"Apple Computer plans to serve up a new iMac model with a larger flat-panel display during next week's Macworld Expo trade show, according to sources. The upgrade to a 17-inch liquid crystal display (LCD) comes as sales have all but stalled on existing 15-inch flat-panel iMacs." Read the report at ZDNews.

The initial release of the IBM WebSphere SDK for Web Services on Linux is now available. Developers can easily create Java-based applications for Web service providers and consumers. This offering contains everything developers need in a single convenient package, including a IBM SDK for Java technology, a runtime environment, a private UDDI registry, tools, samples, and documentation. It's based on open specifications for Web services such as SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI and runs on both Linux and Windows operating systems. The IBM WebSphere SDK for Web Services includes software developed by the Apache Software Foundation and is being offered at this time for free.

"A security mailing list has alerted Apple's OSX users to a program that could let a hacker piggyback malicious code on downloads from the company's SoftwareUpdate service." Read the report at ZDNews.

"Microsoft has delayed the third service pack for Windows 2000- Service Pack 3 —for an indefinite period of time, according to internal documents I viewed over the weekend. Win2K was originally due July 17, but Microsoft recently discovered several major bugs in its Microsoft Installer (MSI) 2.0 code, which was to have been bundled with the update. So now the company will remove MS 2.0 from SP3 and include the older version, MSI 1.1, instead, unless feedback from its beta testers and partners indicates that MSI 2.0 must be included. This indecision, obviously, will adversely affect the release schedule for SP3." Read the report at WinInformant. Update: MSI 2.0 to be Included in Windows 2000 SP3.

"Palm Inc was considering Linux as the foundation of the next-generation PalmOS as recently as last spring, sources tell us. Palm eventually acquired Be Inc's development team last August, but internal discussions on the viability of a Linux-based handheld OS were taking place as recently as fifteen months ago. These were squashed by the lawyers, who concluded that Palm couldn't reconcile the GPL with the in house view of intellectual property. Palm is not using the cut-down embedded version BeOS, BeIA, which was targetted at the NatSemi x86 system on a chip, but a ground-up OS for ARM." Read the report at TheRegister.

"In Dennis Powell's 'The view from the desktop' column last week, he noted a problem with the development of KDE (and other Open Source projects). Generally speaking, KDE developers work on KDE for fun, and while interested, they are not necessarily concerned about the needs of end users. Obviously hobbyist developers should not be required to do anything for those using their code, but this situation often causes features that users want and need to be overlooked." Editorial at LinuxAndMain.

From DaemonNews.org: FreeBSD 4.6.1 is scheduled for release July 17, 2002 in order to update SSH, BIND, incorporate a partial ATA fix, and other changes from the RELENG_4_6 release branch. On a side note, FreeBSD 5.0 developer preview 2, a full release for the i386, Alpha, and sparc64 architectures is scheduled for release July 25.

Support for Intel's Itanium 2 CPU continues with 64-Bit Windows .NET servers; WindowsXP 64-Bit Edition Ver. 2003 to be available in early 2003. Read the press release at Microsoft.com. In the meantime, Windows 2000 has been given nine months to live, as far as OEMs are concerned, and Microsoft is pressuring the PC companies to stop offering dual install Win2K/XP systems immediately.

Cheap hardware, free trips to the United States and all the popcorn you can eat--life's a junket if you're a computer programmer in India. Read the report at ZDNews.

ThinkSecret covers the new MacOSX version, codenamed Jaguar, by publishing an article on what is new and on the kind of updates are to be expected at the end of this summer. There are also a bunch of screenshots included in the article. Part I and Part II.

Microsoft posted updates the Internet Explorer for Mac. Two separate downloads are available from Microsoft's Web site, one for the Classic Mac OS and one specifically for Mac OS X. IE 5.2.1 provides all the latest security and performance enhancements for IE 5 for Mac OS X, according to information posted on Microsoft's Web site. IE 5.1.5 for Mac OS 8.1 to 9.x provides enhanced support for HTTP and resolves all security vulnerabilities in previous versions of IE 5.

Ladislav Bodnar writes: "Before we start, here is the link: boot.iso. Click on it, then save it to your hard disk. By the time you finish reading this review the ISO image will have downloaded. It will only take a couple of minutes to burn the 16MB image onto a bootable CD, which upon boot, provides easy, logical and well-structured instructions. Several hours later, you will be greeted with a beautiful screen running on top of one of the most popular Linux distributions - SuSE Linux 8.0. The full review by DistroWatch."

"Microsoft will support eight-node failover clusters in Windows .NET Enterprise Server. The decision came months after the Beta 3 release of the Windows .NET Server family editions back in November, when Microsoft announced that only four-node clusters would be supported in Windows .NET Enterprise Server, while eight-node failover clusters would be reserved for Windows .NET Datacenter Server customers." Read the report at ENT-News.

"With that rather enormous task and all of the big freezes behind us, we can put out some maintenance releases and get cracking on coolnewstuff again! After much discussion between the release team and Foundation Board reps (Havoc and Nat), we have prepared a timeline for 2.0.x releases and a proposal for the beginnings of 2.1 development. Here 'tis." Check out the timeplan at GnomeDesktop.