A whole year after the Be IP buyout from Palm, BeOS 5 PE still enjoys more than 2,500 downloads per week. However, new hardware creates problems to BeOS, as it does not support new graphics cards, sound cards, new chipsets and worse, doesn't even boot on AthlonXP's or many Pentium4s without the usage of patches/hacks that are floating around. The latest sad incident is the inability of BeOS to boot when you have lots of system memory and lots of virtual graphics memory.

DesktopLinux interviews Xandros president Michael Bego and Dr. Frederick Berenstein, co-chairman of Linux Global Partners (the financial backer of Xandros), regarding the current state of Xandros as a company and on their plans to roll out the first release of Xandros Linux this Fall. Bego gives details about the distribution that includes "a spectacular office suite" and discusses Xandros' corporate goal "to be among the first crop of profitable Linux companies".

Apple Computer will likely shift to using Intel chips, while circumstances exist that could well push Dell Computer and Sun Microsystems into a friendly embrace, predicted Bear Stearns analyst Andrew Neff. More and more analysts, editors and even users are getting smoother to the idea that Apple might have to make the jump to x86, simply because IBM/Motorola are not interested anymore in fullfilling Apple's CPU needs. I wrote an editorial about it two weeks ago (a pretty successful article I might add, judging from the outrageous number of hits received). That article seemed to have re-ignite a number of similar articles on the web since then to several tech news sites.

Say you've got a big computation task to perform. Perhaps you have found a way to cure cancer, or you want to look for aliens. All you need is a few super computers to work out some calculations, but you've only got the one PC on your desk. What to do? A popular solution is the "distributed computing" model, where the task is split up into smaller chunks and performed by the many computers owned by the general public. This guide over at Kuro5hin shows you how.

While the first generation of Itanium left many people dissapointed about its performance (mostly because people were trying to run and benchmark 32-bit code, while the CPU only shines when running native 64-bit code), it seems that Intel is back with a vengeance. The new Itanium2, ready to ship in a few months, scores some very good results in the CPU/compiler intense, industry standard benchmark, SPEC. While its integer capabilities are average to good, its floating point ones is the best thing out there today, scoring even better than the IBM Power4 (which includes a whopping 128 MB of cache). What's very interesting in the results is that both the Power4 and the Itanium2 score poorly on MesaGL, Perl and gzip tests but they are adequate on the gcc test. This is possibly because they're optimized for heavily streaming operations, big matrices. For a short commentary on the results check here. AMD Opteron SPEC results are not available yet.

GNUstep is a set of general-purpose Objective-C libraries based on the OpenStep standard developed by NeXT (now Apple) Inc. The libraries consist of everything from foundation classes, such as dictionaries and arrays, to GUI interface classes such as windows, sliders, buttons, etc. In the new 0.8 version, the graphics/window interface was completely revamped. New functionality was added to make things faster and eventually implement Quartz compatibility. There is now a window server backend for Windows computers, although it is in a very alpha state. The most important applications written in GNUstep so far are the GNUstep Workspace and the GNUstep Mail Application.

The new version of mSQL, 3.0, includes tunable memory use, higher performance, enhanced Indexing, single process and multi-process Servers and more.

First of all, I am very flattered that our recent editorials over at OpenBeOS have received so many responses in the OSNews commenting section.I would like to address some of the issues brought up in the many thought provoking comments, in the order that I read them:

Many companies are trying to move to a subscription model for their software and Apple really has something going for them in that respect if you think about it. We, OS X Users, are already accustomed to the automatic updating of the OS and like it. dotMAC actually looks nice all in all, even if some might feel it is expensive. What people don't like is unpredictability; they have nothing against change as long as they like the outcome and know where it is going.

"Microsoft is honing the user interfaces of a number of its forthcoming products in a way that the company hopes will help users find and access information. At the heart of the redesign is the so-called task shelf component, code-named Sideshow, that will likely debut first in MSN 8, and later, in the Longhorn Windows. The WinBeta Web site last week posted what it claimed to be a Microsoft-internal-only release of Sideshow. And the Neowin site posted what it claimed to be several Sideshow screen shots." Read the report at eWeek. Update: WinInformant reports that SideShow is not from Longhorn, but from an another version of Windows that it will be released sooner.

About two months old, but still, important news for the IRIX users: "As of May 8, 2002 IRIX 6.5.16 is releasing with all new systems shipping from SGI worldwide manufacturing centers. The IRIX 6.5.16 release contains updates for both the maintenance (6.5.16m) and feature (6.5.16f) streams. This release continues the focus on stability, reliability and compatibility required in the IRIX 6.5.X quarterly release process." On a related note on releases of heavy-weight Unix OSes, HP extendeded its leading HP-UX with 11i Version 1.6 on June, while as we already reported a few days ago that IBM plans to bring new releases for its AIX too.

"In the fight for Web services dominance, the scuffle has barely begun and vendors are still scrambling for places in the ring. Although all the initiatives are still relatively young, IBM and Microsoft are eager to be the top Web services heavyweights. Each is heavily touting its offerings to companies interested in moving further toward e-commerce integration." Read the article at Yahoo!News. The article does not include any information about SunONE though.

"Microsoft Corp.'s new licensing programs take effect tomorrow, shifting the model for OS pricing but also for office productivity suites. Microsoft's Volume Licensing Program, delayed twice, kicks in on July 31. The most controversial feature of the plan, Software Assurance, is essentially Microsoft's subscription-based licensing plan for small- and medium-business owners. An enterprise version of Microsoft's software license already requires a yearly fee." Read the report at ExtremeTech, Yahoo!News, while News.com says that the majority of Microsoft's customers won't be signing up for a controversial licensing plan set to go into effect on Thursday, according to analysts' estimates.

"Unless you've been hiding under a rock for the past few years, you know what Mozilla is in general. For those of you in the dark, check out the overview provided by Mozilla for a decent breakdown of the project. The purpose of this review is to assess the win32 port of Mozilla 1.0 and its immediate successors (1.1a and .1b) as a milestone in the development of what may prove to be the greatest challenger to the Internet Explorer empire. We'll consider the pros and cons of Mozilla's core renderer, its implementation (Navigator), Mail, Chatzilla (an IRC client), and the bundle as a whole." Read the review over at ArsTechnica.