Microsoft Corp’s .NET vision, once a confusing morass of marketing hype and technological buzzwords, is now a mature platform for the development and deployment of web-based applications which require inter-device connectivity, the company said.

A few more links to yesterday's barrage of SCO-related articles: "SCO CEO says no Linux is legit" (interview with the SCO CEO), "Meet Linux's New Public Enemy No. 1" (another SCO CEO interview), "Torvalds Sounds Off On SCO Lawsuit", "Analysis: SCO Takes on Linux", "Tragedy to farce--the SCO vs IBM lawsuit" (written by ESR).

The 10-year history of Object Desktop. It's about 50 pages long and has lots of screenshots and also neat insights and OS history and how skinning grew more important over the years.

The GNOME Development Series Desktop 2.3.2 "Little Hero", is ready for bug testing. It is available for immediate download on ftp.gnome.org and mirrors. Details here, changelog here.

"MandrakeSoft has done it's homework. Mandrake 9.1 has a professional and clean looking interface and it's easier to use than ever. This article isn't so much of a review as it is my experience installing and using it. I'll let the pictures do much of the talking." Read the review at TweakHound.

It appears that proprietary SCO code may not be present in the Linux kernel after all. MozillaQuest magazine has done some research and determined that SCO's claims may not include violations in the official Linux kernel. Read more at MozillaQuest. Update by ELQ: Many SCO-related articles today:

Opera released v6.02 for the Mac, while promises version 7 soon. Opera Software also released version 7.11 for Linux recently. In other browser news, Gecko-based Epiphany, released version 0.6.1.

FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Scott Long has uploaded the 5.1 i386 Beta2 release of FreeBSD. He will be uploading the alpha release, work is under way to get a beta2 for sparc64 and pc98. Additionally, FreeBSD team's Hiten Pandya has written a manual page for the Asynchronous Logging Queues (ALQ) for FreeBSD 5.x and is requesting your comments and reviews.

"Earlier this year Red Hat split its range into two segments - effectively, business and everything else. It did this in the wrong order, as The Register remarked at the time, but subsequently the company has padded out its Enterprise range to consist of Advanced Server, Enterprise Server and Workstation, so here at least it has a complete set." Read the article at The Register.

HP hoisted its Superdome-Itanium-Windows combination to the top of the premier OLTP scalability benchmark on Tuesday, about a month after originally gaining the top spot and little more than a week after IBM displaced the combo with a system based on its own AIX/RISC/DB2 stack. Also, Microsoft gained ground on its database rivals in 2002, despite a decline in sales for the market as a whole, according to research published Wednesday by Gartner Dataquest.

SGI today announced that its SGI Altix 3000 servers and superclusters deliver world-record performance on the next-generation Intel Itanium 2 processor (Intel code name Madison). Preliminary results of 64-bit application tests reveal that "the SGI Altix 3000 family running on Madison will once again provide record-shattering performance, price/performance and scalability in a standard Linux OS environment".

So, which file manager is the best across many OSes? Click more and cast your vote!

Ben Hermans, project manager for AmigaOS4 has been interviewed by the Amiga.org staff.
Update: Ben has agreed with nOMAAM of Amiga.org on interviewing him once every 3/4 weeks, until the release of AmigaOS4.

"At the risk of sounding blasé, Mandrake 9.1 is a pretty standard distribution, and consists of the latest KDE, GNOME, OpenOffice.org, Xine, Apache, MySQL, PHP, and PostgreSQL. The PowerPack version comes with 60-days of support via e-mail. The higher-priced ProSuite version of Mandrake comes with 60 days of telephone support and some additional server software." Read the review at LinuxWorld.