"I have tried for the last three weeks to generate a review of Mandrake 9.0 without much success. Not that I have ever been accused of being at a loss for words, but this particular release has left me speechless. I can't think of much to say about this release that hasn't already been said about several other Linux distributions." Read the review at LinuxLookup. In other news, both MandrakeSoft and SuSE have new CEOs since today.

"Be afraid. Microsoft thinks it knows what's best for you. Microsoft Senior Vice President Craig Mundie recently suggested that in the name of security, it may be appropriate to force you to install Microsoft patches or updates, and if that breaks your existing applications, well, it's for your own good." Read the editorial at Wired.

"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: