This is an interview with IBM's expert Matt Huras on DB2. He shares a sneak preview of the new release of DB2 version 8 and its technical highlights, including it's high-availability features, improved administration tools, performance advice, and multidimensional clustering, which allows data to be clustered according to several different "dimensions" simultaneously. There's a free download of DB2 v8.

Linux is the only serious threat to Microsoft's increasing dominance of the market for server operating systems, according to new research from IDC. Although Microsoft cannot compete against Linux on price, the company will use its community of professionals to outsmart the open-source movement, Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer told an audience of Microsoft Most Valued Professionals (MVPs) in London on Monday.

Version 5.0 OF IBM's WebSphere Studio software for developing Web applications is scheduled for release Tuesday, featuring new tools for working with legacy applications written in Cobol and PL1 and support for the latest batch of open-source standards and software.

Daniel Switkin, a long time BeOS developer and former Be Inc. employee, has submitted an editorial on "Writing A BeOS Replacement". It aims to bring together the various efforts out there and define a plan which has the greatest chance of success. Click Read More to see the entire article from Daniel.

Robert Szeleney released version 3.9.1d of his OS, SkyOS, including a number of fixes, while he ported the first game to SkyOS, Quake I (screenshot). In the meantime, Syllable also recently got a port of Doom and Quake. In other small OS news, ReactOS has a preliminary graphics system able to run simple Windows binaries (screenshot, running inside the Bochs emulator). The team expects more and better compatibility to come when the WINE port gets finished.

"Have you ever wondered what operating system you will be using in 2005? Australian tech writer Andrew Parsons investigates the future of Windows, code named Longhorn." Read it at ZDNet Australia.

The UnitedLinux organization plans today to release their first public beta. As of writing this, only the TurboLinux ftp site has an ongoing uploading of the UnitedLinux ISO file. Watch out for more. Update: More mirror sites here.

A recent feature on kerneltrap.org: "Ulrich Drepper recently announced the first public release of the Red Hat sponsored 'Native POSIX Thread Library' (NPTL). He explained, 'Unless major flaws in the design are found this code is intended to become the standard POSIX thread library on Linux system and it will be included in the GNU C library distribution.'

Last weekend at 4 different Amiga shows held across the world Amiga fans were introduced to AmigaOS4, AmigaDE and MorphOS solutions. An in depth show report by GFXBase of an earlier show in Austria, includes many interesting pictures regarding the AmigaOS4/AmigaOne and Pegasos/MorphOS (PPC AmigaOS clone) projects. Some additional pictures of this event can be found here at Elbox' website.

The BeOS Journal and BeGroovy have posted a rather long inteview with BeUnited.org's Simon Gauvin.

InfoWorld features an extensive special show report regarding Web Services and the way they are shaping up for the near future.

BeGroovy reports that David Reid, a very respected BeOS third party developer (ported Apache among others) and ex-OpenBeOS networking developer published a statement explaining his departure from the OpenBeOS project. David cited lack of direction, management in the project and even lack of engineering knowledge among the OpenBeOS developers. Update: Another important BeOS dev and friend of mine (as also in the case of David :), Frans van Nispen cited similar problems with the project. UPDATE 2: The OpenBeOS leader, Michael Phipps, sent us in his response to the issue.

"Red Hat, to its credit and to the utter annoyance of some Linux purists, has engaged in a bold experiment: to produce a simple and easy to use desktop. It has tweaked the default KDE and Gnome GUIs so that they work almost exactly alike, by creating a more Red Hat-centric desktop with simplified menus and attractive graphics." Read the editorial at ExtremeTech.

"Now that we are able to launch dynamic binaries, the goal is to get them linking. The dynamic linker has to do a lot of system calls before actually launching the program. Most of them are plain SVR4, and hence are taken from sys/compat/svr4. Here, we will deal with IRIX-specific system calls." Read the rest fo the article at ONLamp. Part 1 and Part 2 also available.