on an empty seat in his honor. Early Apple engineers took advantage of the absence of Steve's reality distortion field™ and discussed Apple's early days and setting the record straight about the origins of the mac.

ComputerWeekly takes a look at OpenVMS, one of the most stable OSes ever placed in production. Originally known as VMS, it's probably the best designed and most robust general purpose operating system in existence. It's also one of the least-known and appreciated, simply because it works quietly in the background without drama, unlike its noisier and more fussy siblings and offspring.

The Jackito PDA, which they're calling a TDA (Tactile Digital Assistant) because it uses only the thumbs to control and no stylus, has been announced by French company Novinit. It has in interesting internal architecture, with 7 parallel processors, allowing speed and power savings. They claim that a single AA battery will last a few months. It runs an OS called 3ActilOS but the site doesn't have very much information on it. The images on the web site look like Photoshop jobs, so we'll be interested to see if the $600 machines that they're selling actually exist.

Yoper Linux V2 has been released. It includes "leading edge technology enhancements using Linux Kernel 2.6.7, bolstered with performance patches, innovative prelinking, Win4Lin support, VMware support, VMware module integration, NVIDIA 3D support, ReiserFS 4, Secure SHell File System, CDROM Supermount and NdisWrapper for Windows binary driver integration."

Onebase Linux Project has created a special flavor of itsOnebaseGo Live CD that comes with a complete KDE 3.3 Beta desktop and Koffice 1.3.2. It is intended for reporting bugs in KDE and as a Technology preview. It can be installed to hard-disk to have a fully functional Onebase Linux OS. However it is not meant for production use and only users who prefer using the unstable repository are recommended to perform an HD-installation.

IBM is expected to announce a new generation of Unix servers on Tuesday that can run multiple OSes simultaneously, systems it believes powerful enough to let Big Blue topple rivals Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard.

ADO.NET 2.0 includes a new base-class provider model, features for all providers, and changes to System.Data.SqlClient. Get an overview of these new features, examples of their use, and a chart of which features are provider-neutral and SqlClient-specific. Elsewhere, get an overview of the new services, controls, and features in ASP.NET 2.0.

SciTech Software, Inc. today announced the release of SciTech SNAP Graphics ENT (Enterprise Edition) for Windows NT 4.0. Read more for the rest of the press release.

From the DragonFly BSD Project website, "One year after starting the project as a fork off the FreeBSD-4.x tree, the DragonFly Team is pleased to announce our 1.0 release! ... We have done so much that it cannot all be listed here. Please check out the Diary for technical details."

To get a well-rounded breakdown of where Linux is going, and where it trumps (or fails against) Windows, AnandTech took the two largest 64-bit Linux distributions, their 32-bit counterparts, and the Windows XP 64-bit public beta for a test drive.

Apple recently provided developers with a new pre-release beta of Xcode 1.5, an upgrade to Mac OS X's suite of development tools. Release notes for the beta say that Version 1.5 will feature dead-code stripping, code completion for Java, support for the Subversion source-code control system, AppleScriptable CodeWarrior importing, and AppleScript support in the native build system. Xcode 1.5 will also boast speed improvements, Ant templates, faster editor performance, remote debugging, and an enhanced debugger with a globals browser and memory browser.

Microsoft said Monday that the long-awaited update of Windows XP will be sent to manufacturing in August, a month later than expected. The product should be in customers' hands later that month. Also, according to the Redmond software giant, the Windows market is nowhere near saturated. The growth will come from new segments and a vertical push by OEMs, executives predict.

Microsoft is set to include its Services for Unix (SFU) add-on for Windows as an integral part of the next major release of the Windows server operating system, codenamed Longhorn and expected in 2007. Some analysts said the move could eventually sideline conventional Linux and Unix operating systems. A growing number of firms are using SFU, currently a free add-on for Windows 2000, 2003 and XP Professional, because it enables a single system to run Windows, Linux and Unix software.

GNU Classpath is a project to create free core class libraries for use with virtual machines and compilers for Java. Fixes were made to URL and URLStreamHandler. File.deleteOnExit() was implemented. Multiple new features and bugfixes were made in java.text. AWT lists use GTK treeviews.