Competitors with fresh ideas are hot on the heels of the software behemoth, writes Faisal Islam.

Apple today introduced Xsan, a high-performance enterprise-class Storage Area Network (SAN) file system priced at US$999. Xsan is a 64-bit cluster file system for Mac OS X that enables organizations to consolidate storage resources and provide multiple computers with concurrent file-level read/write access to shared volumes over Fibre Channel. A beta version of Xsan is available immediately to qualified customers. The final version of Xsan is expected to be available this fall. On other news, Apple introduced Shake 3.5, Final Cut Pro HD, DVD Studio PRO 3 and a new application named Motion. Go to MacMinute.com for up to the minute updates on the new products unveiled as we write this.

Sun's recent cancellation of many UltraSparc chips is clear evidence that Sun is finding UltraSparc a huge resource drain. But, the company is still averse to porting Solaris over to Itanium (however they did port it to AMD's 64bit architectures). This article is an analysis of the rationale behind such bizarre moves, according to the author, and Sun's alternatives to this self-destructive strategy.

Underscoring Novell's commitment to the Linux operating system, the company's chief financial officer on Friday hinted at further acquisitions. Joseph Tibbetts, pointing to Novell's purchase late last year of two leading Linux companies -- Boston's Ximian and Germany's SuSE -- said the networking giant is on its way to becoming the world's leading Linux solutions provider. Elsewhere, alternative to Windows should play to its own strengths, says Novell Linux guru.

Mac OS X has been able to do COM for quite some time. The thing is, no one has really broadcast this -- until now. You can write COM components that have the potential to run on both Windows and Mac OS X with no code changes. This is another reason for Mac OS X to be considered as a serious platform for enterprise applications.

Hyperion Entertainment and the Amiga OS 4.0 development team announced that after nearly 30 months of painstaking development the Amiga OS 4.0 Developer Pre-release has gone gold and will be sent to the duplication plant on Monday, April 19, 2004.

"On balance, it's hard to see how this isn't a runaway success for Sun. After all, they got everything they wanted, plus $1,950,000,000 in found money. But somehow most of the press managed to see it as McNealy surrendering to Microsoft. Rationally, I don't see how anyone could read even just the press release and believe this." Read the editorial at the LinuxInsider.

O'Reilly's latest entry in the "Pocket" series, "Linux Pocket Guide", bills itself as a "quick reference for experienced users and a guided tour for beginners".

Trolltech made available online an article from their print publication "QT Quarterly" (usually only made available to Trolltech customers only) previewing the new features, optimizations, and improvments that QT 4 will have to offer.

For years, hope has ebbed and flowed among many in the computer business that Linux, a freely available computer operating system which uses a penguin as its symbol, would become a viable alternative to Microsoft's Windows, the near universal standard for the world's personal computers. The industry—excluding Microsoft and its founder Bill Gates, of course—is currently riding another wave of hope. Will disappointment follow?

Cloanto released today version 6.0 of Amiga Forever, the Classic Amiga emulation, OS, connectivity and support suite officially licensed by the Amiga companies. Amiga Forever is available in a downloadable Online Edition and in a CD Edition which includes premium content of historical interest (all Amiga OS versions, gallery, videos, games) and KX Light.

The Microsoft Windows XP Tablet PC Edition Platform Software Development Kit (SDK) contains the information you need to develop applications for Microsoft Windows XP Tablet PC Edition.

Imagine this scenario: you need to run your favorite application under Linux but the application has not been ported to Linux yet and there is no other alternative that would completely suit your needs. Or you need to work with several operating systems.

The XFce Team is pleased to announce the release 4.0.5 of the XFce 4 Desktop Environment and Development Platform. As usual, this is a maintenance release, aimed at bug-fixing; no new features are being added to the 4.0 branch. The main purpose of this release is compatibility with the recent GTK+ 2.4.x release along with other fixes. Download locations can be found on this page, and the changelog is available here.