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.

ReactOS, the GPLed WinNT-clone, is now in version 0.2.1 and out (changelog).

I purchased my first Apple Mac in October 2003, having been a Windows user for many years. It was a new iBook G4. I previously wrote an account of my early experience with this machine along with some of the problems that I encountered. A common criticism that I faced at the time was that I had written the article too early.

"Microsoft's XAML has a lot of people worried. Its advantage is to bring the ease of web page authoring and scripting into writing .NET application user interfaces. This makes immense sense. We have a desperate need for decent user interfaces, and the place where a large body of UI designers and programmers live and work at the moment is in web pages." Read the opinion of Gnome's Edd Dumbill and a reply from Miguel deIcaza.

yellowTAB announced that they will be attending the CeBIT in Hannover this year while they have scheduled another TV appearence. In the meantime, FreeNet.de reviews Zeta (in German).