Portable.NET 0.5.12 has been released, and is available for download. This is mostly a bug fix release, heading up towards 0.6.0, but with substantial improvements throughout the system, particularly WinForms. The release date for DotGNU 0.1 has been fixed at end-September. For Portable.NET the goals are to get pnetC to basic usefulness, fix as many system.xml bugs as possible, and make the core button/textbox/scroll widgets work in WinForms. Screenshots available.

Chad Dickerson, CTO at InfoWorld, takes a ride with a forgotten 450 Mhz G4 Mac on his workplace and moves it home. Soon, he would be so impressed that the Mac would replace his Linux home server and one of his two Windows PCs. Last week, Chad gave us his opinion regarding Linux too.

Microsoft isn't known for the security of its software. But that's something the company is trying to change. Read the article at Forbes.

Version 3i2 of RISC OS Select has been published online this evening by developers RISCOS Ltd., for Select subscribers. The install includes RISC OS 4.37 and this week's Toolbox release. Select 3i2 is described as the "final release version of Select 3" and is presumably the stabilised online release that will precede the eventual CD distribution in a few weeks. For more RISC OS news, make sure you visit the Drobe and IconBar sites daily.

Matthew Green says he is ready to switch Sparc, Sparc64, i386 & Alpha ports to using GCC3.3.1 by default. He's uploaded 4 snapshots, all cross compiled from i386-netbsd. However, there appears to be work involved with fixing approximately 193 broken packages, BSDForums reports.

Dave Kleikamp announced the release of JFS 1.1.3 on the lkml yesterday. Anyone using JFS who recently upgraded to the 2.6-test Linux kernel will want to take note of the new version of the utilities.

Be Inc. and Microsoft Corp. today announced that the parties have reached a mutually acceptable mediated settlement of an antitrust lawsuit filed by Be Inc. in February 2002. Be claimed that Microsoft maintained its monopoly by having exclusive dealing arrangements with PC OEMs prohibiting the sale of PCs with multiple preinstalled OSes. Be will receive a payment from Microsoft, after attorney's fees, in the amount of $23,250,000 USD to end further litigation, and Microsoft... admits no wrongdoing. UPDATE: BeOSJournal.org has an interview with ex-Be employees Dan Sandler, Baron Arnold, and Dave Brown. Interesting is also Frank Boosman's blog on the issue:

In 1999, Novell Inc. conceded that it would never again dominate the network operating system market with NetWare alone. Still licking wounds from disastrous office productivity crusades against Microsoft, the company shed its WordPerfect albatross, retrenched and embraced what was then an up-and-comer: Linux. It has been slowly melding its products and services with the open-source platform ever since. Read the rest of the report on Novell, Ximian and Mono at SDTimes.

Microsoft is expected to announce with vendor partners the pending rollout of a number of NAS appliances based on its Windows Storage Server 2003 operating system. Microsoft initially unveiled details of this OS and released it to NAS OEMs last June. The OS allows the creation of point-in-time copies of a single volume or multiple volumes using Volume Shadow Copy Services.

"If Sun does not get its act together and light a fire under the JCP, it might find itself losing the tiny battles that make up its war with .NET. Letting Java stagnate will open doors for .NET that Java might never again be able to enter." Read the editorial at NewsFactor by Vincent Ryan.

SCO Group, which has sued IBM for more than $3 billion for allegedly moving Unix code into Linux, may also have Silicon Graphics in its crosshairs. SCO on Friday declined to comment on future legal action, but Chris Sontag, the senior vice president in charge of SCO's effort to derive more revenue from its Unix intellectual property, has said two things that suggest SGI is a likely target. SCO said sometime ago that "their" NUMA code found in Linux, has come from SGI engineers working in the Linux kernel.

The benchmark at Barefeats -- Power Mac G4 and G5 versus Pentium 4, Dual Xeon, and Dual Athlon -- has being updated to include new information and tests.

The company is doing wonderful things for programmer productivity. Now Apple is wooing developers in compelling ways as if it were trying to make up for the lost time. If only the IDE supported more languages, SDTimes says.

Storage is an exciting project to replace the traditional filesystem with a new document store, database-based. It is part of a larger design for a new desktop environment, more details on that to come in the future by GNOME's Seth Nickell. The current implementation, built under Gnome for now, offers natural language access, network transparency, and a number of other features. Some additional info is here. Update: Seth is replying at Slashdot about Storage.