One of the early GUI operating systems for the PC, that is still being developed today, is GEM, an operating system that was originally created by Digital Research in the early 1980s. GEM was described as providing a Mac like GUI for the PC – long before Microsoft Windows 3.1 or 95. Today GEM continues to be developed as FreeGEM and old and new versions of the GEM OS and GEM applications can be downloaded for free (see links below). The history of Digital Research and GEM is quite interesting, as GEM had the potential to become the "Windows" (or Mac) of the PC world.

"Day after day since 1984, teams of programmers, linguists, theologians, mathematicians and philosophers have plugged away at a $60 million project they hope will transform human existence: teaching a computer common sense. They have been feeding a database named Cyc 1.4 million truths and generalities about daily life so it can automatically make assumptions humans make: Creatures that die stay dead. Dogs have spines. Scaling a cliff requires intense physical effort." Read the interesting article over at CNN.

The software-only company Amiga Inc. has published a marketing document outlining how it will sell AmigaOS4, which will run on third party POP-based (PowerPC Open Platform) hardware. Now, however, the open hardware seems to become artificially closed.

Luigi Rizzo, has done an extensive rewrite of the FreeBSD IPFW firewall code (userland and kernel) in an attempt to make it faster and more flexible. His announcement is available over at BSDForums.org. IPFW, the software supplied with FreeBSD, is a packet filtering and accounting system which resides in the kernel, and has a user-land control utility, called ipfw(8).

The OpenBSD project is currently having what is called a "Hackathon", that is, as many coders as possible, get together for a little more than a week and hack, drink beer, hang around etc. This year, it all happens in Theo deRaadt's hometown, in Calgary, Canada. The slogan of this hackathon is: "Shut up and hack!" Check out pictures of the event, and see the (always growing) number of CVS commits here. The event is terminating late next week.

Linux-sxs.org features an informative article on how to compile Mozilla from source. Especially if you have switched to GCC 3.1, you can build some really optimized binaries for your Mozilla, as GCC 3.1 does better optimization in general, plus it supports special optimizations for Pentium4 or AthlonXP.

Last year, Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik thought Sun Microsystems' open source-based alternative to Microsoft's widely used Office software would encourage broader use of the Linux operating system on desktops and perhaps loosen the iron grip of Windows. But Szulik abandoned those hopes when Sun started charging for its StarOffice product and changed its way of dealing with the original equipment manufacturers, such as Red Hat, which can bundle it with their own offerings. Szulik accused Sun of adopting the domineering methods of mutual enemy Microsoft.

Audacity is a multitrack/recording free audio editor. It started a few years back as a simple sound editor, but since then it has evolved in a powerfull modern editor, by supporting multi-track recording. The stable 1.0 version was released only a few days ago.

From ActiveWin: "Windows 2000 Service Pack 2 users can now access the brand new and convenient Windows Update version 4 website after they download an update on the actual Windows Update website. Windows Automatic Updating feature notifies you when critical updates are available for your computer. This feature replaces Critical Update Notification if it is already installed. Critical Update Notification will no longer offer critical updates."

"In the last episode, I explained that my Linux boxes run Slackware and XFCE and aren't encumbered by KDE and GNOME. I'm happy to report that they all still run Slackware -- and one of them now also has both KDE and GNOME, because I installed Slackware's 8.1 release candidate 2." Read the preview at LinuxPlanet.

LinuxJournal looks at Qt 3.0 and talks about why it's such a strong and useful visual design environment. Only two serious choices for a GUI toolkit are left: Qt and GTK. When Qt 3.0 was released in October 2001, it was a singificant upgrade and was well received. The most important features of Qt 3.0 are the extensions of the utility libraries, the addition of a rich text edit widget, fabulous support for international fonts and a vastly improved Qt Designer.

With rival AMD showcasing its Opteron systems and its new 2200+ AthlonXP, Intel Corp. released new details of its Itanium 2 chipsets within the U.S. Read the article at ExtremeTech.

A new virus called Simile.D may not be much of a threat to computer systems, but some of its technical tricks could lead to a rethinking of the principles underlying antivirus software. Read the story at C|Net.

For the first time, Hewlett-Packard has won top ranking in an annual study of the merits of different versions of the Unix operating system, displacing Sun Microsystems. Runner up was Sun's Solaris 8, while IBM's AIX followed.