"IBM DB2 is only popular on mainframes...which is only used by your father!" That was Oracle Chairman and CEO Larry Ellison's response to a report that Big Blue's database-management software is gaining market share over Oracle. A recent Gartner Dataquest study ranked IBM ahead of Oracle in the highly competitive DBMS market. The report, which Oracle has since disputed, found that the Redwood Shores, Calif.-based company had slipped to second place in the overall database market in 2001, with a market share of about 32 percent, versus IBM's 34.6 percent.

nVidia Corporation, today introduced the Cg Language Specification - C for Graphics. Cg is a high level programming language that enables content developers to create cinematic-quality real-time graphics easier and faster. Developed in close collaboration with Microsoft Corporation, Cg gives developers a new level of abstraction, removing the need for them to program directly to the graphics hardware. The common, familiar C-like syntax enables rapid development of stunning, real-time shaders and visual effects for graphics platforms, and is compatible with Microsoft's recently announced High Level Shading Language for DirectX 9.0.

Just about 12 days late, FreeBSD 4.6-Release is here. Download its files, or the ISOs (only the mini-iso has been uploaded as of now), and read its release notes. Mirrors available.

C|Net News.com hosts two interesting articles about Danger, the company behind the HipTop handheld device which is a combination of wireless web-aware applications, PDA and a phone. The operating system for the device has been written from scratch (the kernel is the work of a team of ex-Be engineers, including Travis Geiselbrecht, who also brought us NewOS) while it also runs a Java VM. First article can be found here, and interview with Danger's Rubin and Britt is here.

Late last week in an online article The OmniGroup president, William Shipley (makers of OmniWeb for MacOSX) opined that Microsoft's Macintosh Business Unit (MacBU) would eventually stop development of Internet Explorer for the Macintosh.

Yamit is a microkernel, developed under a BSD compatible license. Mentioned capabilities are a thread-aware kernel and multiprocessor support (including both tight SMP and loose - NUMA architectures). The project is largely based on the Mach microkernel that was being designed for many years by CMU and OSF.

The third release candidate for Slackware 8.1 has been released. Changelog here.

Axel, Bruno and the rest of the company in the OpenBFS team, have completed the development of OpenBFS, the open source equivelant of Be's popular 64-bit journaling file system. OpenBFS currently runs on BeOS 5, awaiting the further evolution of the OpenBeOS/NewOS kernel in order to start a back port. The team reports that while the filesystem clone is not very well tested yet, it is already seems pretty stable and it beats in performance the original BFS.

Gentoo Linux 1.2 has been released; basic changes include install-related fixes and countless updates to the Portage tree, such as KDE 3.0.1 (CVS 2002-06-04) and GNOME 2 (beta, CVS 2002-06-07) support. Note that GNOME 2 is still masked, but fully useable. New users can find install instructions here and ISOs and build tarballs. Existing users need only to "emerge sync" to be up-to-date.

"Hewlett Packard Co will today take the wraps off of the second release of its HP-UX operating system for workstations and servers employing 64-bit Itanium processors from Intel Corp. HP-UX 11i version 1.6, which will start shipping in the second or third week of July." Read the report at TheRegister.

"A year ago, investors were losing faith in Palm Inc. The once high-flying company itself admitted to frailty and mistakes. But Palm never gave up, and launches Monday a new operating system -- a crucial weapon in its battle to remain dominant in the competitive handheld market. Palm OS 5, analysts say, is a much-needed major upgrade from the pioneer of personal digital assistants' earlier operating systems." Read the report at Yahoo!. Update: Palm pins hopes on beefed-up OS.

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.

ActiveWin reports that Microsoft has updated the Windows Platform SDK to include documentation, header files, and libraries for new APIs in Windows XP SP1 and Windows .NET Server. This edition of the SDK supports development for the following platforms: Windows .NET Server family and Advanced Server, Limited Edition, Windows XP, Windows XP 64-bit Edition, Windows 2000, Windows NT versions 3.51 and 4.0, Windows Millennium Edition, Windows 95/98/98SE, .NET Enterprise Servers.

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.