Tao Group announced major enhancements and additions to its intent technology suite, and the launch of the intent 2 SDK. Technology components include: Qi (Brandable Control Center), iSS (intent Sound System), iVE (intent Visual Environment), Java solutions, and gaming.

Linus Torvalds spoke candidly with Mercury News staff writer Dean Takahashi about the lawsuit from SCO Group versus IBM, on Microsoft and open source development. He also shed light on his decision to leave chip maker Transmeta for a Linux corporate software consortium, the OSDL.

From DistroWatch: The developers of Ark Linux have reached a new milestone with the release of Ark Linux 1.0-alpha8. The ISO images are available from various FTP mirrors, which are slowly being populated. No release notes or readme files have been published at the time of writing, but the ISO images (only the first image is required for installation) can be downloaded from the mirrors. Ark Linux is a free Linux distribution designed for non-technical users and ease-of-use is its primary objective.

In the new OpenBeOS newsletter you will find an editorial, one article about Designer Power Tools and the CVS Digest (up to June 29th). BeOSJournal recently spoke with ex-Be engineer Jean-Baptiste Quéru, who even years after leaving Be Inc., still watches the BeOS Community with keen interest. There is a new update to BlueEyedOS, with an updated font rendering system and a new screen shot for all to see. Also, Cosmoe 0.7rc12 is now out, and includes SDL as its graphics library.

A new beta SP1 build, 1023, was made available to Microsoft beta testers. Changes include:

IcePack is the third biggest German Linux distribution after SuSE and Knoppix. DistroWatch informs us that they recently released their commercial edition as a free download, as its developers are currently working on Icepack Linux 3.0. Icepack Linux 2.75 comes on 4 CDs, plus a bonus CD containing plenty of artwork, true type fonts and some commercial applications. Download from either the English, German, French and development web site.

Software designed by humans will always have flaws, says Microsoft, but the company argues that its security record is improving. Microsoft has admitted it does not expect to ever release completely secure, flawless code, but denied that its software was any less secure than any other complex code.

Delfim Machado made public a way of crashing a password-protected screensaver and thus giving full access to the user account that the screensaver was running under. All a user has to do is to keep pressing any key for 5 minutes or so and then pressing Enter. Delfim Machado contacted Apple's Security department with his discovery, but when he didn't hear back, he decided to go public.

wx.NET is a C# wrapper for wxWindows, providing a portable GUI toolkit for .NET programs. wx.NET can be used with various implementations of the CLI, including .NET, Mono, and DotGNU Portable.NET. Other C# wrappers for popular freely available toolkits are GTK# and QT#. Also, more developers are needed to assist porting Mono or dotGNU to Mac OS X.

The first beta of SGI Indigo Magic Desktop has been uploaded and is ready for testing. The IMD project reproduces the 4Dwm desktop, as found on SGI's IRIX operating system, running under Linux.

NASA recently benchmarked Apple's dual 2GHz Power Mac G5 at its Langley Research Center in Virginia. The main purpose of the tests was to compare the G5 to the G4 for "computational fluid dynamics applications" however they also compare it to the Pentium 4.

In the Windows 2003 SP1 beta, Intel says it will offer a preview of the 32-bit execution layer that will cause the Itanium 2 processors to run x86 applications at the full clockspeed rating of the processor. For example, the 1.5-GHz Itanium 2 "Madison" processors launched this week would offer that clockspeed to 32-bit applications, as well. Until now, the inability of the Itanium Family processors to run 32-bit applications without a large performance penalty has been a major shortcoming of Intel's 64-bit Itanium line that has negatively affected industry adoption.

"Few languages have been as popular over the years as BASIC. Until about a decade ago, almost every programmer cut his teeth learning BASIC. Indeed, the name itself came from Beginner's All Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. If you've had BASIC training, can you find a familiar flavor that runs under Linux? Because it is not enough to find a good BASIC language implementation for Linux; one must find a BASIC language variant that approximates the style of BASIC to which you are accustomed." Read the article at DevChannel by Russell Pavlicek.

VMware, whose software lets an Intel server run several operating systems simultaneously, is expanding both its software capabilities and business ambitions.