In Part 1 I discussed how the software development world is about to be turned on it's head. Now in Part 2 I look at how the hardware world may be about to undergo even bigger changes and why it wont be a hardware manufacturer leading the way.

"Avalon" applications and Microsoft Windows.Forms applications share many similarities. Both are managed solutions with many of the same underpinnings governing .NET Framework-based applications. There are, however, also differences between the two application models. Understanding these similarities and differences will help you assess how to adapt an existing Windows Forms application to take advantage of the capabilities in "Longhorn." On other news, Longhorn is set to kill middleware: the server version of Longhorn will include business process orchestration features to allow users to link together Web services, among other tasks, without the need for additional middleware.

Total Cost of Ownership for Entry-Level and Mid-Range Clusters by Techwise Research. A detailed analysis of the total cost of ownership of three different RISC-based server clusters including HP OpenVMS, IBM AIX and Sun Solaris. Read the whitepaper here.

Mad Penguin put up an article with some mockups about a Slackware packager front-end. On other interface news, gTask is a daemon and client library that allows programs to communicate the progress of certain long running operations (e.g. downloading files, printing, etc) to the daemon. Various user interfaces can report on the progress of these tasks to the user. The project created after inspiration of an OSNews article. On yet another interface article, here is what Roberto Alsina wrote regarding the relationship between free software writers and UI designers.

Mozilla Foundation renamed its next generation browser from Firebird to "Firefox" and has released version 0.8 (release notes). The new release features streamlined downloading, an installer for Windows users, a new Aqua theme for MacOS X users and numerous other improvements. On other XUL news, ThunderBird 0.5 was released and Lindows.com released the NVU 0.1 preview recently, a cross-platform WYSIWYG HTML editor powered by Mozilla's technologies.

The developers of the SkyOS project sat down with TechIMO to answer a few questions about the promising alternative operating system.

Sun Microsystems' quarterly online conference is this week, February 10th and 11th. It's a series of live videocasts and live chats to discuss Sun's latest technology initiatives. If you "attend," you'll get a Sun Java Desktop System evaluation CD, downloadable Sun BluePrints book and articles, and free Ringtones for your phone. The topic this quarter is 20 new innovations designed to cut cost and complexity. Sign up here.

This article presents a fictional case study that illustrates the methodology, tools, and best practices used to migrate a Tru64 environment to a Solaris environment.

This article provides recommendations for tuning ORACLE on SPARC processor-based systems running the Solaris Operating System to minimize recovery in the event of a system or database failure. This article is relevant for any audience level.

A new version of the HyperTransport specification comes out Monday that will, ideally, boost performance in PCs and communications equipment over the next year.

Gtk# is a .Net/Mono language binding for the Gtk+ toolkit and several GNOME platform and desktop libraries. The GNOME 2.2 platform is currently targeted. Recently, 0.16 of Gtk# was released, codenamed "Groundhog Stew." GtkSharpRSS was updated to take advantage of its new features.

Steven Garrity writes about his experiences with Linux and Gnome: "I've noticed a few little user interface niceties worth sharing", he says.

KernelTrap reports that David Weinehall has released the 2.0.40 stable Linux kernel, calling it the "Moss-covered Tortoise". It earned this name by being released over 3 years after its predecessor, 2.0.39. Those still using the 2.0 kernel are recommended to upgrade for numerous reasons, including fixes to local exploits and remote information leaks. View the changelog and download the new kernel from a kernel.org mirror.

NSIS (Nullsoft Scriptable Install System) is a tool that allows programmers to create such installers for Windows. It is released under an open source license and is completely free for any use. After almost two years of development the NSIS 2 Team is happy to announce the release of NSIS 2.0.