"The introduction of Intel's new Hyper-Threading technology is providing Microsoft with a handy mechanism for getting more money from Windows 2000 Server customers, for encouraging users to switch over to Windows .NET Server, or both. It kind of depends on how .NET Server pricing pans out, but as far as Win2k Server goes it's already clear that people wanting to use the extra oomph in the new Xeons are going to have to stump up. According to a Microsoft backgrounder available here, Win2k Server handles Hyper-Threading by using the processor count from the machine's bios." Read the rest of the report at TheRegister. Our Take: Problem is, a SMT Xeon is not as fast as a real SMP Xeon 2x system at the same Mhz. Therefore, paying double the OS License price for something that only provides a hardware-level feature (Hyper-threading), but not the actual speed you would expect from its SMP counterpart, it is IMNSHO, unjustifiable.

"Apple has two performance headaches right now: the processor and the OS. Apple's director of core engineering Brett Halle last month promised us that OS X performance was a paramount concern, and to be fair, his division need take no blame. The BSD he inherited has the industry's best respected IP stack, for example. The problem is, one former Apple engineer told us, in serializing the twenty five year old BSD layer with the fifteen year old code of the extensions NeXT began to add in the mid 1980s." Read TheRegister's analysis of the G4 SPEC benchmarks Heise reported last week.

The C-based GTK+ cross platform toolkit has now reached version 2.0. This version is the basis of Gnome 2.0 as well and its libraries are not compatible in either source or binary form with previous GTK+ applications. FAQ and release notes. The C++ bindings for GTK+ 2.0, called Gtkmm, is expected to be released very soon too. UPDATE: On a related note, Gnome 2 Beta 2 released for general testing.

In the second part of the ZDNet interview, Linux kernel hacker Alan Cox explains why the world needs open source software on the desktop and why Linux was perfect for Iceland. Alan Cox is generally referred to in the open-source developer community as a "kernel hacker"--someone whose programming responsibilities cover the Linux kernel, or core, itself. His role of organizing and applying improvements is vital. At an interview with ZDNet U.K. in Swansea he spoke on the latest challenges for Linux at the high- and low-end, the arrival of revolutionary 64-bit hardware and why it's hard to argue with the economics of open-source software.

"AOL Time Warner's Netscape unit is snooping on searches performed by users of its latest Navigator browser at Google and other search sites. According to a network traffic analysis performed by Newsbytes, Netscape is capturing Navigator 6 users' search terms, along with their Internet protocol (IP) address, the date Navigator was installed and a unique identification number." Read the report at NewsBytes. Our Take: Yet another reason to use the original Mozilla and not the Mozilla-Netscap(-ed) package by AOL.

Sun Microsystems announced it has filed a private antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft Corporation. The suit, filed March 8, 2002 in the United States District Court in San Jose, CA., seeks remedies for the harm inflicted by Microsoft's anticompetitive behavior with respect to the Java platform and for damages resulting from Microsoft's illegal efforts to maintain and expand its monopoly power. In June 2001, the Federal Court of Appeals found Microsoft guilty of illegally abusing its monopoly power with respect to Sun and the Java platform. Sun's suit seeks to redress the competitive and economic harm caused by Microsoft's illegal acts. Read more on ZDNews.

"This January not only brought new Apple systems, but also a MAC OS X-adapted benchmark suite by the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) entitled CPU2000. On the one hand, this suite allows comparisons to be made within a certain framework with the Intel competition and, on the other, it shows that Motorola and Apple were able to get more out of the new gigahertz processor than might have been expected by simply taking the pure clock frequency difference to the 866 MHz predecessor model into account." Apple G4 Dual 1 Ghz against a single PIII at 1 Ghz. Which is faster? Heise has the SPEC benchmark results. SPEC is known to be very precise when comparing the CPUs themselves without having major interference from the rest of the system or surrounded hardware. Our Take: AFAIK, the MacOSX license specifically states that no benchmarks results of any kind are allowed to be published. Coolio. UPDATE: Read more for some commentary on the results.

In an interview with ZDNet U.K., the Linux 'kernel hacker' gives his views on the GPL, 64-bit computing and why grandmothers should want to use Linux. Alan Cox is generally referred to in the open-source developer community as a "kernel hacker"--someone whose programming responsibilities cover the Linux kernel, or core, itself. Thousands of developers all over the world, from hobbyists to IBM engineers, are constantly contributing to open source software, so Cox's role of organizing and applying improvements is vital.

Along with our XML or PHP news feeds, OSNews is now offering WAP support for the readers that own a WAP-enabled mobile phone. Just point your WAP device on http://wap.osnews.com/ or on http://wap.osnews.com/index.wml and you should be able to access our 15 latest headlines. Please report any problems you may find on our comments section. Additionally, people with 4th generation mobile phones (mostly sold in Japan) capable of HTML should be able to render OSNews in full HTML, but in a more simple manner (no ads or nested tables). Just follow the same instructions as we have for the AvantGo, Lynx, Links and W3M browsers. Check the screenshot showing some WAP emulators and the three major text browsers rendering the alternative (and simpler) OSNews pages. UPDATE: I did some changes on the WAP source, please let us know if it now works ok with your devices. Thanks!

The Linux (for Playstation 2) kit is now accepting pre-orders on playstation.com for North America. The kit will allow people to run a fully functional Linux environment on their Playstation 2 computer entertainment systems. If you are a developer, you can also install the SDL gaming libraries for the PS2 and port or write your own games for the popular gaming console.

FOX is a C++ based Toolkit for developing GUIs easily and effectively. It offers a wide, and growing, collection of Controls, and provides state of the art facilities such as drag and drop, selection, as well as OpenGL widgets for 3D graphical manipulation. FOX also implements icons, images, and user-convenience features such as status line help, and tooltips. Tooltips may even be used for 3D objects. FOX stands for Free Objects for X. It was first developed under Linux, but it has now been ported to many flavors of UNIX, plus WindowsNT/2k/XP/9x/ME. After 4 years of development, Jeroen van der Zijp released FOX Toolkit 1.0 just a few days ago. FOX Toolkit is the third big cross-platform open source C++ toolkit, after wxWindows and Qt. In related news, Imperial Software Technology announced that it is now shipping X-Designer 7: Enterprise Edition, a major new version of its GUI builder for Motif, Windows and Java.

"Mac OS X gave us a host of interface enhancements, for better or for worse. Some are seemingly frivolous, such as the whiz-bang animations that dominate Aqua, and others haven proven truly useful, such as the Finder’s column view. Personally, I dig it all." The article at O'ReillyNet discusses the main Aqua enhancements, animated window resizing and the drawers.

David Chester has hacked through the Xft library and he achieved an incredibly good quality on antialias rendering under XFree86. With this "hack", at last, XFree can deliver similar aesthetic results with the MacOSX or Windows rendering engines. Check the two screenshots "before" and "after" at his page.

February was a month of rapid growth for Lycoris. Its flagship product, Desktop/LX, has been selling well and attracting worldwide partners. In addition to favorable reviews in the Linux world and surrounding tech community, Lycoris is responding to users' needs by providing Hewlett Packard PCs Pre-Loaded with Desktop/LX. OSNews will be featuring a Lycoris review in the near future.