After earlier announcing plans to create a subsidiary for its operating system, Palm on Thursday said it is looking to divide itself into separate, publicly traded companies. "We are looking to move into external separation next year," acting CEO Eric Benhamou told CNET News.com on Thursday, shortly after the company announced that Carl Yankowski was resigning as Palm's chief executive. The company is also looking into asking David Nagel to become the Palm CEO, while he was originally hired to be the CEO of the new Palm subsidiary -- the OS division -- where the Be engineers and Be's COO Steve Sakoman would be employeed, after the buyout of Be's IP would complete. There is a fair amount of uncertainty in the Palm land, as revenue fell a lot recently and the new PocketPC is a rival that the aged PalmOS can't compete with anymore.

"Just about every software maker has embraced "Web services" as its new mantra in the past year, claiming that the trend will revolutionize business and the use of the Internet. Although it was initially met with skepticism, the idea has gained credibility with the support of such industry leaders as Microsoft, IBM and Sun Microsystems. The stakes are particularly high for the software industry, which is trying to revitalize sales in a punishing economy. But before the concept can take off, companies face an uphill battle in convincing customers that they need Web services--and in explaining what they are." Read the rest of the 4-part feature article at News.com.

Peter Tattam from Trumpet Software and also the creator of PetrOS wrote in to tell us that " we are exploring the possibility of providing a BeOS layer to PetrOS. This is consistent with our philosophy of providing multiple API support in the OS. I am in discussions with the OpenBeOS group to determine the feasibility of getting OpenBeOS to run in PetrOS. This would involve us writing a BeOS compatible kernel driver, and supporting ELF format executables in addition to the current PE format executables.We will continue our development on the Win32 layer at the same time with a goal of being able to seamlessly run BeOS and Win32 applications on the same desktop." OSNews recently hosted an interview with Peter regarding PetrOS.

"My fellow cheapskates, I feel for you. Really, I do. I know you want to upgrade to OS X but are racked with doubt. Is Apple's stunning new operating system really worth its $130 price tag? After all, that's enough to buy more than 10 different shareware versions of solitaire or keep yourself in beer and pizza for month." Read the rest of the editorial at BusinessWeek.

Given its size, when IBM talks about Linux, people listen. Two years after IBM laid out its Linux strategy, the company seems to have met its goals and then some. Joe Barr talks to IBM's Linux czar to find what's ahead for the computer giant and open source.

Tom's Hardware has setuped a match between the two most powerful 3D graphics card models, the ATi Radeon 8500 and the nVidia GeForce3 Ti500. To cut the (long) story short, ATi shows that it has a much more impressive hardware than nVidia has, but also much (also impressively) worse drivers. So, while it takes a small lead to only some tests under Win98, under WindowsXP, the ATi card completely fails to perform adequately, plus the drivers are unstable and even exiting or crashing randomly some of Tom's tests.

"Linux penguins are braying louder, but companies don't plan to adopt many of them in the near future. Almost every large company has at least thought about Linux, and some of them are running pilot projects or even day-to-day (albeit nonessential) systems on the open-source operating system. And because the economy is still weak, many tech observers believe that Linux--and its price tag of "free"--will attract more businesses looking to cut costs. At least that's the theory. Practice indicates something else." Read the rest of the editorial at ZDNews.

OpenSSH 3.0 has just been released. It will be available from the mirrors listed at OpenSSH web site. OpenSSH is a 100% complete SSH protocol version 1.3, 1.5 and 2.0 implementation and includes sftp client and server support.

KDE Studio Gold is a full-fledged IDE for the development of sophisticated C++ applications - including the high utility features you expect from a modern development environment, such as code completion, dynamic syntax highlighting and popup function parameter lookup. Debugging is simplified by tight integration with kdbg in the IDE, and comprehensive documentation is provided. Version 3.0 is now available and shipping. TheKompany added a couple of new features to this final release, which includes an integrated Programmers Calculator and Font Viewer. Demo versions are also available.

"One possible concession by Microsoft in the proposed AntiTrust settlement has come too late to save the company which pressed hardest for its inclusion: Be, Inc." "I'm always cautious around what these guys 'promise'", Be's CEO Jean-Louis Gassée told TheRegister via email at the weekend. JLG believes that the restriction that DOJ posed to Microsoft regarding the bootloader issue, can boost Linux and *BSD. Our Take: Funny really, JLG says that this concession can boost Linux and *BSD, but he fails to mention his own child, the (abandoned) BeOS.

FileMaker Pro 5.5 Unlimited is now certified for Apache Web Servers running Red Hat Linux 7.1 and the powerful new Mac OS X Server. FileMaker Pro 5.5 Unlimited offers the same powerful database features found in FileMaker Pro 5.5, including two-way ODBC capabilities, record-level access privileges and more. However, in contrast to FileMaker Pro 5.5, it sets no limits to the number of Web Browsers that can access a FileMaker Pro database published on the Web.

The title says it all, get it while it's hot! This release is mostly a stability version for the new Linux VM system and 2.4.15 will also be the same. After that release, Linus Torvalds is expected to open the 2.5 development source tree.

The fourth revision of Debian GNU/Linux 2.2, R4 (codename `potato'), has been released. This point release, revision 2.2r4, mostly includes security updates, along with a few corrections of serious bugs in the stable distribution.

Motorola has released the latest update to its PowerPC 8500 - aka G5 - processor that ups AltiVec performance and delivers consistent 1GHz and up clock speeds, TheRegister rumours, based on their Apple sources. "Indeed, the source claims, two of the chips in the sample set of CPUs sent to the Mac maker, clocked at 2.4GHz. Most, however, ran at 1GHz, 1.2GHz or 1.4GHz, and some - a "considerable number", says our Deep Throat - operate at 1.6GHz." In related news, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has again upped the stakes in its processor performance race with rival Intel. AMD launched the new Athlon XP 1900+, its highest performance desktop processor issued to date.