I have written up an article about a bunch of ideas for 3D desktop development now Project Looking Glass is Open Source. A number of the Looking Glass owners have an interest in the document and it might prove interesting to get an insight into the potential desktop of the future.

Opera Software released today the version 7.52 of Opera browser with added security (Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, Mac OS X and MS-Windows):

The KDE Project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of KDE 3.3 Beta 1. As another step towards the aKademy in late August, this release is named Klassroom.

This article surveys a number of benchmarks and finds that Java performance on numerical code is comparable to that of C++, with hints that Java's relative performance is continuing to improve. Then they describe clear theoretical reasons why these benchmark results should be expected.

This is an interview with Ed Bugnion, CTO and Co-founder of VMware, conducted by IT-Director.com. It offers an insight into VMware past, present and future.

Softly spoken, shy and retiring Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer sent an email to staff yesterday to complain that the company is not as wealthy as everyone thinks. According to Mr Ballmer, stories have been getting out that he is sitting on a fathomless cash ocean of billions of dollars and does nothing more than swim in the mountains of loot. He wanted to tell staff that it is not true because Microsoft needed a lot of cash.

Jan Schaumann announced that the second NetBSD Quarterly Status Report for 2004 is now available online. It covers the major recent developments within the NetBSD project during April, May, June.

Customers can now purchase workstations using Intel Corp.'s Nocona Xeon processor, with 64-bit extensions to the x86 instruction set, but they can't run the beta 64-bit version of Windows designed for those extensions on the new workstations.

Forrester senior analyst Simon Yates told MacNewsWorld that Apple and Microsoft are attempting to offer a multipronged approach to user searches in Tiger & Longhorn, in an attempt simplify finding data.

In the following article, DistroWatch explores OpenBSD, an operating system built from the ground up with security in mind. Though not suitable for every taste, OpenBSD will no doubt save many system administrators gray hairs. Even for those not running a server, this is a very stable and powerful OS and you don't necessarily need to be paranoid (though it helps) to enjoy using it.

There is a certain thing about skinning. It's just relaxing. Changing skins, browsing for skins, adding icons, trying out different color schemes in order to find the best match. The skinning community is quite large, ranging from people who change only their WinAmp skin, to people who use different DE's on Unix-like systems. In fact, you are also skinning when you don't use a DE; since the command line is in fact a type of 'skin' as well.

"Getting FC2 to a state of desktop readiness is a task that requires a medium amount of skill and will probably take close to a full day for the first workstation (assuming that you have a high-speed Internet connection). Subsequent installs should go more quickly; indeed, I intend for my students to get most of it done during their first three-hour class." Read the article here.

Microsoft is developing a version of its Windows Server 2003 operating system that is designed to handle applications running across dozens of single- or dual-processor computers working in parallel.

Mark Mitchell announced the availability of GCC 3.4.1. Mark explains, "there are no new features in this release, but there are a lot of improvements for various languages and architectures."