From ActiveWin: Adam Kinney, a known blogger in the Avalon community, tells us of his experiences getting started with Longhorn, and what's working and what's not. Elsewhere, Joe Beda, development lead on the Avalon/Longhorn team, talks about the 3D capabilities that will be delivered in Longhorn.

Sun has released the latest version of its Java application server software, and as in the past, has made it available for free download to developers, TechWeb reports.

Sun Microsystems has discontinued development of two planned chips as it retrenches in a difficult era for the company. More at News.com.

To get the already-delayed follow-up to Windows XP out the door by 2006, it has decided to omit some of the most ambitious features, including WinFS over network.

Red Hat, Ximian and Debian developers are discussing the future of Gnome and its place in the desktop marketplace at Planet Gnome (scroll to read all discussions taking place). In the meantime Dropline GNOME 2.6 became available for Slackware, while the Gnome bindings have reached RC status.

Proprietary OS vendor Green Hills and its CEO Dan O'Dowd have launched a broadside against the use of Linux in military and defense applications.

Jim Farnsworth takes a look at the ICEwm under MEPIS. On other X11 news, with Release, X.Org seals the fate of XFree86 says InternetNews.

Mac OS X comes with dozens of utilities and applications—many of which can be easily cataloged, such as Internet and media tools. Many applications, however, can't easily be assigned a category. This chapter covers the useful Mac OS X applications and utilities that you're likely to use regularly.

NUMA is a memory architecture used in multiprocessors wherein apart from the common system memory each processor has its own local memory which can be used for the processor's own computations.

Three days are left for our 'Aspire Swatter' competition (prize worth $3000 US) and we have only received a single submission. Participate, as the chance of winning is huge!

Eclipse is one powerful IDE. I've been using it for a few weeks and in this article, I will be reviewing a few of the features that make it such a wonderful tool.

In this episode, learn how to make use of some new features added to Visual C++ in Visual Studio 2005. These include adding OpenMP to your application, optimizing your application with Profile-Guided Optimization, and building a 64-bit application.

Maynard Kuona takes a look on Gnome 2.6-pre and discovers a whole new world of new features and well-crafted interfaces built-in on every Gnome-bundled application.

Microsoft is paying Sun Microsystems $1.95 billion as part of a deal signed Friday--but Sun could gain as much as $450 million more over the next 10 years through a patent provision in the agreement.