Apple has confirmed to the Register Panther, aka Mac OS X 10.3, will not be a fully 64-bit operating system. Greg Joswiak, Apple's vice president of hardware product marketing, this week admitted that Panther will be a 32-bit operating system tweaked to support 64-bit addressing. Joswiak himself says: "The important thing for us we didn't want to create a separate OS that is 64 bits. What is essential is that this OS and this hardware will run 32-bit applications with no recompiling - it will just run them."

From our sister site, NewMobileComputing: PPCW.net has a review of the new version of Windows Mobile 2003 operating system running on PocketPCs.

By now you have all undoubtedly heard about SCO's lawsuit against IBM and the threat that it reflects on the Linux community. The news sites and web forums have been alive with speculation about how this case will pan out, articles either show many shortcomings of Open Source development or how wrong SCO is and how bad they are going to lose.

Another test release of Linux's next incarnation, 2.6 has been released today. The full release is available here as well as a patch for those who prefer it. Check out kernel.org for details.

Amiga Inc has made available Ben Herman's AmigaOS 4 presentation from AmiWest 2003. Also interviews with Ben Hermans of Hyperion, Alan Rednouse of Eyetech and a panel speech/discussion with various Amiga community leaders who attended this event are now available in MP3 format.

Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates said the intellectual property battle between SCO and IBM is hurting the business of Linux. Gates said the SCO controversy has exposed a fundamental weakness of Linux--that the General Public License (GPL) makes it difficult for companies to engage in the cross-licensing deals that have become standard in the software industry. That's a big Achilles heel, Gates said.

"It's a rather difficult mission to shop for an operating system for a server. When most people think of server OSes they think of Unix, and when they think of Unix they think of SCO, the company that owns the Unix source code. But there are so many more choices out there, the least of which offers a dearth of advantages over SCO's Unix products. Having said that, let's explore the Unix world and take a look at what it has to offer the server and workstation market." Read the article at TheJemReport.

At OSNews we are interested to see how many people are using our special version of OSNews (no nested tables, no ads but still *full-featured* version, screenshots here and here) that is able to browse on "lesser" browsers. In the following polls, please vote and let us know if you are generally using an HTML-capable web browser with your PDA or your mobile phone.

GNUstep is a set of general-purpose Objective-C libraries based on the OpenStep standard developed by NeXT. In the new version, the LanguageSetup docs were updated to better help users settings fonts for their language, especially with regard to non-Latin fonts. An improved RTF reader with better Unicode support was added. Slightly better EWMH support was also added. The Art backend now works with more versions of Freetype.

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.

A hacker group released code designed to exploit a widespread Windows flaw, paving the way for a major worm attack as soon as this weekend, security researchers warned.

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.

RMS fights against private software and its social implications is a battle to the death. As he highlights in his speeches, the law created more problems for those who want to publish free software than to those who would like to unveil plans for an atomic bomb. This is what he stated at Zaragoza, during an event organised by Zaralinux and the Giunta citizens.

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