From Slashdot: "Hans Reiser has benchmarked Reiser4 against ext3 and Reiserfs 3. Reiser4 turns out to be way faster than V3, and for ext3, why don't you check out the results yourself ? Han's Reiser states, "these benchmarks mean to me that our performance is now good enough to ship V4 to users", and he will be probably sending in a patch within the next couple of weeks to be included in the 2.6/2.5 kernel." Benchmarks against XFS would be most interesting too.

SCO shares fell nearly 10% Friday, after an IBM memo rejecting SCO's Linux claims turned up. Meanwhile, Andy Butler of Gartner said "Users should not start waving their cheque books" in apparent contradiction of earlier comments by his colleague George Weiss. GROKLAW lists several other analysts taking anti-SCO positions on Linux licensing. Form-4 filings with the SEC reveal SCO Executives have been cashing out stock. They made $398,833.90 in June, and $781,964.70 in July.

To me, it's a miracle how every tiny article on OSNews.com, or any other tech-site, ends up in people shouting all sorts of nonsense at each other like "Linux is gonna bring back Elvis", "Windows shot president Kennedy", "Linux kept the cold war cold" or "Bill Gates wants to buy the moon and charge people for looking at it". Do these people really know what they are saying, or are they just going with the Open-Source flow? Update: Rebuttal article here.

According to a NYTimes article, Bill Gates says that 5% of all Windows installations crash more than twice a day. Elsewhere, at Silicon.com Microsoft CEO talks on the Longhorn 'big bang', $49bn cash mountain and more.

Scientists are wrestling with individual atoms to develop molecule-sized computers, tiny cancer-fighting robots that travel the bloodstream and stain-resistant trousers.

From the Mac news site MacMinute: It appears as though Apple has removed all of the "Switch" commercials from its web site. When trying to view the ads, which used to be available here, you are redirected to Apple's "Switching to Mac: Real Stories" page. In April, Apple removed the "Switch" tab graphic from the top of its web site navigation to make room for the "Music" tab, although all of the content remained at apple.com/switch. Several media outlets have recently claimed that the campaign was a failure, citing stagnant Apple market share numbers. Also, read our interview with a switcher here.

eCosCentric today announced their partnership with SuperH Inc to deliver the eCos real-time operating system and RedBoot firmware on SuperH RISC CPU cores. The partnership will extend the existing eCos coverage of SuperH embedded development boards to include the SH-4 MicroDev Platform. On other embedded CPU news, both QNX and MontaVista Linux said that will support the new Motorola MPC5200 CPU while Samsung says it has developed the world's fastest mobile CPU, which runs at a speed of 533MHz, and outpaces Intel's CPU. Get similar news on our sister site, NewMobileComputing.

Microsoft Corp. will spend about $6.8 billion on research and development in its new fiscal year, an increase of 8% from the previous 12 months, said Bill Gates. They will be moving more deeply into the model-based programming space, said company chairman and chief software architect Bill Gates.

Phoenix is the next generation .NET optimization framework which will be the basis for code generation for all future Microsoft optimizing compilers," such as Microsoft's Visual Basic, Visual C++, and Visual C# ones, according to a description of the Faculty Summit session on the technology. On other Microsoft news, check the FAQ for the Advanced Networking Pack for Windows XP and download it.

HP developers move some features from Compaq's version of Unix to its own HP-UX, an important part of the company's plan to eventually merge the two product lines. This was known to happen since Day 1 of the merger of HP-Compaq. Additionally, read our recent interview with an HP-UX engineer.

The software giant plans to use an analyst meeting Thursday to tout, among other things, strong sales of its Windows Server 2003 operating system. At the same time, they issue another passel of warnings about security holes, including a "critical" flaw that affects most Windows PCs.

Microsoft has released DirectX 9.0b enduser runtime via WindowsUpdate and the release fixes some security problems and performance improvements. Download here, bug fix for 9.0a, more information on both issues here and here, SDK here.

Novell today announced the August availability of Novell NetWare 6.5, advanced network services for business. NetWare 6.5 includes business continuity, open source, Web application services and "virtual office" capabilities to reduce network costs and complexity while giving users around-the-clock access to the tools they need to be productive.

Trolltech today announced the release of Qt, version 3.2. Qt, Trolltech's C++ multiplatform application framework, is the industry-leading C++ tool used to create applications that run natively on Windows, Linux/Unix and Mac OS X, all from the same codebase. The release of Qt 3.2 includes hundreds of enhancements and features that enable developers to build high-performance, low-maintenance multiplatform applications.