Version 2.0.6 of the GTK+ widget toolkit and associated libraries (GLib, Pango, and ATK) is now available. This is a bug-fix release. Announcements for GTK+ and GLib. Update: On a related note, GTK# 0.3 was released only a few days ago.

A whole year after the Be IP buyout from Palm, BeOS 5 PE still enjoys more than 2,500 downloads per week. However, new hardware creates problems to BeOS, as it does not support new graphics cards, sound cards, new chipsets and worse, doesn't even boot on AthlonXP's or many Pentium4s without the usage of patches/hacks that are floating around. The latest sad incident is the inability of BeOS to boot when you have lots of system memory and lots of virtual graphics memory.

Apple Computer will likely shift to using Intel chips, while circumstances exist that could well push Dell Computer and Sun Microsystems into a friendly embrace, predicted Bear Stearns analyst Andrew Neff. More and more analysts, editors and even users are getting smoother to the idea that Apple might have to make the jump to x86, simply because IBM/Motorola are not interested anymore in fullfilling Apple's CPU needs. I wrote an editorial about it two weeks ago (a pretty successful article I might add, judging from the outrageous number of hits received). That article seemed to have re-ignite a number of similar articles on the web since then to several tech news sites.

While the first generation of Itanium left many people dissapointed about its performance (mostly because people were trying to run and benchmark 32-bit code, while the CPU only shines when running native 64-bit code), it seems that Intel is back with a vengeance. The new Itanium2, ready to ship in a few months, scores some very good results in the CPU/compiler intense, industry standard benchmark, SPEC. While its integer capabilities are average to good, its floating point ones is the best thing out there today, scoring even better than the IBM Power4 (which includes a whopping 128 MB of cache). What's very interesting in the results is that both the Power4 and the Itanium2 score poorly on MesaGL, Perl and gzip tests but they are adequate on the gcc test. This is possibly because they're optimized for heavily streaming operations, big matrices. For a short commentary on the results check here. AMD Opteron SPEC results are not available yet.

The new version of mSQL, 3.0, includes tunable memory use, higher performance, enhanced Indexing, single process and multi-process Servers and more.

Many companies are trying to move to a subscription model for their software and Apple really has something going for them in that respect if you think about it. We, OS X Users, are already accustomed to the automatic updating of the OS and like it. dotMAC actually looks nice all in all, even if some might feel it is expensive. What people don't like is unpredictability; they have nothing against change as long as they like the outcome and know where it is going.