CNN is running a review of the latest Solaris Release, calling it "stylishly cryptic" -- as fitting a description of the leading commercial UNIX OS as I've ever heard. Oh, wait a second . . . Steven Soderbergh? Oops, never mind.

Intel's next Itanium2 processor likely will run at 1.5GHz, a 50% increase from its predecessor and an indication the company is getting better at meeting development goals for its high-end chip family. Read the report at ZDNews.

You can download the recently released DirectX Media 6 SDK here (93 MB). The SDK can be installed on any recent version of Windows.

"The first version of ASP.NET, along with its integration into Visual Studio .NET, is fantastic on almost all counts. Indeed, when compared to most other version 1 products that hit the market (especially from Microsoft), ASP.NET shines bright. A few things were left out,though, or don't work as well as they should. As the self-appointed pain in Microsoft's ass, it's my job to point some of them out. Here is a list of twelve issues that Microsoft needs to address for ASP.NET 2.0" Read the article at AngryCoder.

"The U.S. Defense Department should think twice before embracing open-source software, a trade association is advising. The Initiative for Software Choice, which counts Microsoft, Cisco Systems and Intel among its backers, said in comments filed Tuesday that the department should "avoid crafting needless and potentially detrimental IT policy to promote the use" of open-source software." Read the report at News.com. At a time that countries like Germany and Japan begin to invest in OSS/GPL, Microsoft tries to hold US back. Are the Group's worries justified? Discuss.

The GNOME Project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of the GNOME 2.0.3 Desktop and Developer Platform. Download statistics: tar.gz: 77M total, tar.bz2: 58M total. The GNOME 2.0.x Desktop and Developer Platform releases are devoted to bugfixes, translations, user interface consistency, and general polish.

You can read all about the new features here, download here. This bug is still there though (Win2k/XP).

Brazillian BeOS User Group, BUG-BR, interviews Guillaume Maillard from the BlueEyedOS project.

And the winner of yesterday's Rekall competition is... Craig Knox (cknox AT environcorp DOT com). Congratulations Craig! Thank you everyone for participating!

The IRIX 6.5.18 release contains updates for both the maintenance and feature streams. This release continues the focus on stability, reliability, security and compatibility required in the IRIX 6.5.X quarterly release process. Approximately 118 customer reported incidents are fixed in this release.

Let's all have some fun and leave a comment about what we liked most in the OS scene this year!

GNU-Friends has an overview of Portable .NET, a key part of the DotGNU Project: "DotGNU aims to provide a complete alternative for all aspects of webservices, including user authentication (Virtual Identities), service directories, access, and security (SEE), as well as support businesses interested in using the Free DotGNU model." Additionally, the Mono Project released slides of their presentations.

Rekall is a database front-end. It is not itself a database -- data is stored somewhere else, in an SQL server, and Rekall is fundamentally just a tool to extract, display and update that data (of course, it does lots more than that, it does forms and reports and scripting and so on). It is database agnostic, and does not have any preferred database in the sense that Access uses the Jet database engine. TheKompany is giving away a free copy of the packaged version of Rekall (normally costs $80 USD) to a lucky winner. Read more to participate to the competition!

"I've recently installed both Gentoo 1.4 and Mandrake 9.0 (both bleeding edge distros). I'm not going to talk about the installation so much as the niceness factor. The niceness factor in my opinion is after doing a default install, how nice is it to use. Gentoo 1.4 hasn't been released yet, so things may change." Read the mini-review at NewsForge. The pluses for Mandrake installation are its speed and the absolute ease of obtaining and applying updates. It completely obliterates the Windows contenders in both the update category and the installation of attached devices. Read that article at LinuxWorld.