From ActiveWin: "Intel has today released to the world new USB 2.0 drivers for Windows XP (1.08 MB). These new USB 2.0 are built around Microsoft reference drivers and carry the build number 5.1.2600.41. Note that before installing these drivers you need the Microsoft hotfix Q312370."

"Linux is set to become the de facto standard in so-called "embedded" devices such as robotics, information appliances and automobile information systems. However, fragmentation could prove a stumbling block, said Inder Singh, chairman of the Embedded Linux Consortium (ELC)." Read the rest of the article at ZDNews.

In Part One, Simson Garfinkel and Michael Mahoney explain why Cocoa and Mac OS X aren't nearly as revolutionary as they are evolutionary, beginning with Apple's genesis in the 1970s. Now they pick up the story with the Star Trek project and bring you to the current iteration of Mac OS X.

In an article posted at C|Net News.com sun has announced their intentions of expanding linux with Solaris features (and continuing to expand Solaris with Linux features) to make the two "similar". Perhaps this is seriously the next step in the Intel Unix market for Sun, if they have, in the end, chosen to do without Solaris/x86. In other news, according to the article, Solaris 9 will be released May 22nd.

Friends of Sci-fi and CGI should be pleased this month, first with the release of the (pretty good, I might add) Spider-Man movie, the Matrix Reloaded/Revolutions teaser last night and of course, today, the opening of Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones. Have fun everyone!

Get the news first on OSNews: The long-awaited "stable" and recommended for full use, GCC 3.1, is finally released. Get it from Gnu's ftp site, while the mirrors are not fully updated yet. Update: And the release is now official. You heard it first, here, on OSNews. Again.

"Microsoft's operating-system monopoly has gotten plenty of ink in this paper, but Microsoft Office exerts an even tighter stranglehold on the market. The productivity suite dominates not just on Windows PCs but on Macs as well, and its file formats have become a default language in offices, homes and schools around the world." Rob Pegoraro reviews OpenOffice for WatshingtonPost. In the meantime, Sun puts a price at Star Office, while Microsoft is finalizing its next-gen Office.

Opera has just released version 6.02 for Windows, and the final version of Opera 6.0 for Linux while they announced support for Symbian's new exciting technology concept, "Magpie", when it becomes available as a commercial solution. In the meantime, Mozilla RC-2 was released a few days back.

Qt Script for Applications (QSA) is a multiplatform toolkit that allows developers to make their C++ applications scriptable using an interpreted scripting language, Qt Script (based on JavaScript). QSA allows developers to make their applications more attractive to end-users, VARs and their own support staff. All three groups are empowered by scripting to compose their own functionality from the functions that the application developer provides, and from the Qt library itself.

"An upgrade to Sun's enterprise server clustering technology is set to arrive next week alongside the company's much-anticipated new Solaris 9 operating environment. Backwards-compatible to Solaris 8, Sun Cluster 3.0 will offer features such as improved ease of management, enhanced dynamic configuration, and support for Oracle9i RAC (Real Application Clusters), according to Jim Sangster, the group manager for Sun's cluster product line, in Palo Alto, Calif." Read the story at InfoWorld.

A lot of interesting hardware-related news lately. First of all, Matrox makes a dynamic come back with its Parhelia512 graphics card and a lot of sites (1, 2, 3, 4) carry the white papers and spec sheets. In the console world, SONY has slashed the prices of PSone ($49) and PS2 ($199), following price cuts by Microsoft on XBOX. However, PS2 remains the No1 console in sales, by far. In the meantime, Intel introduced faster Celerons, based on the Pentium4 core. In fact, these new Celerons are nothing but the older Pentium4 that were selling last year. The newer Pentium 4s have reached a speed of 2.53 Ghz. On the other side of the river, Apple announces a new rack-mount server:

Gentoo is so far, the big Linux surprise this year. With its 1.0 release took the Linux world by storm and converted a huge number of power users and developers from the well-known Linux distros they were using, to the lightweight Gentoo Linux. While its installation process is not for the faint of heart, it pays back the user with a highly optimized system. As a result, Gentoo is dubbed the "fastest Linux distro" to date. Read on for an exclusive interview with Gentoo's project leader, Daniel Robbins where he reveals that Gentoo will be further optimized with the fastest x86 C/C++ compiler (Intel's ICC) in addition to GCC 3.1. Daniel also speaks about the future plans for Portage and the overall system in general.

This is the first installment in ThinkSecret's series of news coverage for the next major update to Mac OS X, code-named Jaguar. They take a look at tweaks to OS X's Finder and System Preferences, as seen in the first developer preview of Jaguar, build 6C35, and include lots of screenshots.

Robert Szeleney emailed in to tell us about the new version of his PDF documentation for SkyOS: "This PDF File has a lot of information about SkyOS, it's design, applications and much more".