PalmSource has licensed CIC's Jot character recognition system for its new handwriting system, replacing Graffiti for all devices, and added a unified soft Graffiti area.

The Intel Xeon processor introduces a new technology called Hyper-Threading (HT) that makes a single processor behave like two logical processors. The technology allows the processor to execute multiple threads simultaneously, which can yield significant performance improvement. But, exactly how much improvement can you expect to see? This article gives the results the investigation into the effects of Hyper-Threading (HT) on the Linux SMP kernel. It compares the performance of a Linux SMP kernel that was aware of Hyper-Threading to one that was not.

A couple of months ago, at the Lightweight Languages Workshop 2002, Matthew Flat made a premise in his talk: Operating system and programming language are the same thing (at least "mathematically speaking"). I find this interesting and has a lot of truth in it. Both OS and PL are platforms on which other programs run. Both are virtualizing machines. Both make it easier for people to write applications (by providing API, abtractions, frameworks, etc.)

Bernd from YellowTab sent us a number of screenshots of their upcoming Zeta operating system which is based on BeOS R5 and Dano versions. First screenshot, second. And here are a shot of ToDoIt application for Zeta (still under heavy development), which is a personal organizer and more.

"Could we be constantly tracked through our clothes, shoes or even our cash in the future? I'm not talking about having a microchip surgically implanted beneath your skin, which is what Applied Digital Systems of Palm Beach, Fla., would like to do. Nor am I talking about John Poindexter's creepy Total Information Awareness spy-veillance system, which I wrote about last week. Instead, in the future, we could be tracked because we'll be wearing, eating and carrying objects that are carefully designed to do so." Read the interesting editorial at ZDNews.

From the announcement: "The Mono team is proud to release Mono 0.18, with plenty of bug fixes and improvements. If you are a happy 0.17 user, this release is a happiness extension release. Many bugs in the runtime, class libraries and C# compiler have been fixed." Additionally, Qt# (a C# language binding for the Qt toolkit) 0.6 was released too.

John Mahala writes "Over the weekend, Sun released Solaris 9 for x86. You can check it out here. The cost is $20 to download, and there is no offering (yet) to purchase a Media Kit."

Bruno G. Albuquerque was the first to submit the big news on OpenBeOS. According to the OpenBeOS website, "With the latest round of changes made to the runtime linker, the startup code, and libroot.so, we are now finally able to load and run native BeOS applications. Of course, only simple one will work right now (since we only have (most of the) parts of libroot.so implemented), but I was able to run the same application under BeOS and OpenBeOS simultaneously. We can now make our first tests to prove binary and functional compatibility between both operating systems."

"Visual Studio .NET 2003 just came out as a "final beta." I’ve been developing on it for a while now, and I want to point out some of the signature features and tools in this product.2 Read the article at 3Leaf.com.

Is the modern operating system a tool of facilitation that should provide just the basic necessities of a system and no more, staying out of the way of the user? Or should the modern OS assist the user in their everyday tasks, sorting and displaying relevant information, providing a filter between the ever increasing amount of information and the task at hand.

From MacNN: Rob Galbraith has posted an article on digital file transfers, comparing an Alienware Laptop, a discontinued Dell Desktop and a MDD Dual 1.25GHz PowerMac in RAW photo and Photoshop batch processing. The article concludes that the Windows machines beat the Mac in virtually all of the benchmarks:

The GCC Project has just updated its front page with the addition of two significant announcements: support for precompiled headers (PCH) and a new C++ parser that has brought g++ near the top of the food chain in conformance and led to over 100 bugs being closed.

Frank alerted us to the new cartoons IBM presents on their website. Though generally out of character for OSNews.com, here's a little weekend humor. Linux Animations (requires Flash or Realplayer).

KAMiKAZOW writes "It's now possible to boot ReactOS from CD and to compile ReactOS under itself. There will be also a new release before the end of this month." Unlike many of the small, independent Linux distros and other OSes, ReactOS has a clearcut, fairly unique goal - to run Windows binaries. Read more on their homepage.