"If there's one thing an effective empire builder needs, it's a good map. Microsoft's map for reshaping and reviving the world of business software can be found on floor two of Building Four on the company's campus, in the office of a technology strategist named Norm Judah. The map itself doesn't look like much. If anything, it resembles a microchip design or possibly an org chart gone mad. But this poster-sized piece of cardboard is nothing less than a schematic of how business works. Not how Microsoft works. How business works." Read the article at Fortune.

"Linux will be deployed on no more than five percent of desktops over the next two to three years because of a lack of viable applications, claimed Gartner research director Phil Sargeant on Thursday evening at the Gartner Symposium and ITXpo." Read the article about the Gartner Group's analysis.

Nicholas Blachford has written an interesting article about MorphOS. It covers the history of MorphOS, its structure and the inner workings of this new and interesting OS.

"The journaling operation itself does impose a performance penalty on disk writes. Mac OS X Server alters the sizes of certain buffers used for file transactions when journaling is enabled, which mitigates much of the performance hit, reducing it from the 10-15 percent range down to the 2-5 percent range, for a system with 512MB of RAM. The more RAM you have, the more buffering can be used, so your performance hit decreases accordingly. This buffering does not occur on "regular" OS X, which is one reason why Apple is not supporting or recommending its use on non-OS X Server systems." Read the article at WorkingMac.

According to a report published November 12 by Aberdeen Group, "Security advisories for open source and Linux software accounted for 16 out of the 29 security advisories - about one of every two advisories - published for the first 10 months of 2002 by Cert." Read the report at NewsForge.

Linux seller Red Hat--which chiefly looks to displace Unix rivals--announced today it has landed a customer that is bumping aside Microsoft Windows in favor of Red Hat software for its database servers. Read the report at News.com.

SuSE Linux, the SCO Group (formerly Caldera International), Conectiva and Turbolinux are all expected to launch on Tuesday the latest versions of their Linux enterprise distributions powered by the UnitedLinux core, according to industry sources late Thursday. Read the report at eWeek.

"On the contrary, I would argue that Open Source and JBoss in particular are already Sun's best defense against Microsoft .NET. Only Open Source has proven uniquely resilient to a Microsoft onslaught. In the same way that Linux has prevented MS NT from dominating the server operating system, JBoss will prevent .NET from making serious inroads into the application server tier, the crucial gateway to enterprise software applications." Read the article at Jboss.org.

"Are you looking for a desktop Linux that you can use right out of the box? If so, give Mandrake Linux 9.0 a quick spin. Whether you are an experienced Linux user, a Microsoft Windows user, new to computers, or an IT-IS manager, Mandrake Linux 9.0 could be the operating system (OS) for you or your organization." Read the review at MozillaQuest.

"Why isn't GNU/Linux taking the desktop market by storm? After all, when you make a feature comparison, Linux has a lot going for it. With Windows, the operating system is just a start; you must add applications to make it functional. Many Linux distributions provide a desktop look similar to Windows and include an extensive assortment of applications, programming tools and games. Installing Windows and sundry applications can take most of a day. Contrast that with Linux, where the process typically takes less than 60 minutes." Read the article at News.com.

DistroWatch is reporting about an announcement from Lindows about the imminent release of LindowsOS 3.0 on Monday. If you pre-order before Saturday, you can get a better deal, while this time the OS comes with a 30-day money back guarantee. Please note that LindowsOS 3.0 comes out only 2 months after LindowsOS 2.0 was released (our review is here). This version scheme seems to work well marketing-wise for Lindows as big sites (e.g. news.com) get to report on it.

Qt 3.1 introduces many significant new features and many improvements over the 3.0.x series. This provides an overview of the main changes since version 3.0.x. The Qt version 3.1 series is binary compatible with the 3.0.x series: applications compiled for 3.0 will continue to run with 3.1.

This is an unsupported Pre-Release version of DirectX 9.0 and may contain bugs or issues that prevent correct operation of DirectX applications. The DirectX 9.0 runtime cannot be uninstalled, so users should create a “System Restore” point before installing. This pre-release version expires on March 19, 2003. On other 3D news, here is an article about OpenGL's future.

Microsoft has scratched plans for a major overhaul to an upcoming version of its Windows operating system for servers, the company confirmed Tuesday.