Developer Jean-Baptiste Queru wrote a short editorial regarding the SPEC benchmarks and how modern CPUs are competing these days based on the specific benchmarks. JBQ talks about the Pentium4, AthlonXPs, Itanium and especially about the G4. Update: JBQ just wrote a redux article.

"While I normally turn a cold shoulder to all those increasingly arcane ways of dividing people into two groups we keep inventing, there's one that I think holds the key to Linux's prospects for success on the mainstream desktop." Read the article at LinuxAndMain.

"Wal-Mart, the most mass-market retailer imaginable, is committing an outrageous form of computing heresy: On its Web site, it's selling Windows-compatible personal computers without Windows. Stranger yet, the PCs (built by Microtel Computer Systems, a Los Angeles area manufacturer) come installed with a version of Linux, the open-source operating system that has been giving Microsoft fits lately." WashingtonPost reviews Wal-Mart PCs with Lindows.

The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce that Release 1.5.3 of the NetBSD operating system is now available. NetBSD 1.5.3 is a maintenance release for users of NetBSD 1.5.2, 1.5.1, 1.5 and earlier releases, which provides the following updates relative to 1.5.2: A number of security problems have been fixed, some performance fixes have been incorporated, improved device support in some existing drivers, some new device drivers have been added.

Contrary to reports that Microsoft has abandoned its HailStorm technology (aka .NET MyServices), company officials have revealed plans to embed components of the XML schema and data-access technology throughout its .Net application, server, and client stack. The software giant is combining HailStorm services, a unified storage system, and collaborative SharePoint services toward the goal of building a universal canvas infrastructure across multiple product groups. Read the report at InfoWorld.

From DistroWatch: "The first beta of the brand new Mandrake 9.0 release has hit the mirrors. Get the three CD images here: MandrakeLinux-9.0beta1-CD1.i586.iso (700MB), MandrakeLinux-9.0beta1-CD2.i586.iso (700MB) and MandrakeLinux-9.0beta1-CD3.i586.iso (498MB) (if these URLs don't work, try here). The version increase from 8 to 9 has been justified by a jump to KDE 3.x, Gnome 2 and GCC 3." Update: It seems that Mandrake Software does well these days. Thanks goes to Michael Matthews for the pointer.

"A company selling proprietary software to third parties will never open its code if the company has a competitor. It will never release its software under the GNU GPL. If you consider open code a benefit to society, you may want to propagate open-code legislation or otherwise try to stimulate new competition in the marketplace." A draft of this article has been stirring up much debate on the Free Software law mailing list, but this is the first time it's been published at a web site.

"The dual Athlon is still the fastest PC we've tested, but the single Intel P4 2.53 GHz machine runs a close second, and even beats the dual Athlon on some of the tests. And, as expected, the Mac dual 1GHz G4 could not even come close to keeping up with these two PCs. Even though the P4 machine has only a single processor, it was easy for it to leave the dual-processor Mac far behind." Read the benchmarks at DigitalVideoEditing.

Some Oberon friends emailed us a few days ago and asked for an introduction of the platform to the OSNews readers, so here it is: Oberon started in the '80s, and it is both a native operating system capable of running on its own partition, and a programming platform (based on Pascal/Modula) on top of existing OSes. It seems to be quite active and in fact, there was a recent fork of the official Oberon kernel, becoming the Bluebottle OS, which also seems very active.

Object Desktop 2002 is a desktop enhancement suite designs to allow Windows users to completely transform Windows into anything they want. It includes WindowBlinds, DesktopX, ObjectBar, IconPackager, WinStyles, and more. It also includes a 1 year subscription to ObjectDesktop.NET where users can download all the components of Object Desktop, updates, and new features. Our Take: I was lucky to have a "live" demo of the product from Stardock's CEO, Brad Wardell , a few months back. This set of applications truly transform the Windows GUI to something completely different, which is certainly not just skining, but a complete change of how the UI behaves and interacts with the user.

The Rasterman is the founder of the Enlightenment project, an infinitely configurable window manager that is working its way toward becoming a desktop, even though he thinks the desktop battle is lost. In an email interview with LinuxAndMain, he talks about what he's doing, his view of the future of desktop Linux, the nature of development projects (commercial, community-based, and genius-based) and more.

The campaign to free Blender's sources has officially started. 100,000 Euro are needed in order Blender to become open source and be the first truly powerful 3D rendering package for the OSS community. If you can spare some money this weekend, help this great application get freed.

"Apple CEO Steve Jobs said this week that his company would consider moving to Intel chips, but that he would wait until at least 2003 because the transition to Mac OS X was more important. But with the speed of Power PC hardware increasingly falling behind Intel's chips--The Pentium 4 will hit 3 GHz this year--Apple would be wise to do a bit of research. I recommend AMD's upcoming 64-bit Opteron, which will give Apple a technological leg up on Windows and, perhaps, offer them Windows compatibility through the Opteron's full compatibility with 32-bit x86 code. Come on, Apple: Do the right thing." Read the blurb on WinInformant. Read more for a short commentary. Appendix 21/July/2002: Please read for a small update and more explanations at the end of the article.

The Debian Project is pleased to announce the release of Debian GNU/Linux version 3.0. Debian GNU/Linux is a free operating system, which now supports a total of eleven processor architectures, includes KDE and GNOME desktop environments, features cryptographic software, is compatible with the FHS v2.2 and supports software developed for the LSB. With the addition of the IA-64, HP PA-RISC, MIPS (mips, mipsel), Alpha, and S/390 architectures, Debian GNU/Linux now supports a total of eleven architectures. For the first time, Debian comes with the KDE 2.2. The GNOME desktop environment is upgraded to version 1.4, and X itself is upgraded to the much improved XFree86 4.1.