Sun has offered a frank response to the open letter from Eric S, Raymond, President, Open Source Initiative, in which he called on Sun to make its Java platform Open Source and described the company's Open Source strategy as 'spotty' and 'confused'. 'I'd say this is 100 per cent rant,' Sun's Chief Technology Evangelist, Simon Phipps said. 'His simplistic accusations don't hold water... If this is the way that Open Source treats its friends, I'd hate to see how it treats its enemies.'

Intel will come out with a server chip next quarter that adds 64-bit processing power to its current x86 line of processors, the company's chief executive said Tuesday. In the meantime, Advanced Micro Devices is adhering to the less-is-more theory as it begins shipments of low-power versions of its Opteron processor for servers.

"Normally I don't review early test releases of software, but the opportunity to test drive Fedora's first distribution based on the 2.6 kernel was too irresistible to pass up. The conclusion: Bravo, Red Hat!"

"According to a recent update on their website (February 14th), the reason why the source code of BlueEyedOS (which is under the LGPL licence) hasn't been made available yet is because they can't find a public host." More is available here. Also interesting to check out the sourceforge status.

This series of three articles helps the developers involved in the tedious process of migrating/porting the OS/2 system drivers and applications to Linux. It provides a one-to-one mapping of various OS/2-to-Linux calls related to threads, IPC, memory management, timer handling, file handling, and so on. In addition, it captures the various preprocessor directives and compiler/linker options that can be mapped from OS/2 to Linux.

The Torrent files are out now for Mandrake Linux 10 RC1, while MandrakeSoft announced that they are reverting back to XFree86 4.3 because of the recent licensing change for XFree86 4.4.

A new screenshot showing OS4's default icon set by Martin "Mason" Merz has been revealed (not all icons shown in the shot are the new ones though). Also Q&A session 27 with Amiga's CTO Fleecy Moss is now available. Hyperion, Eyetech, AmigaWorld.net and many more exhibitors will attend the upcoming AmiGBG fair in Sweden.

With the hype growing to a feverish pitch about the public announcement of Xen, I thought I would share some insight into the knowledge I've had of the language for almost a year and a half. I'm still under orders not to post the video demonstration I have back to my blog (not because the subject matter is Xen, but because apparently the demonstration is internal to Microsoft... I still don't understand this (expecially now that the cat is out of the bag), but it certainly doesn't stop me from sharing some of the information contained in it. This will be an ongoing post as the demonstration is over an hour long, with lots of code samples to boot.

Which Linux distribution is the most popular? For many players in the open source realm, that answer depends on which part of the globe is counting, and how. By most accounts and research metrics, Red Hat (Quote, Chart) is the current market leader in distributions. IDC, for example, estimates that Red Hat's distributions cover over 60 percent of the Linux server market.

"I got my new iBook a couple of days ago, and finally tried this “Mac OS X” thing for the first time. After doing all the software updates, this is what I found." Well-known usability hacker Mattew Thomas (mostly of Mozilla fame) gives his two cents on Mac OS X.

"Every couple of years, Sun Microsystems kicks off a 'new version of Solaris' celebration. This Unix fiesta, if you will, requires several months of marketing hype before the actual operating system is released. And so the party began this week with Sun's plugs for Solaris 10, which should arrive in the second half of 2004." Read the report at TheRegister.

The first and second articles in this series about .NET security covered the basics of .NET identity-based security, and showed you how to implement custom authentication and authorization schemes. In this last installment, you get the missing piece of the puzzle: Learn how to implement identity flow and identity impersonation across.NET-distributed multilayered applications.

Slashdot reports that a post to Bugtraq from SecurityTracker.com reports an Internet Explorer 5 exploit that has been released based on the Win2K code leak: "It is reported that a remote user can create a specially crafted bitmap file that, when loaded by IE, will trigger an integer overflow and execute arbitrary code." Elsewhere, this is a quick, superficial look at the style and content of the leaked Windows 2000 source, quoting from the comments but not the code, so this should be safe for developers to read.

SkyOS is now able to handle and display text from all languages. Because of the recently introduced keyboard/UNICODE mapping and UTF8 handling in the entire GUI and applications you can type and view text from languages like English, German, Chinese and more. Check the news & shots here.