People who use Microsoft's Windows XP operating system aren't taking advantage of many of the systems best features, a top executive said - and the world's largest software maker has only itself to blame. Jim Allchin, Microsoft's group vice president for software platforms, including Windows, said he thinks customers aren't using gadgets like Windows Messenger and Movie Maker because Microsoft hasn't done a good enough job telling people about them.

Red Hat has maintained the pure open-source approach, making open-source software available to users, says Gartner analyst George Weiss. "For the end-user, the software may be open source, but the question is, 'How much do I have to pay to enable the software with a subscription?'"

This article describes how Linux boots. Who loads what, who starts which program, and what services do and act like.

While sizing the heap for 32-bit Java applications on AIX, you can sometimes run into situations where a segment is claimed by two or more parts of the process simultaneously. This article shows how to detect this situation by using a well-established set of applications as examples, and we also show the reasoning behind the configuration changes suggested to avoid this situation.

Here is a look at Virtual PC 2004's performace. It's put to the test by using the PassMark benchmark.

Ximian released today GTK# 0.17 while MonoDevelop is also under way (new screenshot).

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.

In response to an open letter from IBM asking Sun to join the company in developing an open-source version of Java, Sun plans to meet with IBM to discuss the issue, Sun sources said. Sun officials planned to meet with IBM as early as Thursday to discuss the merits of whether the company should work with IBM on an independent project to create an open-source implementation of Java.

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.

Malicious hackers and vandals are lazy and wait for Microsoft to issue patches before they produce tools to work out how to exploit loopholes in Windows, say experts.

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.

A Morphix-based GNUstep live CD has been released for i386. It includes many GS apps, such as MPlayer (GS port), GWorkspace, Preview, GNUmail, ProjectCenter and many more. It can be installed to a hard drive.

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).

Scott Long has announced the release of FreeBSD 5.2.1. This point release contains security and bug fixes, as well as improvements to the ATA/IDE and SATA handling. A list of mirror sites is here.