"I want to believe. Those words set up my review of Mac OS X 10.1 almost a year ago. Mac OS X began life as the last, best hope for Apple's decade-spanning quest for a modern operating system. At first, it was enough for it to simply exist as a stable, feasible product strategy. But while developer releases revealed some very interesting technology, they also raised some red flags. The public beta was a warning shot across the bow of an anxious community of early adopters. The initial release reinforced the old Apple saying: "real artists ship." Mac OS X 10.0 had arrived, but there were problems." Read the review at ArsTechnica. Also, 19" iMacs are on the way.

The Blue Bell, Pa., OEM and its key partner will demonstrate the forthcoming 64-bit OS Windows .Net Server 2003, Datacenter Edition and 64-bit SQL Server running on Unisys' 32-way ES7000 SMP server at the Windows conference.

Mention the name "Woz," and most Mac users will know exactly who you're talking about. After all, they've been enjoying the fruits of Steve Wozniak's labors for years. Wozniak spends spends most of his time these days focusing on Wheels of Zeus, a company he helped form to develop wireless consumer electronic products, but he still pays attention to that other company he helped establish with Steve Jobs 26 years ago. "I love OS X from a feeling point of view. But from capability and readiness, I still don't rate it ready for me, I'm sorry to say." Woz says.

Linux on XBox made quite a progress lately, but now, Jeremy Penner of Astra Network has managed to get QNX 6.2 to boot on his Sega Dreamcast. It only took Jeremy a couple days to get it booting 6.2. Read about it at QNXZone.

There's an interesting editorial at Mikhailtech regarding FPS, refresh rates and what the brain really distinguishes. Although he has no scientific background experience he has assembled some interesting facts. You can get more information on how the brain interprets visual data here.

"From the moment Mac OS X was announced, one of its most compelling features for me was its ability to run Mac and Unix software at the same time. It meant I wouldn't have to keep multiple systems around, booting into one or the other as needed. And now, with the release of version 10.2 (aka Jaguar), OS X is a better Unix than ever. Make no mistake: Mac OS X has been a real Unix from the start, albeit one that could actually run desktop apps like Microsoft Office, Photoshop, and BBEdit, and let you play Warcraft III and (soon) Halo. But now, Jaguar's Unix underpinnings have been given a much-needed refresh." Read the editorial at ZDNet.

"With all the publicity that Windows and Linux get, you may be forgiven for not being aware of a number of other operating systems. Yet there are many other choices that I find interesting and as useful alternatives. Five Desktop Alternatives..." Read the article at Byte.

A recent white paper suggesting that an architectural flaw exists in Windows has generated interest in the press and on security mailing lists. While some of the report's findings are correct, its core assertion – that there is an architectural flaw in Windows – is inaccurate, Microsoft says. The Microsoft Security Response Center has thoroughly investigated the report's claims, and they would like to provide information about our findings and the planned future steps.

Lunar Linux is a fork off Sorcery Linux and it recently had its 1.0 beta release. In the meantime, ROOTLinux was just released version 1.3, and it includes kernel 2.4.19, it is compiled with GCC 3.2 and it has many brand new packages like KDE 3.0.3 and Gnome 2.0.1. We also learned that CRUX will have a new release soon too, and it will be also switched to GCC 3.2.

In an open letter to Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy, a group of users has called for the company to make Solaris 9 available on the lion's share of computers based on the Intel architecture. The letter, published as an ad in the San Jose Mercury News and titled "Shame on you, Scott", is the latest move in an eight-month war of words between Sun and a vocal contingent of its users. The spat kicked off in January when the software maker said it would put its next operating system, Solaris 9, on indefinite hold for the x86 architecture. Read more at News.com.

We have been reporting on Pepper, the programmer's text editor, several times, so this is a follow up on what really made Maarten Hekkelman to stop development of his multi-platform product (Mac/OSX/Win/FreeBSD/Linux). Even Slashdot noticed his interview at DaringFireball. "Programming for BeOS was simple when you just started. But it became quite messy quickly. The problem is the multi-threading." "MacOSX, however, loses on all fronts. It claims to be a Unix but it doesn’t support much of the more advanced Unix features, since it is using such an old kernel. It claims to be user friendly, but I find it more obscure and difficult to use than my Win2k box. And then, it is dog slow." Very good (and long) read about the troubles of an independent developer in today's computing market, who's trying to make a difference with his product. Today, Maarten is trying to find companies or other devs that might be interested in purchasing the source code and rights to Pepper.

The OpenBFS team today announced that they finally moved to beta stage. This means that OpenBFS (the free and open source alternative, but fully compatible BeOS File System clone) is completely done feature-wise and only testing is missing now. OSNews (over)heard that "the query engine is way faster than the BFS one _and_ it supports searching on non-indexed attributes. Also it performs at least as good as BFS and in some test cases it is even considerably faster than it.".

Wal-Mart is famous/notorious for its relentless focus on price. Now it's decided to have a little fun with the PC business. The world's biggest retailer is flogging a new desktop computer for $199. The 800 MHz VIA C3 processor is never going to win prizes for performance - but for price/performance at the budget end of the market, it's very hard to beat. The PC comes with 128MB SDRAM on a VIA Apollo PLE133 chipset-based mobo, supplying integrated graphics and networking.

So what exactly are Sun's plans? While precise details remain close to Sun's chest, it is clear that the company is planning to assemble a suite of both open source and proprietary software products with which to go head to head with Microsoft. Some of these, such as the MySQL open source database, Sendmail messaging software, Samba file and print software, Apache web server, Mozilla browser, and Gnome desktop, have already been discussed by Sun executives. Our Take: At LinuxWorld, I saw their default configuration of Gnome 2 on Solaris. It looked pretty bad, while their X server did not even support AA. I don't think they are going anywhere to "assault" Microsoft. They might "assault" some other Unix or even Linux vendors, but their game will stop there.