PalmSource ain't gonna make a birthday party for BeOS but it would only be fair if the rest of us, users, remember the "media OS" as the innovative operating system of the late '90s, still used by some. Depending on how you count, it was early 1994 when the first BeOS version left the Be, Inc. offices and headed toward Be's "partners" and "developers". It was 1994 when the word started to spread around among geeks about this "new and exciting" OS and soon, external devs got access to it.

In what could be a sign of things to come, Microsoft Corp. is offering a small sweetener to its Software Assurance licensing program. From this week the company will allow servers used for disaster recovery to carry copies of its Windows server software at no extra cost. Update: Elsewhere, IBM this week relaxed stringent requirements for running the highest-end version of its Windows server software, effectively lowering the overall price 30 percent in some cases and potentially expanding the pool of interested customers.

SUSE LINUX has opened its entire 9.1 directory tree for free download and installation via FTP/HTTP.

Sun has backed up an announcement that its Solaris server operating system will have an open source flavour by making a similar promise for its Java technology.

It's all Waterloo-Maple's fault, really: if they had maintained a version of their computer algebra system for the Amiga, I wouldn't have found it necessary to switch to Mac. Or maybe it's Commodore's fault for mismanaging themselves into oblivion; I don't know. Either way, I became painfully aware three years ago that my little Amiga would no longer satisfy my computing needs. I needed a new home computer.

Do you need open-source legal protection any more than you need meteor insurance? Advocate Bruce Perens predicts a widespread attack on open source from proprietary software vendors.

The performance of computer hardware typically increases monotonically with time. Even if the same could be said of software, the rate at which software performance improves is usually very slow compared to that of hardware. In fact, many might opine that there is plenty of software whose performance has deteriorated consistently with time. Moreover, it is rather difficult to establish an objective performance metric for software as complex as an operating system: a "faster OS" is a very subjective, context dependent phrase. Read the article at KernelThread.

A former Microsoftie says addiction to Windows revenue, mediocre products, and missed opportunities could doom Seattle’s most successful company.

I worked for Microsoft for eight years. I'm a long time Windows loyalist. And, I admit - I mocked Apple's switch ads and Macintosh users in general - even as recently as a few months ago. But gradually, I grew tired of Windows' many problems and began to notice, even envy Apple products..." Read his blog here.

Here's a kind of an application that is sorely missing from a stock Gnome installation and not many Gnome users know about: Gnome-PPP, a front-end to the wvDial, a modem/ISDN dial-up software. Read more for some quick info on the app and a screenshot.

During the majority of my time working with computers, Windows was the operating system of choice. Reason being, it's all I've known. In 2002, I took a college course titled "Linux Administration" which entitled me to a few cd-roms of Redhat 7.x. While this course was nothing more than a few extra credits for me, I fell in love with Linux and went through the entire textbook a week into the class. It was a nice feeling to use something "different" than what I was used to.

A recent thread on the OpenBSD project's misc@ mailing list discussed why OpenBSD has chosen to stick to a purely monolithic kernel, instead of trying to optimize performance by using kernel modules. As described in the OpenBSD FAQ, the OpenBSD team only supports the GENERIC kernel that is provided with the distribution. Numerous reasons were provided, including security, the ability to fully test, and simplicity.

Sony's decision to cut back its PDA business isn't a huge surprise. The popularity of the personal digital assistant has been steadily eroded by smart phones, digital cameras, music players and other devices that can provide many PDA functions. Check out the article portal here.

This article discusses the political differences between Mono & dotGNU, two .NET re-implementations.