Microsoft will reveal hundreds of pieces of proprietary computer code from its monopoly Windows operating system in the next several weeks to comply with an antitrust settlement it signed with the U.S. Justice Department last year, the company said on Monday. Get the scoop at ZDNews.

The main goal of the is to add a graphical installation to OpenBSD. This project has been developped in the spirit of OpenBSD which means that the installation is as close as possible as the text one. wishes to add some value to the product by developping installation modules to known servers such as Bind, Sendmail, Inn, Apache etc. Our Take: Great project, but may I point out the illegal use of the BeOS and (some) Windows icons in the Installer?

I've always been curious about how things work. When I was little, I annoyed my parents with millions of questions. Why is the sky blue? How does water come out of the tap when you open it? Maybe I was born without the mental switch that lets you be happy with using something, without trying to figure out how it works.

Version 2.0.6 of the GTK+ widget toolkit and associated libraries (GLib, Pango, and ATK) is now available. This is a bug-fix release. Announcements for GTK+ and GLib. Update: On a related note, GTK# 0.3 was released only a few days ago.

Saw this over at BSDForums.org. In this final series article, JavaWorld's Jeff Friesen completes his exploration of threads by focusing on thread groups, volatility, thread-local variables, timers, and the ThreadDeath class. Also, the accompanying sidebar, "Finalization and Threads," explores Java's finalization activity in the context of threads.

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.

You can use a mirror to download the latest stable Linux kernel 2.4.19, released today. Changelog, patch, full source are available. An XFS patch for 2.4.19 should be ready by next week.

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.

"The combination of cell phone and Web-browsing handheld, which the company had hoped to have in the hands of consumers by the beginning of this month, is unlikely to be widely available until next month, industry sources say. Danger CEO Andy Rubin declined to offer a new launch date, saying that is up to the company's carrier partners. However, he said the company is in volume production of the device, with 6,000 Hiptops being produced each week (will sell for $200, unlimited browsing and some free phone minutes for $40/month). Initially, BlackBerry maker Research In Motion should not feel much of a threat from Danger, given that the former sells primarily to business users and the latter is pitched at consumers. The device's arrival could pose problems for Palm, which gets much of its business from consumers". The story is at News.com, earlier coverage here.

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.

The announcement is not out and about yet, but you can download the 3-CD beta 2 of the upcoming Mandrake Linux 9.0. Happy bug hunting.

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

eComStation (eCS) is an Internet enabled platform for business desktop computing. The focus of eCS is to provide an organization with a set of world class business applications and an application engine which can support multiple API sets. eCS is REXX enabled and comes with support for DOS, Java, Windows 3.1, OS/2 applications. Here are some screenshots of the installation process of the upcomming eComStation 1.1. We did a review of eCS 1.0 a few months ago. On a related note, IBM refreshed the Java Development Kit 1.3.1 for OS/2 (paid subscription required to download it).

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.