Get it while it's hot (translation: before the Apple laywers take the site down)! MacNytt has put online an exclusive video showing Quartz Extreme's capabilities, the new 3D graphics acceleration technology used for the 2D desktop of MacOSX 10.2. Our Take: Let's hope that the brand new iBooks that feature a 16 MB Radeon Mobility AGP graphics card will be able to run Quartz Extreme at 1024x768 at 60 Hz. Depending on the resolution you run your desktop, you will need either 16 MB or 32 MB and above of VRAM and AGP 2x (PCI won't cut it because its bus is times slower). For anything above 1024x768 though, you should be considering upgrading to an AGP card with lots of bandwidth and lots of memory.

The KDE Project today announced the immediate availability of KDE 3.0.1, the third generation of KDE's free. KDE 3.0.1 is primarily a translation release for KDE 3.0, which shipped in early April. In addition, KDE 3.0.1 offers a number of performance and usability enhancements. For an extended list of changes since KDE 3.0, please see the change log. Our Take: I spent most of the day yesterday compiling KDE 3.01 from source on my Red Hat 7.2 box. Here's a screenshot.

Kyocera are hard at work to release their first PDA product. The Pocket Cosmo runs Personal Java 1.2 on top of the Elate operating system from Tao Group Ltd. This will allow it to run programs written in Java faster and using less memory than other PDAs, which usually run on a Windows, Palm, or Linux operating system, according to a statement.

The Lycoris folks have posted a screenshot of the new, web-based, Control Center for their KDE desktop of the Lycoris Desktop/LX operating system. The Update2 of the OS will be released soon.

"Netscape 7.0 is the latest version developed around a technology called Gecko, which was created by the AOL-funded Mozilla open source browser movement. Will it lure consumers back from Microsoft?" Read the article at ZDNews.

Scott Robert Ladd has updated his GCC versus Intel C++ compiler benchmarks. This time round he includes updated results of the recently released GCC 3.1. The new version of GCC seems to be much better than its 3.0.4 predecessor, and GCC 3.1 even wins some benchmarks it lost previously over ICC. Overall, ICC remains a much faster C/C++ compiler, but GCC has successfully narrowed the gap. Read Scott's interesting conclusion at the end of the article too.

"The Palm handheld computing platform is moving ahead with advanced new technology, but users and developers shouldn't expect to see a big change overnight, according to company unit PalmSource." Read the rest of the report at News.com.

We were the first to feature the world preview of gobeProductive 3 for Windows, the popular office suite, and now we have for you five brand new screenshots of the upcoming, GTK+ based, Linux version. Dig in for the goodies!

This article at InformIT (free reg. req'd), provides a brief introduction to optimization on the Solaris Operating Environment. To explore this subject in more detail, refer to Rajat Garg's and Ilya Sharapov's Sun BluePrints book, "Techniques for Optimizing Applications," published July 2001.

The release of Apple's latest hardware offerings this month has caused quite a stir among Apple loyalists. This is only Apple's second foray into creating a truly dedicated server machine, the first of which being the "Network Server 500/700", which Apple sold in 1995 running AIX. The question on everyone's mind now is going to be what this means for Apple's prospects as a server platform. Certainly everyone agrees that the new machine looks nice, but how will it on the duties it will be required to perform. Furthermore, what kind of price/performance ratio is Apple offering when compared to the current group of servers.

"The GNOME 2.0 Desktop Beta 5 release, "Reciprocity", is ready for your bug-busting and testing pleasure! It is now available for immediate download. The GNOME 2.0 Desktop is a greatly improved user environment for existing GNOME applications. Enhancements include anti-aliased text and first class internationalisation support, new accessibility features for disabled users, and many improvements throughout GNOME's highly regarded user interface." Read more at LinuxToday.

"FreeBSD 4.6-RC1 (i386) is now available for download. The RC has been on ftp-master for over 24 hours so most of the mirrors have the ISO and FTP install tree, except for some reason ftp.freebsd.org. The build for the Alpha platform should be available within the next 24 hours." Read more at KernelTrap.

America Online has dropped Internet Explorer from a test version of its software for MacOSX, the latest sign that the Internet giant wants a rematch in the browser wars with Microsoft. Read more at ZDNews.

"As children, many of us watched TV shows like The Jetsons and dreamed about the day we might have our own robot maids, mechanics, and assistants. Evolution Robotics says it's making this happen. The Pasadena, Calif., company has released an operating system designed for the personal-robotics industry and says it hopes to do for that industry what Windows did for the PC. The Evolution Robotics Software Platform contains everything a company needs to develop and program robots, says Jennifer McNally, the company's senior director of marketing. It consists of a robot-control architecture, core software modules, and a set of developer's tools, she says." Read the story at InformationWeek.