If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Microsoft's fiercest foes--Java software providers--are showing growing admiration for their powerful rival, says News.com. eWEEK also has an article on Sun's new announcements, and here is our own report on Sun's Linux distribution: Java Desktop System.

Microsoft announced that Windows Small Business Server 2003 has been released to manufacturing.

SciTech Software, Inc. today announced that Open Watcom 1.1 has been released. This update includes a number of eagerly anticipated fixes and enhancements and can be downloaded, free of charge, from the Open Watcom web site.

After some time in development, XPlite has finally been released. XPlite (successor of 98lite) lets you remove Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player and several other components from Windows XP/2000.

Intel is working on hardware to facilitate instant-on capability for PCs. It works on the same principle as the saved state functionality that OS vendors have used to eliminate the lengthy boot-up that PC users hate, but in hardware. What's really interesting about their work is that this saved state will not only work when the user shuts down the system properly, but will work even after a power outage. This has interesting application in the server space too, and eliminating the boot-up would help reduce downtime after a UPS failure, for example.

In the Apple conference in Paris, Jobs spoke of the new 15" Powerbook, the updated 12" and 17" Powerbooks, the new Bluetooth keyboard and mouse and he re-iterated that Panther will be out before the end of the year and that G5 will reach 3GHz by the end of next summer.

Sun Microsystems is introducing its Linux distribution, Sun Linux, a part of the Mad Hatter project, to the general public today. Sun Linux is targeting the Enterprise market and at a very low price. OSNews had a sneak peak at Sun Linux last Friday at Sun's offices and here is what we saw there.

The GNOME-Office team announced the immediate availability of GNOME-Office 1.0. It includes the AbiWord-2.0 word processor, GNOME-DB-1.0 database interface and Gnumeric-1.2.0 spreadsheet. In the meantime, Nautilus is set to receive a new UI design which will be object oriented-based. In this OO design each folder is an object and opens in its own window, while the navigational buttons and methods are going away from the default interface (similar to Tracker in the pre-OpenTracker BeOS 4/5 days).

As many OSNews readers forced to get by with ailing, slow computers at work may know, a stingy hardware upgrade cycle can have negagitve productivity effects. However, in this age of gigahertz processors, how often do businesses really need to upgrade? Every three to four years, a recent Gartner study recommends. Now, I'm sure Dell is happy to hear this news, but is it really necessary to upgrade that often?

SkyOS now has hardware accelerated Nvidia support, supporting all known models. Additionally, the first round of the "SkyOS GUI Design Contest" is now over. Round two has started, and you may vote for the design you would like to see. The winner will be the design implemented and released in SkyOS 5.

Novell last week said it plans to use newly acquired systems management tools instead of including its own ZENworks technology in a Linux software package that's due to open beta testing next month.

InfoWorld features three articles on Sun: "Sun Network: Welcome to the post-boom Sun": Company hopes to bolster its enterprise worth at next week's user conference. "Sun steals page from Microsoft's playbook": Grid, p-to-p software missing from Project Orion's official launch. "Sun inches toward low-cost computing": Company demos Oracle 10g database running on a cluster of its Intel-based servers. Also, McNealy, 48, who co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982, sat down last week with a group of Chronicle reporters and editors to discuss the challenges facing his company.

The BeOSJournal caught up with Vassilis Perantzakis recently in BeShare, who spoke about his work on BeOS Max Edition, his outlook on Be Inc.'s decision to "focus shift", and what he thinks is in store for future distributions of OpenBeOS, including YellowTab's Zeta. Additionally, the new french news site BeOptimistic.net features an interview of Guillaume Maillard, leader of the BlueEyedOS project. This interview is in french, but an english translation is also available. Other new BeOS-related news sites involve ZetaNews and IsComputerOn.

Once the most aggressive users of IT, financial institutions have learned to make do with less. But few can go on cost-cutting indefinitely. Computer- and telecoms-makers could soon be feasting again. In most cases, IT systems have not been touched for more than a decade - "note the antiquated OS/2 operating system that runs many an IBM computer on tellers' desks", the Economist reports.