FlexBeta has a quick look at the recent Longhorn Build 4053 with screenshots.

Distrowatch reports that a port of Fedora Core 1 to the AMD64 architecture has been released: "The port of Fedora Core 1 to AMD64 is now available. Everyone is encouraged to download it and participate by either submitting bugs or submitting fixes. All bugs, requests for enhancements, and fixes should be submitted via Bugzilla. Please keep up to date via the Update methods." Read the full announcement and the release notes for more information.

If the U.S. Postal Service delivered mail for free, our mailboxes would surely runneth over with more credit-card offers, sweepstakes entries, and supermarket fliers. That's why we get so much junk e-mail: It's essentially free to send. So Microsoft Corp. chairman Bill Gates, among others, is now suggesting that we start buying "stamps" for e-mail (paid in cpu cycles that we rent to others).

This document discusses operating systems that Apple has created in the past, and many that it tried to create. Through this discussion, we will come across several technologies the confluence of which eventually led to Mac OS X. An important goal of the discussion is to better understand the reasons, and if possible, the rationale behind Mac OS X and its important components. This, in turn, will be helpful in understanding and appreciating the system as it is today.

Imagine not one, but two, three or more separate operating systems loaded on a single PC, each of which functions as a separate OS on a separate physical machine. VMware Workstation 4 does just that by creating and managing one or more virtual machines on a single, physical host PC. Every virtual machine is a full-fledged virtual PC, where you can install a guest operating system of your choice, with network configuration and a full suite of PC software. Read the article at TomsHardware.

Some software developers may find their applications no longer work on machines using Microsoft Service Pack 2 for Windows XP, which will be released later this year.

All of us who are in computers know that at present we are using enhanced software products for applications, which our predecessors never thought about or used. Why do we need a word processor when a simple text file does the same job of documentation.

The first release of the Mono port of SharpDevelop, MonoDevelop, is up, here are the release notes (additional screenshots 1, 2). There are no binaries yet for it, but gtksourceview-sharp rpms have been put onto the Mono Red Carpet channel. You will also need the latest version of Mono built with ICU support and the latest GTK#.

This guide in PDF provides prescriptive guidance to enable Microsoft Windows Server 2003 to be used for authentication and as an identity and authorization data store within heterogeneous Microsoft Windows and UNIX environments.

Sun Microsystems Inc is open to relinquishing stewardship of Java to a neutral third party, but is apparently against releasing the language to open source under GPL.

A few months ago, I briefly tried SpeedDownload but I didn't evaluate it in-depth. I realized recently that the time had come to spend more time with it and write a review. SpeedDownload2 is a download manager for Mac OS X. In an older review at SpyMac, they called YazSoft's SpeedDownload2 a "wonder of development." Were they right?

Mandrake Community 10.0 was released today. The public ISOs aren't available for download yet, but club members can download it, or you can pre-order the DVD.

Mario and Borg of Polish BeOS Users' Group wrote a review of Zeta DeluxeEdition 1.0 RC2. The quick and dirty english translation is available here.

The NetBSD Project announced Monday that release 1.6.2 of the NetBSD operating system is now available, with binary distributions for 40 architectures. NewsForge interviewed Luke Mewburn of the NetBSD Core Group and asked him about the NetBSD project in general, the long awaiting release 2.0, and a lot of technical and organizational issues.