Castle today celebrated the first birthday of their 600MHz XScale, RISC OS machine, the IYONIX pc. Castle announced the machine 17th of October last year, and placed it on sale on the 28th of Novemeber 2002. Since then, it has gained a Linux port, and revitalised the RISC OS platform. More information in this drobe.co.uk article.

Phoenix Technologies is sounding the death knell for BIOS - the bread and butter of its current operations. While Phoenix is comparatively the "Microsoft" of the BIOS world, it has spent years endeavoring to modernize the aging standard. If all goes according to plan, a new product the company dubs Core System Software (CSS) will serve as the foundation of PC architecture.

RISCOS Ltd.'s managing director Paul Middleton has this month told Foundation readers that his company will continue by "adapting to change and seizing new opportunities as quickly as possible". As well as sketching out a RISC OS 4 road map, Paul also revealed some surprisingly unreported facts.

"An inductive, or task-based, user interface is one that is based on "tasks" rather than applications (as in OS X) or documents (as in Windows 95/Office 95, sort of; Microsoft backed off of this concept pretty quickly as the benefits of a task-oriented UI became more obvious). Here's an example. Let's say you want to print a digital photo." Read the article at WinSuperSite.

"Code Reading: An Open Source Perspective", by Diomidis Spinellis, is a new kind of book. It's a foray into a domain normally left untouched by Computer Science texts and exemplifies yet another positive contribution from the Open Source movement. Simply put, Code Reading is a detailed discussion of the techniques required to read and maintain both good and bad code. As an interesting twist, the author draws on projects from the Open Source world to provide examples, both good and bad.

FreeBSD's Scott Long announced the availability of 5.2-BETA ISO images and ftp install sets for i386 and alpha. Amd64, sparc64, ia64, and pc98 sets will be available shortly.

The QNX4 driver for VMWare is now available. The package includes a graphics driver for Photon and a vmtool for accessing VMWare information (date, clipboard, etc.).

Linus Torvalds has released his final 2.6.0-test kernel, calling it the "Beaver In Detox". Following this release Linus says that 2.6 development will be lead by Andrew Morton. The kernel's name refers in jest to the previous release, which Linus had named "Stoned Beaver". It contains a fix for the aic7xxx driver, proper error handling in do_fork(), some firewire fixes, and correction of a few skbuff leakage points. Download it from a kernel.org mirror.

HP displaced Sun as the market leader in Unix systems this quarter, according to IDC figures released today. Read the news at TheRegister and at LinuxElectrons.

The first round of screenshots showing off the new GUI for SkyOS 5.0 have been released. The three screenshots show various features of the new GUI, including the new WindUI theme, new Viewer window, and various window effects such as curves, shadows, and transparency. In addition to the new GUI, SkyOS 5.0 will have other additions, such as more support for hardware (e.g. an ATI driver to go alongside the NVidia driver), speed and stability improvements, anti-aliased text, and Bochs support.

What’s the next killer app? What’s your biggest wish? The Microsoft chairman responds to readers’ letters in MSNBC's online forum.

As someone who is always looking to maximize performance and efficiency from my computers, I was delighted to have stumbled upon a program named Distcc a while back. According to their website distcc is a "fast, free distributed c/c++ compiler."

SuSE releases latest Linux Technology for SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8: Service Pack enhancements include improved hardware support, enhanced storage access.

When I was presented with the opportunity to review The Kompany's dbRadar product, I jumped at the chance. I seem to be on a continual quest for good database tools.