Quality rant by Eric Raymond on the topic of bad user interface design in open source software, making some good points. The editorial was inspired by ESR's experience with CUPS.

http://codewars.osdever.net marks a new beginning in the OS Development Ring. A totally new idea of code wars? No, code wars aren't any new idea(Allegro SpeedHack) but coding an OS in such a short time? Even at all. OS development is a relatively new and growing hobby for programmers. Now you have a chance to openly develop OS code, have it judged, and win Challenges.

Despite Microsoft's repeated denials, the company will indeed release an interim version of Windows XP that will bridge the gap between the initial XP release and Longhorn, which is currently due in late 2005 at the earliest. The interim XP version will ship as a new retail product that replaces existing retail boxed copies of XP and as a set of updates, called XP Reloaded, that existing XP users can install separately.

One of the most impressive aspects of even relatively modest PC hardware is its' ability to emulate a wide range of other platforms. Being a bit of an OS junkie myself, and lacking the space for a full computer room of weird and wonderful hardware, I emulate a range of systems from my humble desktop PC. In this article, I will describe the procedure through which you can run RISC OS 3.7 and others on a Windows-based PC and experience this classic OS (screenshots included).

JSR 133, which has been active for nearly three years, has recently issued its public recommendation on what to do about the Java Memory Model (JMM). Several serious flaws were found in the original JMM, resulting in some surprisingly difficult semantics for concepts that were supposed to be simple, like volatile, final, and synchronized. In this installment of Java theory and practice, the author shows how the semantics of volatile and final will be strengthened in order to fix the JMM. Some of these changes have already been integrated in JDK 1.4; others are slated for inclusion in JDK 1.5. On other Java news, IBM urges Sun to make Java open source.

Mepis Linux is a liveCD, debian based distro, with some additional features, which makes it an excellent introduction to debian. A recent review provided a good overview of the background and basis of Mepis, my review aims to focus more on the day to day use for a desktop user.