The most powerful synergy in Microsoft Corp.'s technology portfolio is between its powerful platform services and its reasonably priced, highly capable tools. Wooing developers with seductive ease of use, Microsoft's tools then pave a path of least resistance toward the adoption of each new wave of Windows features. Read the review of Visual Studio.NET at eWeek.

Julien Bordet has ported code from NetBSD to support NTFS4 and NTFS5 in OpenBSD-current. He has heavily tested read accesses to his Windows 2000 partition, and that has worked fine. Julien says that there is an existing port, but his port is new and adds NTFS5 support.

Mark Stephens reports on the Wakefield show theatre presentations given by the RISC OS' leading developers. Four companies demonstrated what they've been up to and suggest what's to come, providing an insight into perhaps where RISC OS is now heading.

"Bad architecture and the proprietary lock-in has frozen out innovation," Tiemann, Red Hat CTO, said. "That makes it difficult to bring new ideas to market. The open-source platform with open-source standards has liberated the playing field." Tiemann urged chief information officers to approach their planning from this perspective, and he provided more detail in this interview at SearchEnterpriseLinux.

Andrew Bloo from SciTech Software sent us in a clarification to our yesterday's story: "The SciTech SNAP drivers are not actually XFree86 specific at all, but rather the XFree86 driver is just a small module that interfaces to SciTech SNAP. Once SciTech SNAP is installed on the system, developers can actually code directly to the SciTech SNAP API's via the SDK, and bypass X entirely.

Deal.com has an analysis of the Apple situation and they suggest a restructuring of the company, even if that might mean break up into smaller companies a'la Palm/PalmSource.

Microsoft's plans for "Longhorn," the next version of Windows, include a new graphics subsystem, a new file system and a new security system. But, so far, users aren't nearly as excited about the features as Microsoft is, eWeek says. In the meantime, The Register reports that Microsoft sidelines Longhorn database caper: Microsoft has scaled back its 'Big Bang', and its Future Storage initiative will build on, rather than supersede the NTFS file system, when the next version of Windows appears in 2005.

"From my perspective the work being done by OpenBeOS is amazing and the concept was acceptable last year. Zeta has changed the landscape now and their approach, offering backwards compatibility but trying to move BeOS forward as Zeta is a good one and with luck they will succeed. My only question is whether they've gone far enough to warrant the interest they hope to attract." Read the editorial at BeOSJournal, written by David Reid.

AMD released the Athlon XP 3200+ for desktops, the last scheduled member of a chip family that helped turn the company's fortunes around. Benchmarks here ("it should have been called a 2800+").

This is the final segment of a 3 part interview series with Jonathan Schwartz, EVP of Sun Software. In part 1, Mr. Schwartz talked about how Sun is expanding its software business. In part 2, he talked about why Sun isn't worried about Linux. Today, Mr. Schwartz talks about the future of the software business.

"What? Are you nuts? Running SuSE 8.2 Linux Professional on a 150 Mhz Pentium? That will never work. That's exactly what I did do and it did work, admirably." Read the article at LinuxPlanet.

The well-known graphics driver development company, SciTech Software, are closing on releasing a beta of their Linux port of their SciTech SNAP Graphics for Linux. These drivers replace the 2D XFree86 modules for a large number of graphics chipsets. SciTech claims that their latest beta drivers have shown up to 12-15% faster 2D performance than their XFree86 counterparts (for some chipsets). In the initial final release, accelerated 3D via DRI won't be supported though.

Sun Microsystems is spitting nails over a biting report from Meta Group, a market research and consulting firm, that suggested, among other things, that Sun's customers should rethink doing business with the company in the long term, and that CEO Scott McNealy should be replaced.

"Earlier this year The Register expressed an interest in Lindows.com's Lindows Media Computer, and despite the accompanying back-handed compliments, Michael Robertson himself got in touch and arranged to have one shipped round. So for the past couple of months I've been able to check out LindowsOS itself, the Lindows.com business model in operation, the hardware, and the whole notion of the 'living room' PC, or the 'one per room' PC." Read the article at TheRegister.