At the International Supercomputer Conference 2003 today, MandrakeSoft announced its latest entry to the company's growing portfolio of middle-to-high end server products. MandrakeClustering is a high performance clustering distribution for IA-32 and AMD64 (Opteron) architectures. IA-64 support should come in September, the company reported. Read about the announcement at OfB.biz and here..

This article discusses incremental compaction, a new feature in the memory management component of IBM JDK 1.4.0. Incremental compaction is a way of spreading compaction work across different garbage collection cycles, thereby reducing pause times. Elsewhere, industry leaders discuss Java status Quo. Also, Eclipse SDK 2.1 leverages Java’s strengths, but beware of too much expansion, InfoWorld says.

I was present at Apple's WWDC yesterday and witnessed one of the historical moments in Apple's history, the introduction of their 64-bit platform. Am I impressed? The answer is complicated. I was happy to see Apple moving on and deliver. But I would have expected nothing less from a 4 billion tech company who had the need to catch up with the "other" platform, the 32-bit PC. You all heard by now what's new in yesterday's press releases and news coverings. But here is a wrap up of the first day of the conference and a commentary on what Apple really announced yesterday, underneath its surrounding distortion field.

A new release candidate of Mozilla 1.4 is out, RC3.

DistroWatch reports: "It seems that LindowsOS 4.0 has arrived. While the official product launch won't happen until Tuesday, the Lindows.com web site has come back to life, ready to sell us their latest and greatest. The information on the product page and also in a recent edition of Michael's Minutes will take some serious research before we can present it in a clear and concise way, but basically, the cheapest available product is LindowsOS 4.0 for US$49.95 for digital delivery. This is a 2-CD product (installation CD + live LindowsCD)." Update: The first review of LindowsOS 4 is at TuxReports. Update 2: ExtremeTech posted another LindowsOS 4 review.

In the latest of his legendary keynote stage shows, Steve Jobs kicked off Apple's WWDC this morning in San Francisco by showing off the company's speedy new aluminum G5 desktop Mac.

After two years of work, OpenOffice.org for Mac OS X (X11) is ready for download by all Mac OS X users. With anti-aliased fonts, to name but one feature, this Golden Master satisfies the needs of professionals and individuals wanting a free, complete, and open-source office suite able to operate in an office environment alongside Windows, Linux, and Solaris machines. Elsewhere, AbiWord 2.0 Beta 1 was released.

Since Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates sent a memo 18 months ago urging the company to focus on making its software trustworthy, the company has devoted developers and money to security in its software products. But Microsoft has given short shrift to a second concern outlined in the so-called "Trustworthy Computing" memo - protecting privacy - except when forced by the government. With the hiring of a new privacy chief, the software company is hoping to improve its privacy record and keep government regulators at bay.

Apple has published details of new Panther features on their web site. Read more for the highlights:

The specs for the G5 machines that were accidentally posted at the Apple store a few days ago were correct. Steve Jobs just announced G5 Powermacs at the WWDC conference. He's calling it the "world's fastest personal computer." They just finished doing a demo in which a Dual 2 GHz G5 vastly outperforms a High-end Dual Xeon. Read more for preliminary specs. Prices will be $2000-3000. Oh, and the Panther OSX update was announced, but we already knew about that.

A Lycoris community member named "jmcqk6" has created two unofficial "television" commercials. One is in QuickTime and the other in Flash. They can be seen here.

Today was a big day for Microsoft's mobile devices software strategy. The company: (1) rolled out Pocket PC 2003 (and renamed it); (2) unveiled a new "Windows Mobile" branding strategy; and (3) launched a collaboration with three leading high-speed wireless service providers to provide easier access to more than 3,500 Wi-Fi wireless "hot spots" by Windows-powered PDAs throughout the US. All this (and more) is covered in this "special report" at WindowsForDevices.com (including a detailed list of enhancements in Pocket PC 2003).

For the 21st of June, there was an 'AmigaOS4 on Tour' event planned for Basel. I travelled from Holland to Switzerland to write an extensive report for AmigaWorld.net regarding this event.

LindowsOS 4.0 is expected to be released this week and so the Lindows.com web site is down for upgrade at press time. In the meantime, the Lindows.com folks released a funky Lindows theme song called "Lindows Rock". To view the video clip, you will need Flash.