"Today, Xandros has released their latest operating system, the Xandros Desktop OS – Business Edition. Though this release doesn't really differ much from their previous Deluxe 2.0 product, I felt that the features introduced by this version were significant enough to warrant a few words on this new product." Read the review at MadPenguin.

Microsoft Corp. executives on Tuesday spent a lot of time talking up the Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI), which is the company's vision and technology roadmap for reducing the cost of managing and securing enterprise systems. Elsewhere, Microsoft exec says that open source model endangers the software economy.

Amiga, Inc. announced today that it has sold the Amiga Operating System to KMOS, Inc, allowing Amiga, Inc to focus on the growing mobile market. On April 23, 2003 Amiga entered into an Agreement with Itec LLC, later acquired by KMOS, Inc. for the transfer and sale of all of Amiga's right, title, source code, and all versions, from the "Classic Amiga Operating System" through AmigaOS 4.0 and all subsequent versions to KMOS, Inc. The PR gives no explanation about the exact future of Amiga OS 4.

Apple released MacOSX 10.3.3 via the Software Update pref. panel. More info & changelog here.

The presentation subsystem in "Longhorn" (code-named "Avalon") provides powerful new APIs for input. This article gives an overview of these APIs: What services are provided to applications, the architecture of the input system, and how new input devices can be supported.

Here is the transcript of the Dan Farber interview with Darl McBride at the Sand Hill Group's Software 2004 conference in San Francisco, which Groklaw has been given permission to transcribe.

In an effort to determine what the true performance benefit of 64-bit computing is, TheJemReport designed this benchmarking project using FreeBSD. The article can be found here. The article compares the performance of three test cases (Intel P4 Prescott 3.2E and Athlon64 3200+ in 32-bit mode and 64-bit mode) using stopwatch tests, openssl, and two synthetic benchmarks from the Ports system.

If you've ever inherited and then had to maintain a Java-based legacy application, then this article is for you. The author shows you how to use aspect-oriented programming (AOP) to gain an unprecedented view into the inner workings of even the most opaque of legacy applications.

The Windows Application Compatibility Toolkit (ACT) version 3.0 for Windows 2000 Service Pack 3 or later, Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 contains the tools and documentation you need to design, deploy, and support applications on these platforms. Tools include the latest versions of the Microsoft Windows Application Compatibility Analyzer that simplifies application inventory and compatibility testing, the Windows Application Verifier that assists developers and testers in locating common compatibility issues during the development cycle, and the Compatibility Administrator that provides access to the necessary compatibility fixes to support legacy applications in Windows.

This technical whitepaper by veteran real-time instructor David Kalinsky examines the queueing calculations that should be done as part of the design of application software for embedded systems using a real-time operating system. These calculations serve to properly configure message queues, linked lists, ring buffers, memory pools and partitions. Both capacity and queueing time issues are discussed, with emphasis on practical examples rather than mathematical proofs.

The European Commission is expected (free reg. req.) to declare Microsoft an abusive monopolist, impose a fine of $100 million to $1 billion and order the company to make fundamental changes to the way it sells software in Europe. Such a ruling would be a significant setback for Microsoft after it overcame its most serious legal challenge by settling a sweeping antitrust case in the USA in 2001.

Janice Winsor details the two new installation configurations of the Solaris 9 release.

Rony Klein explains a few of the reasons why he prefers Gnome over KDE, an article accompanied by screenshots illustrating his case.

The well-known limitation of BeOS to crash when too much memory is installed is now hacked around by some people in the community. The first patch, patches the kernel to "think" that only 64 MB is installed in the machine. We would advise the team to make multiple hack packages for 64, 128, 256, 384, 512, 640 and 768 MBs of RAM (the right amount is different for each user because it depends on the MBs the graphics card reports to the PCI level, not just how much RAM and gfx RAM is actually installed). This hack is for BeOS 5.x systems.