"IBM WebSphere 5.0 features SOAP parsing, UDDI repository, Java and a number of open source technologies that IBM claims speeds performance of Web services and lowers integration costs. The application server also simplifies management through features IBM claimed are part of its nascent autonomic computing strategy for self-healing of systems. These features include ability to detect and correct faults and automated server clustering." Read the report at TheRegister.

Intel released its version 7.0 compiler suite for Linux and Windows, for the x86 and Itanium1/2 architectures. Optimizations include support for SSE2 in the Pentium 4 CPU and software pipelining in the Itanium1/2 CPUs. Inter-procedural optimization (IPO) and profile-guided optimization (PGO) can provide greater application performance. Intel Compilers support multi-threaded code development and optimization through the Auto-Parallelism feature and OpenMP 2.0 support. Intel claims that the new version of their compilers are now much more compatible with Linux code (including the GCC C++ ABI) and that they also outperform GCC 3.2 by 30% at the produced executables. There is a 30-day evaluation version for everyone to try out.

AMD said on Tuesday that it would embrace a strategy of developing processors for a wider range of products outside computers and called on the industry to focus on user needs rather than creating "technology for technology's sake." Our Take: In the last year it has been made clear that AMD could no longer outpace Intel in the MHz, speed and power consumption race of PC CPUs. Even the highest end models of the new AMD Opteron and its desktop version, Athlon64, which are to have a modern 64-bit core, according to SPEC benchmarks they will not be the speed leaders by the time they will come out (Q2 2003), bringing AMD to yet another race against Intel's Xeons/P4s. Oh well, shift happens.

The first release after 18 months, Fresco, previously known as Berlin, released M1 or Milestone 1. The release notes here, screenshots here . The original "press release" follows:

"With all the hoopla surrounding Linux lately I wanted to give it a try. Several people told me that for a newbie Mandrake was the way to go. As luck would have it MandrakeSoft was about to release their newest version, 9.0. I requested a copy to review from them and it was here in less than a week. A big thank you to the team at MandrakeSoft for the CD's and for their help." Read the review at TweakHound.

Apple released Security Update 2002-11-21 for MacOSX 10.2 Jaguar (via the Software Update utility). It fixes potential vulnerabilities introduced in BIND, the domain server and client library software package from ISC, that is shipped with OS X and OSX Server. BIND version 8.3.4 addresses the recently-discovered potential vulnerabilities where an unauthorized person may disrupt the normal operation of the DNS name service. BIND is not activated by default on OSX.