And our winner for the $3000 prize worth of the Aspire Swatter (Enterprise Edition with 25 client licenses) competition is Amit Bahree and his soon-to-be-published article "Exception Management in .NET". Amit won amidst 6 more submissions. Congratulations Amit!

Microsoft gives its Java virtual machine technology a three-year reprieve in the wake of its antitrust settlement with Sun Microsystems. But don't expect any new MSJVM enhancements. On other Java news, NetBeans IDE 3.6, which includes two-tier J2EE 1.4 support, became generally available today. NetBeans is a pure Java, open source development environment for Windows, *nix and MacOSX.

Opera software releases today the new Opera 7.50 preview version for Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris (*nix), Mac OS X and Windows. Elsewhere, OmniGroup recently released OmniWeb 5.0b5 for testing.

Mandrake Linux 10.0 is now available to club members and in packaged sets. According to the press release, "Mandrakelinux 10.0 Official offers the most advanced Linux features currently available. 10.0 Official provides increased performance with Linux kernel 2.6, an enhanced desktop experience with KDE 3.2, GNOME 2.4 and Mandrakegalaxy II, unbeatable hardware recognition, and support for Serial ATA, USB2 and IEEE 1394." The Mandrakelinux 10.0 Official FTP tree will be released this week, and public ISO images will be released later.

According to the latest press release, Lindows, Inc. has changed the name of LindowsOS to "Linspire." Although rumors suggested that the name change was only for use abroad, the press release suggests that the name change is both permanent and all encompassing.

I wanted to write something about the great progress being carried on linux as OS of choice for a professional Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) since a long time. With the inclusion of the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) into the 2.6 kernels, time has come to extend my experiences to all of you.

Despite the growing success of the Open Source movement, most of the general public continues to feel that Open Source software is inaccessible to them. This paper discusses five fundamental problems with the current Open Source software development trend, explores why these issues are holding the movement back, and offers solutions that might help overcome these problems.

Just when you think you've got your developer tools all sorted out, a fresh crop is sure to emerge. This article uses a real-world example to introduce you to two of the most exciting new technologies for the enterprise. Hibernate is an object-relation mapping tool and Spring is an AOP framework and IOC container. Follow along as it shows you how to combine the two to build a transactional persistence tier for your enterprise applications and write code that is database-vendor agnostic, and that can run inside of a J2EE container or run standalone.

What happens when ex-Lycoris employees join a Linux-friendly hardware computer reseller? Apparently, a new desktop Linux distro with a kick: the hardware that comes with it is meant to give you the Apple experience. ION Linux is a Debian-based distro that is meant to work well with the hardware it sells with. Read on for our interview with Element Computer's Mike Hjorleifsson (one of the founders and CTO) regarding their new upcoming products and a screenshot of ION.

Ximian's Nat Friedman will deliver the keynote at this week's Real World Linux Conference, and in this interview, he discusses Novell's commitment to the Linux desktop, barriers, misconceptions and the importance of success stories.

Apple today announced a faster, more affordable line of eMac desktops for home and schools, including faster PowerPC G4 processors running at up to 1.25 GHz, 333 MHz DDR memory, faster ATI Radeon graphics and USB 2.0 connectivity to peripherals.

Research and development, or R&D, is a big deal with the Gates Gang. After all, in 2003, they spent over (all figures US) $4.6 billion on it. For a company that had revenues of $32.1 billion in the corresponding period, this is an impressive figure and to put in perspective, they spent $6.5 billion on sales and marketing during the same period. Clearly, R&D is important to the company. Read the article at Canoe.ca.

Scott Long announced the availability of FreeBSD 4.10-BETA for i386. 4.10-BETA for alpha will be following shortly as they work out some problems. 4.10 is the next step in the 4-STABLE branch, and as such contains primarily bug fixes and incremental functionality improvements. One significant new feature is the merging of the USB stack and drivers from 5.x.

The HTML procedure that will be included on the Amiga OS4 developer pre-release CD for the AmigaOne has been given to Amigaworld.net. The procedure is simple to follow and will walk users of all experience levels through the painless task of installing the developer pre-release on to an AmigaOne. Elsewhere Amiga Forever 6.0 is now available.