"The battle to create and own a proprietary industry standard generates rapid improvements in price and performance, at least until somebody emerges totally dominant. If fact, even after a monopolist emerges, there is still considerable pressure to innovate, because unless you can induce your installed base to upgrade frequently, you have a hard time continuing to grow." More at streamingmedia.com.

J2EE 1.4, Sun's new Java Specification, will undoubtedly be widely adopted by the makers of Java-based software, but though Sun's attempts to hype it have not been as successful as in the past. Aside from the fact that the software industry just isn't as exuberant as it once was, many vendors are already "ahead of the spec" and have implemented functionality that customers demanded without waiting for Sun and Java to blaze the trail.

Continuing yesterday's Gnome story where we mentioned the webcam/voice project for Gaim, Tim Ringenbach wrote us in with more info and a preliminary screenshot from their project, gaim-vv.

SUSE LINUX 9.1 is now released and available in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. If you live elsewhere, you can get the first taste of the new SUSE by downloading the SUSE LiveCD (formerly known as SUSE Live-Eval). Read more at DistroWatch.

In this article, Jim Menard is going to describe testing frameworks and walk through the process of adding unit tests to CheckbooX.

Gnome 3.0 is a long way off still and I have already written a wishlist for Gnome, however this time around I thought I write some specific feature requests for the next major Gnome release (coming in more than a year from now). These are applications that I would like to see included by default on Gnome 3.0 for a more full and integrated experience.

A least privileged environment is going to significantly increase the security of the "Longhorn" Windows platform. Get started today by writing managed code, first of all, and when building desktop applications, make them LUA (Logical Unit Application programming interface) compliant.

Partial template specialization is a vital technique for writing rich and useful collections. It can serve a useful purpose in many C++ programs, and is just one of the many new areas of standards conformance in Visual C++ .NET 2003. This article demonstrates how Visual C++ can be used to incorporate the .NET Framework into C++ applications.

And where everyone thought that BayStar pulled out their investment off SCO because they didn't like the bad press and any SCO involvement, it seems to be the exact opposite: they want to see even more IP enforcement from SCO! "It's questionable whether SCO Group should continue in the (Unix) market," BayStar's spokesman Bob McGrath said. "We're looking for the best return we can, and we think the focus should be on IP licensing (and enforcement)."

Linux may be entrenched in the data center, but it will need some sprucing up before the upstart operating system grabs a significant spot on the desktop PC, says News.com. Elsewhere, Mandrake sees good demand for desktop Linux.

New devices will shrink Microsoft's OS market share, researcher predicts.

This article shows you how to develop a Struts application in the Eclipse IDE, with the help of the Easy Struts plug-in. You'll get an introduction to Easy Struts, installation and configuration steps, and instructions on building a basic Struts application through a progressive example. Different ways of enhancing the Struts application -- such as connecting to a database, modularizing the application, internationalizing and localizing content, handling exceptions, and creating custom plug-ins -- are also covered. Finally, you will learn how to deploy your Struts application on the Tomcat Web server.

The first release candidate of the next version of FreeBSD's STABLE branch, FreeBSD 4.10-RC1 has been released. It contains many changes including bugfixes and backported features from the development branch such as enhanced USB support. Get it from a mirror before using the master server. Testers should get their hands on this now as the final release is expected in a couple of weeks.

Mike Deem provides a quick look at the basic concepts of the WinFS data access API: objects based on schemas, powerful query support and support for WinFS concepts such as relationships.