Microsoft has announced the public availability of Windows XP SP2 RC2. A network install for both English and German can be found here.

Mozilla Firefox 0.9 has been released. Release and download infromation can be obtained here. Major changes include a new extension manager, a new theme manager, improved tools for migrating from IE as well as various performance and stability enhancements. A review can be found here.

Novell Inc is lining up a summer launch for its new business Linux desktop strategy following its recent acquisitions of Ximian Inc and SuSE Linux AG. The Waltham, Massachusetts-based software and services vendor's new Linux desktop solution is currently in closed beta testing and will be launched along with a roadmap for Novell's business desktop strategy this summer.

Here is a comparison of a C and Java speech librarywhere the Java version is 2-3 times faster, with server VM configuration. And here are some more C++ and java comparisons, with various algorithms. Elsewhere, Java 1.5 is 20% faster than C says JavaLobby. And some of our tests.

The major competition of visual skins for Windows, the GUI Olympics, has ended. The site has now an all-around article showing the best themes from the competition. "The Last Order" icons look sweet.

An Internet security firm claims to have found the first worm in the wild for Symbian OS, and it spreads via Bluetooth.

There has been a lot of commentary recently about Gnome, and a common source of confusion seems to be Gconf - what is it, how does it work, and so on. Some people even seem to confuse Gconf with the registry database in Windows. I will attempt to clear some of this confusion and give an overview of Gconf, and why it looks the way it does.

"Ever seen some Linux application and thought: "the source is available, why can't we have that on RISC OS?" And indeed, because of the efforts that have been made on the GCC port for RISC OS and its C library, Unixlib, this is possible for a large number of Unix applications." Read the article at Drobe.

Public-sector deployments of Linux are continuing to grow at the expense of Unix and Windows. The latest Linux win is the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts (AOUSC), in Washington, which provides administrative support, program management and policy development services to U.S. federal courts.

The recently released QNX 6.3 is now available for a test run by developers. It doesn't seem to be a fully free for no commercial purposes no-IDE version of QNX RtP anymore.

GNOME Development Release 2.7.2 has been released for testing.

There already exists a good deal of reviews of Mandrake 10 already. Instead of doing the typical review, I'm going to do things a bit differently. You see, there are a few things my OS needs to do perfectly, to warrant it a chance to stay on my PC longer than an hour or so. If any one of these necesseties fail, I may end up not liking the OS altogether. My OS needs to support good hardware acceleration, it must be able to play MP3's, I absolutely need Zsnes, and it has to be fast and stable.

According to this SMP support is now in OpenBSD-current.

Apple is a famously secretive company. Its hush-hush culture makes it impossible for employees to talk about their work, even with spouses or family members. Today's the Day. This may help keep new products a surprise, but it has a downside: In the past few weeks widely publicized security holes in OS X were discussed everywhere and by everyone, except Apple, says Wired.