Today the Eclipse Foundation announced the availability of the royalty-free 3.0 release of the Eclipse Platform, adding enhancements that improve flexibility, scalability, interoperability and responsiveness. Eclipse is an award-winning universal platform for tools integration, software modeling and testing that has been broadly adopted by commercial vendors, academic institutions and open technology developers. With release 3.0, Eclipse now extends its sophisticated object-oriented development technologies to support a rich-client platform (RCP) that enables construction of desktop applications.

Microsoft says its deal with a banking consortium to continue to provide security hot fixes once it ends NT 4.0 support is par for the course.

Maybe you haven't worked with state machines since your college computer science courses. Jon Shemitz offers a reason to dust off the technique with .NET: object-oriented state machines can be easier to read and debug than their enum and switch equivalents.

Multiple standards keep customers from taking the Web services plunge. Office supply house Corporate Express should be a Web services poster child.

Just posted at openbeos.org - a few screen shots of Haiku boot screen, fail safe mode etc. Elsewhere, BeOSJournal did some extensive reporting from the WalterCon.

A year after launching its low-cost, minimalist Windows CE "Core" product, Microsoft and assorted industry analysts say the program has played a major role in helping Windows CE become one of the top embedded OSes.

The battle about Software Patents in Europe seemed as good as lost. The Council of Ministers voted for a directive that basically slapped the European Parliament in the face because they shamelessly put aside a democratic decision taken by the European Parliament. And even though the Parliament still has a second reading where it will have to go trough a lot of trouble to repair the damage done by the Council, it is a serious matter that the Council of Ministers seems to have no idea how sloppy their directive is. It does allow general, broad softwarepatents, practically without restrictions even though several explanations by the Ministers say they don't.

OneStat.com today reported that more and more internet users choose for screen resolution 1024x768 (54%) which is the most popular screen resolution for exploring the internet. While 800x600 has fell from 32% last year down to 25% this year, it is still holds a huge share among users and so developers should still be considering these users when designing their desktop applications. Other resolutions include: 1280x1024 14.1%, 1152x864 4%, 640x480 0.6%, 1600x1200 0.8%, 1152x870 0.1%.

Read the Sun Java Desktop System review at eWEEK with much info on the product.

Apple announced on Monday network management software that will help administrators remotely control systems running Mac OS X--or the Windows or Linux operating systems.

One year after it surprised rivals and partners by jumping into the anti-virus market, Microsoft still has no clear AV strategy, and users are still hanging on to the promise of integrated Windows protection.

The purpose of grid services is to break application silos by allowing the virtualization of the IT resources where the application is running. Using grid services does not mean you have to rewrite all your applications. The IBM Grid Toolbox Version 3 for Multiplatform (IGT) provides a set of tools that lets you easily create grid services from existing applications.

Based on the restored demand for enterprise servers that began late last year, researchers at IDC are predicting strong growth for server systems through 2008, especially for Linux & Windows-based boxes.

The Patent Office's recent review of Microsoft's file system could put Linux and other GPL-licensed products at risk warn industry figures.