In continuing with my articles exploring the my SPARC-based Sun Ultra 5, I'm going to cover the topic of compiler optimizations on the SPARC platform. While many are familiar with GCC compiler optimizations for the x86 platform, there are naturally differences for GCC on SPARC, and some platform-specific issues to keep in mind.

"The other day something happened that left me a little speechless. A friend of mine brought over a copy of Yellowtab's Zeta OS RC1." Read the review at Beta10, but please note that they are reviewing an older version of Zeta, RC1, while RC2+more_patches are already available. Yesterday OSNews featured shots of ZintrO, YellowTAB's newest work, and ZetaNews has some info as well on this.

"During the next two to three years, I quite like the prospects for appreciation in Novell’s stock price, but I'd be inclined to stay on the sidelines for the next few months before thinking about starting a position. While I expect Red Hat to remain the sector leader, its dominant position will be eroded as strong competitors such as Novell/SUSE enter and consolidate in the space. It's still early, and Novell’s transition will take time as management reconciles its various challenges and opportunities." Read the article at ITManagersJournal.

AMD's Athlon-64 (for PCs) and Opteron (for servers) will protect against buffer overflows when used with a new version of Windows XP. Intel plans similar features on next generation Pentium chips.

Threads can be thought of as lightweight processes, offering many of the advantages of processes without the communication requirements that separate processes require. Threads provide a means to divide the main flow of control into multiple, concurrently executing flows of control. This sample chapter will teach you how to "think multitasking" -- and improve your apps in the process.

"Our main goal is to complete the Rhapsody OS and make it an OS that people would like to use. We aim for end users and hope to bring them what Apple has brought their customers for the past 20 years - the simplicity and style which Mac OS has." Check out the project here.

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates won widespread applause in January when he trumpeted an agreement to give $1 billion in software and cash to the United Nations as part of a job-training program for the developing world. But Microsoft did not seek any attention for a much smaller amount that it contributed earlier to pay some travel expenses for a United Nations business standards group.

The use of inheritance in VB.NET requires you to make several extra design decisions. This chapter from "Building Applications and Components with Visual Basic .NET" will help you learn how to make those decisions.

Karl Fogel from the Subversion project announced the release 1.0.0 of the CVS replacement version control system which we introduced a few days ago. Developers are recommended to try it over CVS.

Along with the development environment, Datschge and Henrique Pinto look at the large number of new KDE apps, the project structure, and even the philosophy behind KDE. If you are thinking about checking out KDE 3.2, are a long-time user, or just want to know what's up, this review has everything you need to know.

Wind River, a major force in software embedded in devices such as cell phones or factory robots, has signed a deal with leading Linux seller Red Hat to jointly develop a version of the open-source software, the companies plan to announce Monday.

As RAM increasingly becomes a commodity, the prices drop and computer users are able to buy more. 32-bit archictectures face certain limitations in regards to accessing these growing amounts of RAM. To better understand the problem and the various solutions, we begin with an overview of Linux memory management. Understanding how basic memory management works, we are better able to define the problem, and finally to review the various solutions. This article was written by examining the Linux 2.6 kernel source code for the x86 architecture types.

There is a (German) article in the online edition to the largest and longest running political magazine of Germany, the "Spiegel", about ReactOS. Definetely good publicity for the OSS hobby OS.

The popular German TV channel 3Sat put together a mini-presentation to the YellowTAB GmbH and their OS offering, Zeta. The program starts with a bit of history about Be/BeOS and moves to YellowTAB's offices and their newest product, ZintrO. Check in for exclusive shots & info on the ZintrO.