Apple has already proved it can deliver supercomputer technology with a cluster installation at Virginia Tech, so what does Xgrid bring to the table? In typical Apple fashion, Xgrid provides an easy-to-implement solution for two common problems in the scientific community: The lack of cheap computing power, and wasted cycles on unused desktops.

Microsoft plans to broaden its stake on Linux and Unix systems this week by giving away a set of tools for migrating applications to Windows.

IBM announced two compilers for Mac OS X: "IBM XL Fortran Advanced Edition V8.1 for Mac OS X -- A new platform supported in the IBM XL Fortran family" and "XL C/C++ Advanced Edition V6.0 for Mac OS X -- A new platform for the IBM family of C/C++ compilers".

"Spidering Hacks" by O'Reilly is targeted at everyone who wants to automate surfing the web and has a little bit of programming experience. Though each of the hacks in the book covers a particular topic, similar to books in the Cookbook series, there is also a lot of material that is generally applicable in each of them.

ZetaNews.com posted some interesting all-around BeOS/Zeta news today: Opera 3.64 for BeOS now available for $10 USD, BeOSmax.org are explaining why the newest version is further delayed, an article about installing BeOS inside Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 and a hack effort to make BeOS believe that the machine has less RAM than it actually has in order to not hit its 1 GB RAM limitation and crash.

On November 23 a new relase of Minix sneaked out. To make things a bit more interesting it looks like there may well be more releases to come: "Version 2.0.4 has been slapped together in a hurry to have a fixed point to start a new Minix project at. The code should be OK, but most new things haven't been tested. (So there's already a fix out.) The documentation is alas far behind all the changes." A Bochs image is also available (in the i386/DOSMINIX.ZIP, use the minix.bxrc to start Bochs).

Xen is a virtual machine monitor for x86 that supports execution of multiple guest operating systems with unprecedented levels of performance and resource isolation. A port of Linux 2.4 to run on the VMM works well, and *BSD and XP ports are in progress. Version 1.0 was released a few months ago.

Netcraft has published the second half of 2003's Top 10 hosting providers survey and list which Operating Systems they use for reliability. Seven providers use FreeBSD, one Windows and one Linux.

About 3 years ago I was looking around for something to add multimedia capabilities to my GNOME desktop. At that point in time there wasn't really that much around. I think the most advanced video player for Linux in those days was XAnim, which was neither were moving quickly or could qualify as free software, except in the beer context. Projects like Xine and mplayer had either just started up or not come into existence yet.

According to Tablet PC Talk Microsoft has announced at CES that they will release a beta copy of Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2004 (Lonestar) upgrade in March 2004.

SciTech Software, Inc. today announced that Open Watcom 1.2 has been released and is now available for download from its website. This release contains a large number of new features, product enhancements and several fixes designed to bring Open Watcom to a higher level of quality and compatibility. SciTech, the official maintainers of the Open Watcom project, have also announced the availability of an updated Open Watcom CD, complete with SciTech’s installer for DOS, OS/2, and windows. Support for the update will be handled exclusively through the Open Watcom website.

A judge has ruled that the Web site Linux vendor Lindows set to aid California residents in processing claims against rival software maker Microsoft will not be tolerated.

YellowTAB informed us that their testing of Release Candidate 2 of Zeta 1.0 has finished. They sent us two screenshots of Zeta 1.0-RC2 and Bernd Korz replies to two of our questions regarding the RC-2.

Sun's Glynn Foster is reporting from the Linux conference in Australia that he was able to get some JDS Live CDs to give away. It might be safe to assume that Sun will be releasing these for free to the public for them to taste JDS first hand.