For Windows codenamed "Longhorn," Microsoft is investing in the development infrastructure for industry partners, as well as investing in technologies and innovations that continue to expand the PC capabilities and experiences for end-users—including support for advancing technologies such as PCI Express, new storage technologies, and robust advances for both wired and wireless networking. This site provides pointers to technical information for hardware, driver, and firmware engineers who are planning and creating new products that will run Windows "Longhorn."

In this artile, at Consulting Times, they discuss the costs in the terms of lives and dollars when local governments do not deploy open standards based software for data sharing. Can local governments afford to create redundant applications to meet new Federal standards for first responder alerts, emergency services, law enforcement, broadcasters? Open Source collaborative initiatives may provide the only solution for the US if the people want to create a safer environment.

NetBSD's Christopher Sekiya announced on New Year's Eve that he committed the final bits for Indigo (IP20) support to the NetBSD/sgimips Port. Both NFS root and local root now boot multi-user. Please see his message to the port-sgimips MailingList for details.

This whitepaper by a veteran real-time trainer David Kalinsky provides an introduction to the subject of Priority Inversions and Mutexes, from the perspective of embedded systems software developers using a real-time operating system. It discusses unbounded priority inversions, including a detailed example. Then it surveys the differences between mutexes and “classic” semaphores, and the use of priority promotion, priority inheritance and priority ceiling protocols. More articles here.

Usman Latif writes: "Linux has made few inroads on the desktop. Linux enthusiasts have plenty of excuses but do not seem to understand where they need to focus in order to make Linux a success on the desktop. My article 'The Future of Linux on the Desktop' is an attempt to point out markets where Linux can really make a difference."

Syllable 0.5.2 has been released and is now available for download. Some of the changes include new graphics card drivers for the nVidia GeForceFX and the Savage IX/MX chipsets. The media framework has also been updated, so now Syllable works with multiple soundcards. A full list of changes can be found on the Syllable website.

Linus Torvalds announced the release of 2.6.1-rc1, the first prepatch for the 2.6 series. He announced that 2.6.1-rc1 includes many patches that have been in the -mm patchset for a long time.

There are several tasks to which we must attend before actually making use of our freshly installed FreeBSD system. Immediately upon reboot, you will find yourself in the console. While it is possible to setup and use the graphical login managers -- kdm, gdm or others -- it is important to note that this uses extra resources. One of our assumptions is that you might not have all that excess horsepower, so we'll stick with the console login for now. Read more at OfB.biz.

Preview sports new file system, gee-whiz graphics, and some security fixes. The next version of Windows, code-named Longhorn, is still in the early stages of its journey to the retail corral, but PCWorld's hands-on look at a preview reveals features we'd love to have now--while raising some intriguing questions.

In the course of putting the January 2004 issue together, the LinuxWorld editors circulated forward-looking questions to a wide selection members of the Linux community whose opinions we respect. Here's what they had to say. Elsewhere, "Linux will continue to make headway in 2004, but the path to success is rarely a straight line. The number of installed instances of Linux will continue to shoot straight up, but revenues for service providers will not" says David Johnson.

MandrakeSoft released a test version of its Cooker tree in the form of 2 ISOs available now for testing. Includes XFree86 4.4.0-RC2, KDE 3.1.94, kernel 2.6.0.

The DR-DOS/OpenDOS Enhancement Project has finished work on version 7.01.06 of the patches to the original Caldera OpenDOS/DR-DOS 7.01 source code, adding support for the FAT32 file system.

Ben Mazer write a not-so-positive review of the KDE 3.2 beta. It can be found here. Our recent KDE review is here. Elsewhere, RangerRick now has a preliminary KOffice port (with some Qt font/drawing issues still to fix) to Mac OS X in addition to the recent Konqueror port.

eWEEK.com's Linux & Open-Source Center Editor Steven Vaughan-Nichols loves the Linux desktop... for himself and other Linux mavens, but thinks that it's still a ways off from being the right choice for most companies. Our Take: There isn't a specific date where you can decide that a desktop experience is good for everybody everywhere (it is already good enough for many people), however I get the feeling that especially around middle 2005 we will be witnessing some truly satisfying results from Gnome 3, KDE 4, OpenCarpet, a matured 2.6 kernel and the evolved distros of the time, so hang on.