DragonFly is an operating system and environment designed to be the logical continuation of the FreeBSD-4.x OS series. Prominent former FreeBSD developer Matthew Dillon is a major player in the development. According to the website, DragonFly gives "the BSD base an opportunity to grow in entirely new direction from the one taken in the FreeBSD-5 series."

Aaron Hillegass' new book, titled "Core Mac OS X and Unix Programming", is now available in the stores. In the past, we reviewed his previous book "Cocoa Programming for MacOSX" and we got a good idea of Aaron's elegant writing style, descriptive chapters and advanced development under Mac OS X. In this book, he goes down under, teaching us how to handle and develop for the underpinnings of OSX, the core of the OS.

Market research firm Embedded Market Forecasters released a report today with data that indicates that embedded development projects using Microsoft's "Windows Embedded" operating system platforms (including Windows CE .NET and Windows XP Embedded) is 43% faster and costs 68% less on average than projects using Embedded Linux. Further background, an executive summary, and a link for free downloading of the full report are available in this WindowsForDevices web site.

Stéphane Guillard published recently a comprehensive report of the current status of the Amiga OS4 project. The documents are available in English and in French, in PDF/JPEG or PowerPoint.

He could have been as rich as Bill Gates, but Ken Sakamura says he's fine earning enough to lead an "ordinary life." In the world of computers, the obscure Japanese engineer stands in the top rank along with Gates, having developed an operating system that is more widely used than even Microsoft Corp's Windows. Sakamura's system, TRON, is used to run items ranging from digital cameras to car engines, just as Windows operates personal computers.

Visionaries are using photons to develop data-security systems that may prove the ultimate defense against eavesdropping hackers.

The Justice Department and 19 states have made peace with Microsoft Corp. over its monopolistic misdeeds. But Tom Reilly is still on the company’s case. The Massachusetts attorney general is the lone public sector holdout who has refused to settle with the Redmond, Wash.-based software giant over allegations that it attempted to crush competitors with monopolistic tactics.

A Grid computing environment provides the virtual computing resource that will be used to execute applications. The functional components(security, resource managament, informations services, and data managament)of a grid environment, as well as non-functional considerations such as performance requirements or operating system requirements, must be well understood when considering enabling an application to execute in a grid environment. This article helps you determine whether an application is a good candidate to execute in a grid environment.

How many hardcore gamers do you know who are also avid Mac users? Probably not many. Windows users have thousands of titles to choose from, and cheap hardware to run their games on. Despite the many virtues of the Mac platform, it is not the first choice of serious gamers. Even the speedy new G5’s will not change that.

A CA World panel of Linux luminaries that included Linus Torvalds predicted the demise of Unix over time, saying it will be replaced by Linux. Again, our recent editorial on the subject.

Every so often I have this urge (maybe more of an itch) to spend hours and hours on the web trying to find information about old, obsolete computers of the past. I am intrigued by the XEROX Alto and Star ('70s-'82), the Apple Lisa ('83) and, of course, CRAYs ('75-ish). These were revolutionary machines indeed, they wrote golden pages in the history of computing. In the end of the 1980s, a new innovative product was ready to ship, created by a bunch of people coming from Apple: The NeXT platform.

Here are a few screenshots of applications on YellowTAB's Zeta: "BeTunes is coming along well, the TimeLiner management app looks promising, the Tracker configuration is easy and very useful. MeTOS, the developing tool is fully functional and will speed up your coding adventures. AbiWord is a tight word processor and for simple editing use Zedit, the enhanced text editor. As you will see, the Network configuration has dramatically improved over R5. If you develop an app that requires network settings you can add a tab to the configuration panel."

The filesystem is a database, but it has always been unsuitable as the computer's primary one. Programmers have to write specialized programs to get the functionality they need. Now, new advances in software like Plan 9, the Reiser 4 filesystem and Linux are making the improvements the filesystem needs to become viable. Plan 9 is using the filesystem as the integral system interface, and the Reiser filesystem is unifying pointlessly different but equivalent namespaces. For operating systems to improve for users (that always includes programmers), they need to incorporate these new ideas.

Sun Microsystems Inc. is hoping to lure users of Hewlett-Packard Co.'s Alpha server technology with an incentive program that includes no-risk assessments of migrating to the SPARC/Solaris platform.