MacMinute reports that Apple has released Java 1.4.2 for Mac OS X 10.3 Panther. According to the release notes, the update provides support for Sun's Java 1.4.2 APIs, and includes enhancements to drawing performance and stability for both Java applications and Java applets. Java 1.4.2 is available via the Mac OS X Software Update preference pane. Apple on Monday also released Safari 1.2.

Safari 1.2, or v125, includes several new features, some of which have been anticipated in the past. The new version also boasts performance improvements as well as bug fixes. As expected, Version 1.2 features the ability to navigate between hyperlinks using the keyboard. Elsewhere, OmniWeb 5.0-b1 was released. Highlighted new features in this version include a tab drawer, saved browsing sessions, updated bookmarks, page marking, improved shortcuts, site-specific preferences, and more.

A service domain applies autonomic computing principles for aggregating Web services and grid services. The service domain technology provides a service grid and can create, filter, discover, cluster, organize, select, route, recover, and switch Web services and grid services autonomically. Using service domain objects enables you to implement business solutions easily and quickly. In this article, we discuss how to invoke and access a service domain to start the operational phase.

Every C++ program -- and every networking app -- needs a good logging mechanism. ACE provides you with more than one way to handle such things. Consider your application and how you expect it to grow over time. Your choices range from the simple ACE_DEBUG macros to the highly flexible logging service. Regarding .NET, exception handling is more than just throwing and catching objects. There are many design elements in providing a robust system, and providing a sound exception handling, logging, and tracing schema are among the first steps. In this chapter from ".NET Patterns: Architecture, Design, and Process" book, you'll learn best practices for determining when to throw, catch, and log your errors.

Bruce Perens' UserLinux startup, having turned down an earlier offer by a few dozen active KDE and Debian developers to integrate KDE into UL now seems to suffer from too many requests to support KDE desktops regardless of its previous policy decision to primarily go for a gratis LPGL development platform. In a mail to the UserLinux list Bruce now announced that Perens LLC will start to support KDE commercially, and declares it an option open to all other UserLinux support providers.

Slashdot reports on an interesting article discussing how one might go about 'killing' x86. The article details a number of different technological solutions, from a clean 64-bit replacement (Alpha?), to a radically different VLIW approach (Itanium), and an evolutionary solution (Opteron). Another article by the same author covers hardware multi-threading and exploiting thread level parallelism, like Intel's Hyperthreading or IBM's POWER4 with its dual-cores on a die. These types of implementations can really pay off if the software supports it. In the case of servers, most applications tend to be multi-user, and so are parallel in nature.