"Going by the numbers, Apple appears headed for trouble again. But fear not, Mac faithful: Apple may never again pose a threat to Microsoft and its PC allies, but its niche is safe. In the $160 billion PC market, a 3% market share should be enough to fund Apple's research-and-development push. Nothing will come easy for Apple, however. It is rapidly losing its grip on the education market, a former stronghold. Over the next year, Apple may get a boost in the professional market. Finally, Apple is moving beyond the Mac." Read the article on BusinessWeek. Also, Apple strengthens server support.

"After long weeks of impatient waiting, it has finally arrived. NVIDIA has distributed the first GeForceFX cards to the press. Now, NVIDIA has to prove that it really has what it takes to topple ATI and its successful Radeon 9700 PRO from the throne." Benchmarks on TomsHardware, ExtremeTech, AnandTech and Hard|OCP.

"A lot of people are watching Miguel de Icaza, a bubbly young Mexican programming whiz behind an unusual project he named 'Mono', Spanish for monkey. Icaza's company, Ximian, has already produced software called Evolution that gives users of the free, open-source Linux operating system e-mail and calendar tools comparable to those that run on Microsoft's Windows operating system." Read the article at SiliconValley.

"So here we are, more than a year and a half later , and only a handful of audio applications have placed both feet firmly on the good ship OS X. Hardware drivers and plug-ins also remain a crapshoot. While the rest of the Mac world has been moving to OS X with only minor hiccups, most audio-related companies have lagged far behind. What's the holdup? The answer, as you might expect, depends on whom you ask." This is an interesting article over at 'Electronic Musician' regarding MacOSX from the pro-audio point of view, and its audio application base status today.

From BSDForums: "FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Scott Long presents the FreeBSD November-December 2002 status report. Key highlights of the report include the anticipated FreeBSD 5.0 Release Bluetooth stack development, busdma driver conversion project, DEVD, C99 & POSIX Conformance Project, FreeBSD Package Cluster work and much more!"

2002 was a good year for Microsoft --­ certainly more so than 2001. And the optimism continues, with a distinctly Microsoft-friendly administration in power in the US that has as good as declared itself uninterested in pursuing the company through the courts for any corporate misdeeds it may or may not have committed in the past.

In their on-going GNU/Linux review series, most OfB have received much criticism from loyal users of the various distributions we have covered. Timothy R. Butler notes that many of the issued raised by those who commented on the series were cases of "knee-jerk" reaction and ponders how such reactions impact the community at large and its appearance to outsiders.

AddABoy features a review of ArkLinux, the new desktop distro from ex-Red Hat employee, Bero. Update: Five new screenshots from the brand new version 1.0.0-alpha6 are available. Its control panel is essentially the same as in Lycoris. Fonts and their rendering look below par though. Update2: The conversation on our commenting section seems to have get around usability and UI again, so here are my two suggestions, including a mockup for the Control Panel used by Ark and Lycoris: suggestion here, mockup here.

It's been a week since FreeBSD 5.0 got released. Many argue that this release is the most important and most technically advanced, ever, for FreeBSD. I am truly disapointed though on the way the media have responded to this release.

Honda announced the Honda 'Studio E' Concept Vehicle. It is an SUV with full multimedia capabilities, running on top of MacOSX: "The personal audio computer has its own workstation with keyboard, mouse and a 17-inch liquid crystal display. To play to a larger crowd, a motorized 42-inch plasma screen rotates down from the ceiling and interfaces with the audio computer to display custom visual patterns in step with the music out the back of the vehicle, or it can play DVDs."

HelloWorld is a software application with a visual approach to connecting people, online messaging, search and transfer operations, and personal publishing, in a decentralized network environment that is owned and operated by the network community. The application (soon to be released for Windows, Linux and Mac) is literally an alternative user interface for our online needs.

The OpenPKG project released version 1.2 of their unique RPM-based cross-platform Unix software packaging facility. OpenPKG 1.2 provides 361 selected packages which include proven versions of popular Unix software -- all carefully packaged for easy deployment on the six officially supported Unix platforms FreeBSD 4.7 and 5.0, Debian GNU/Linux 2.2 and 3.0, and Sun Solaris 8 and 9.

In a Microsoft mailing list posting sent yesterday, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates reports that the company is making progress on its initiative to make its products more secure, though he also notes that the demand for security has risen since Microsoft began the initiative. New versions of Windows Server 2003, SQL Server, and Exchange Server will have all passed the new, more stringent, testing, and users will notice that vulnerable services will be turned off by default. Gates also promoted the use of smart cards for authentication in the email. Read more in this PC World article.

Dell CIO says Linux killing Unix: "Unix is dead," said Randy Mott, CIO and senior vice president of Dell, in a keynote address on Thursday. Sun still sees Unix promise though. In the meantime, Linux targets the desktop as well as the server space. Reports here and here.