"In my career, I have managed the deployment of Macintosh labs and offices in colleges and elementary schools and at companies with a few workstations to those at major corporations.

Compelled by the endless debate of whether Linux is ready for the desktop, I wrote my own rant. It morphed into some kind of "my experience with Linux". This is some kind of long term review of Linux, from the very specific viewpoint of someone who uses it to do research about computers and networks. It is not a distro comparison, or Linux vs Windows TCO comparison, or any such thing. It is just a story about a guy who found Linux.

With Windows Server 2003, Microsoft is promising greater security. However, its 50 million lines of code mean it'll never be secure enough. Read the article at BusinessWeek.

Lately, we've all read a lot of articles about desktop Linux - so many that it's getting hard to tell them apart. One says "Why Linux Sucks," the next "My Success With Linux." Even Michael Robertson of Lindows.com joined the fun with his "Why Desktop Linux Sucks, Today." But very few people have proposed anything radical, and I believe that's what's needed to take GNU/Linux to the next level.

VeriTest, an independent test lab, has found that Windows Server 2003 outperforms Microsoft Windows 2000 Server and Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0 by a dramatic margin—typically performing two to three times faster on the same hardware. Compared to Windows NT Server 4.0, Windows Server 2003 is: Two times faster on average as a file server. Three times faster serving dynamic Web content. Four times faster serving static Web content. Update: Apparently, VeriTest is owned by Lionbridge.

Though Oracle and IBM deny that MySQL, PostgreSQL or other open-source offerings are a threat to their enterprise business, they are still taking steps to re-emphasize their low-end offerings. Read the article at NewsFactor.

For all the glitz surrounding the unveiling Monday of Apple Computer's new music service, a quick look suggests that it's a solid, but hardly revolutionary, addition to the market.

Microsoft is considering an open source approach to one of its software libraries, following heavy pressure from developers and sharp competition in the growing mobile device development arena. The decision would be a radical one for Microsoft, a fierce opponent of the open source model of making intellectual property available for modification and redistribution. The surprise move to open source is being considered for the Windows Template Library (WTL) - an enhancement of the C++ language.

Matthew Garrett demonstrated his success in building a Debian system on the Sparc architecture on top of the NetBSD kernel. Additionally Joel Baker reported about significant work for the NetBSD/x86 port, such as dpkg and APT, that will work without additional patches. NetBSD runs on hardware unsupported by Linux.

This is a desktop comparison of Red Hat Linux 9 and SuSE 8.2 Professional Edition. We have used Red Hat Linux 8 for all our work since last fall, and installed version 9 as soon as it became available. However, we have not been fully content with Red Hat, so we gave SuSE 8.2 a try when it became available this month.

Will Red Hat and SuSE be drawn into the SCO v. IBM fracas? In an informative interview SCO-Caldera's Chris Sontag tells MozillaQuest.com's Mike Angelo there is SCO-owned code in Red Hat and SuSE Linux and no tainted code in the "Linux kernel that Linus and others have helped develop."

Avoid the overhead of large numbers of very similar classes with the Flyweight pattern. Learn how to recognize instances that are fundamentally the same except for a few parameters, move those variables outside the class instance, and pass them in as part of a method call. There is more development articles for C, C++, Java etc to read, here.

Within the next year, PC makers are expected to start selling a powerful new generation of home computers that run on 64-bit microchips. But consumers might initially find little extra value in these PCs, despite their exponentially more powerful features. Read the rest of the article at Reuters.

Today we feature an in-depth interview with three members of FreeBSD's Core (Wes Peters, Greg Lehey and M. Warner Losh) and also a major FreeBSD developer (Scott Long). It is a long read, but we touch a number of hot issues, from the Java port to corporate backing, the Linux competition, the 5.x branch and how it stacks up against the other Unices, UFS2, the possible XFree86 fork, SCO and its Unix IP situation, even re-unification of the BSDs. If you are into (any) Unix, this interview is a must read.