People sometimes stare when Microsoft executive Tim McDonough opens his laptop in meetings. But that's probably normal when someone uses a Mac PowerBook in the center of the Windows world.

OS2 World.Com reports about Serenity Systems International (SSI)and its new virtual machine product family, Serenity Virtual Station(tm) (SVISTA). The SVISTA(tm) products will provide the broadest support for operating systems in the industry. "Our support for Microsoft Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, and IBM OS/2 as hosting platforms demonstrates that accomplishing this objective is in sight," according to Bob St.John, Director of Business Development for SSI. He continued, "We expect to conclude our Early Support Program and release the retail product in early 2Q04. We are prepared to support the product in service engagements right now."

The next release of the .NET Framework will include both 32- and 64-bit native support. CLR 2 is allready ported to Itanium (and AMD-64). Christopher Brown discusses how developers writing managed code today will be able to easily port and, in many cases, just copy existing applications to this new environment. The video requires Windows and MS Media Player.

Here is a positive review of Slackware 9.1 over at ExtremeTech's forums by R. Burns (our review).

yellowTAB is pleased to announce that RC2 has arrived and is ready to ship. Please read here if you are interested in taking part in their trade-in offer (trade RC1 for RC2). Otherwise they will be releasing a free update to bring all RC1 installs up-to-date to the RC2 status.

CVS, part of the glue that holds open source development together, shows its age. Many competitors have emerged recently, fixing misfeatures and adding new ideas. Shlomi Fish (of the version control comparison fame) explores several current open source version control systems that may be better than CVS for your needs. Email Shlomi on how to add info for your favorite VCS on his comparison page.

Linux Labs announced a key stepping stone towards large-scale deployment of the Linux Operating System. Called Clusgres, this product has the ability to make standalone applications run in parallel across a group of computers and act as one, including the Open Source database system PostgreSQL. To date there has been no capability to either increase speed of free database servers for Linux or to allow them to scale past the limitations of a single server. Despite advances in clustered supercomputing, there has been no capability for a server program running on a single machine, let alone the PostgreSQL database, to transparently operate across linked computers and to operate as if a single large program.

Microsoft’s chief software architect Bill Gates took centre stage at last week’s software developer day in London in a bid to convince UK software developers to stick with Microsoft’s roadmap, even though Longhorn, its next generation operating system, is two to three years away.

The XFree86 Project modified their license (fully effective as of the upcoming 4.4.0 release). The updated license change applies to the base XFree86 license, and to source files that explicitly carry a copyright notice in the name of The XFree86 Project, Inc. Copyrights and licenses in the names of others will not be affected by this change, however some fear that these changes might be GPL-incompatible.

The FreeBSD status reports are back again with the 2003 year-end edition. Many new projects are starting up and gaining momentum, including XFS, MIPS, PowerPC, and networking locking and mutlithreading. The end of 2003 also saw the release of FreeBSD 4.9, the first stable release to have greater than 4GB support for the ia32 platform. Work on FreeBSD 5.2 also finished up and was released early in January of 2004 (our review), while we learned FreeBSD 5.2.1-RELEASE is expected sometime next week with some critical fixes in it.

Microsoft Corp. will put a more human face on its upcoming global multimillion dollar advertising program for its Windows Server System. The company, which is set to announce the new ad campaign at its Silicon Valley campus on Thursday afternoon, will spend tens of millions of dollars on this worldwide campaign, which will feature specific IT staffers from enterprise and mid-level firms that use the Windows Server System solutions.

Martin Hansen wrote a review of the 'Advantage Six' (first, second part), a PC solely created to run RISC OS and other StrongARM software in emulation. Martin is discussing the differences between using reference Risc PC, the Iyonix XScale machine and the emulator's hardware, and also benchmarks them.

For some reason, Microsoft's brilliant and cutting-edge .NET development environment left out one crucial tool... a tool that has been common in software development environments since, oh, about 1950, and taken so much for granted that it's incredibly strange that nobody noticed that .NET doesn't really have one. Read more on what Joel has to say here.

Paul writes: "I've written an article, containing _mockups_ of an idea I've had for the Gnome desktop. It's called Scoop, and it's an idea for a container widget, to act as a "System Sidebar" on a users desktop. You can see the writeup here." Update: Paul writes: "I've updated the article with more ideas, and added a link to my Gnome AutoManager proposal, which can be seen here."