Microsoft has been promoting AmigaDE software for use with WindowsCE .NET based devices at the Embedded Systems Conference in San Francisco. The AmigaDE is a binary identical layer/OS which supports almost any embedded operating system currently available, including embedded Linux, PalmOS, Epoc, VxWorks, iTRON and QNX RtP. The promotion of WindowsCE .NET AmigaDE usage confirms the widespread support and adoption of the AmigaDE/ Intent platform. Thousands of developers are working with Amiga Inc on content for new AmigaOS based desktops, laptops or other AmigaDE enabled devices including PDAs, STBs, Internet Appliances, Mobile Phones and Digital TVs.

"To achieve the long-elusive goal of easily finding information hidden in computer files, Microsoft is returning to a decade-old idea. The company is building new file organization software that will begin to form the underpinnings of the next major version of its Windows operating system. The complex data software is meant to address a conundrum as old as the computer industry itself: how to quickly find and work with a piece of information, no matter what its format, from any location." We have already reported on this here and here, but News.com has more information on the subject today.

Firebird is a relational database offering many ANSI SQL-92 features that runs on Linux, Windows, and a variety of Unix platforms. Firebird offers excellent concurrency, high performance, and powerful language support for stored procedures and triggers. It has been used in production systems, under a variety of names since 1981. Firebird is a commercially independent project of C and C++ programmers, technical advisors and supporters developing and enhancing a multi-platform relational database management system based on the source code released by Inprise Corp (once known as Borland Software Corp) under the InterBase Public License v.1.0 on 25 July, 2000. Version 1.0 of Firebird was released just yesterday for many platforms including MacOSX and Linux.

From the press release: "Red Hat, Inc., the world's premier open source and Linux provider, today announced a strategic agreement with Motorola, Inc. to develop a GNUPro Linux toolchain and cross compiler for Motorola's Altivec-enabled host processors based on the PowerPC instruction set architecture. As the leader in GNUPro tool development, Red Hat will provide a complete toolchain for the PowerPC instruction set architecture with full support for Motorola's AltiVec technology."

"A production version of the free GNU operating system is likely to be available by the end of this year, according to the president of the Boston-based Free Software Foundation (FSF). "We actually have the GNU kernel working, and we can now produce the GNU system, as opposed to the GNU/Linux system that people have been using so far," said Richard Stallman, who is in India this week to attend a GNU/Linux Day in Pune." Read the rest of the report about GNU/Hurd at IDG.net.

David Pogue is a well known author of a whole series of computer and other technical books. His latest book "Mac OS X: The Missing Manual" was published about 2 months ago in assosiation with O'Reilly.

"Even though all of us here at MandrakeSoft are excited about the upcoming release, we've also been distracted by financial concerns. Despite continuous good reviews in the press; despite having millions of users throughout the world; despite producing an award-winning Linux distribution that is a solid competitor to both UNIX and Window$, the Mandrake Linux distribution's short-term future is in jeopardy due to a simple factor: money." Read the rest of the article at Mandrake's own web site. IMNSHO Commentary: After the comically tragic news about the end of Loki Games which apparently did not pay some employees since end of 2000 and "a single employee is listed in creditor filings as being owed almost $350,000 in unpaid salary and in expenses the company incurred using the employee's credit card" and many other Linux companies in the past, now is Mandrake's turn to have money trouble. Except Red Hat Linux (who are specifically targetting servers and the Enterprise market instead of desktop users), none of the "desktop" Linux-oriented companies makes real money or even survived the... GPL (you can argue as much as you want about that - be my guest).

"What’s New in HP-UX 11i?" The new HP-UX 11i sports an 'Internet-centric' focus for end-to-end e-services. Irene Maltzan covers the major new features of the HP-UX 11i operating environment -including better scalability and availability- in this article. "Example File Systems" This chapter excerpt from 'Modern Operating Systems' book discusses several example file systems, ranging from quite simple to highly sophisticated. "Clustering Microsoft Exchange Server 2000" Ensuring reliability and scalability within your email system can be a trying experience. Let author and columnist Joseph M. Lamb guide you through the construction of a clustered Exchange Server utilizing Windows 2000 Advanced Server and Exchange Server 2000. "What is a Microsoft Cluster?" Let author and columnist Joseph M. Lamb guide you through the various cluster types, and how you can implement clusters that best serve the needs of your application using Microsoft's Windows 2000 Advanced Server. "Optimizing Disk Performance in Windows XP Professional" In this second article on getting better performance from Windows XP Professional, Louis Columbus provides step-by-step directions for increasing disk drive performance on your Windows XP system. Read all these articles at InformIT.

"The introduction of Intel's new Hyper-Threading technology is providing Microsoft with a handy mechanism for getting more money from Windows 2000 Server customers, for encouraging users to switch over to Windows .NET Server, or both. It kind of depends on how .NET Server pricing pans out, but as far as Win2k Server goes it's already clear that people wanting to use the extra oomph in the new Xeons are going to have to stump up. According to a Microsoft backgrounder available here, Win2k Server handles Hyper-Threading by using the processor count from the machine's bios." Read the rest of the report at TheRegister. Our Take: Problem is, a SMT Xeon is not as fast as a real SMP Xeon 2x system at the same Mhz. Therefore, paying double the OS License price for something that only provides a hardware-level feature (Hyper-threading), but not the actual speed you would expect from its SMP counterpart, it is IMNSHO, unjustifiable.

"Apple has two performance headaches right now: the processor and the OS. Apple's director of core engineering Brett Halle last month promised us that OS X performance was a paramount concern, and to be fair, his division need take no blame. The BSD he inherited has the industry's best respected IP stack, for example. The problem is, one former Apple engineer told us, in serializing the twenty five year old BSD layer with the fifteen year old code of the extensions NeXT began to add in the mid 1980s." Read TheRegister's analysis of the G4 SPEC benchmarks Heise reported last week.

"FreeBSD now works with multiple processors on sparc64 systems, thanks to the efforts of Jake Burkholder, and Thomas Moestl", the FreeBSD news page reports.

The C-based GTK+ cross platform toolkit has now reached version 2.0. This version is the basis of Gnome 2.0 as well and its libraries are not compatible in either source or binary form with previous GTK+ applications. FAQ and release notes. The C++ bindings for GTK+ 2.0, called Gtkmm, is expected to be released very soon too. UPDATE: On a related note, Gnome 2 Beta 2 released for general testing.

According to Tiqit, although this feature was previously considered impossible to engineer, the eightythree is not a concept product. Instead, Tiqit says it has built -a mass produced- a fully functioning x86 handheld device out of cutting-edge but available parts, designed specifically for enterprise use and immediate production. In terms of components, eightythree's CPU is the National Semiconductor Geode, 266-300 MHz, RAM is 128 MB or 256 MB, and there is a 10 GB hard drive. The screen is a 4-in 640X480 TFT (18-bit color) with touchscreen and backlight. The external monitor displays up to 1280 x 1024 at 75 Hz, 1024 x 768 at 85 Hz. eightythree is powered by an internal lithium ion rechargeable battery. "This product will greatly accelerate adoption and use of handhelds in the enterprise," said Ian Blasch, CEO, Tiqit Computers. "It uses standard operating systems -- Windows XP, Linux or UNIX -- and is compatible with all associated applications, including legacy software. Almost anything you can do on a laptop or PC, you can do on eightythree -- only it is smaller and more mobile."

ROME is a lightweight, modular, multitasking, embedded operating system which has been developed and used for multiple research projects. ROME was designed to manage high speed data streams within a multimedia environment. The system is highly modular, with functionality split between multiple processes. To ensure a high throughput with minimal overhead ROME provides a zero copy architecture where pointer references to data are passed around instead of data being copied. The goal of this approach is to maximize the utilization of a given hardware configuration. ROME released version 2.01 yesterday.