"Recently Dennis E. Powell wrote a commentary entitled "The future belongs to GNOME; inertia, to KDE" that has generated much feedback, and a lot of flames in the KDE community. From my perspective as a software company that was/is doing KDE specific applications I think I see where the fundamental disconnect is between the two, and in my discussions with a number of the core developers, they have substantiated my opinion on this." Read the editorial at LinuxAndMain.

"SGI is widely expected to make a statement of direction that will see the company push Itanium-based machines employing open source systems and middleware software along side its MIPS-based Origin servers and Onyx visualization systems (think of it as workstations created directly from slices of a parallel supercomputer and you'll get the right idea), which run the Irix variant of Unix." Read the story.

David Dawes is maybe the most active XFree86 developer and he is also the lead founder of the project. He works for Tungsten Graphics, which is the main company working on the XFree, DRI and Mesa codebases today. We are happy to host an interview with David, discussing the present and future of XFree86 project. Update: Still confused how a VSYNCed desktop look like? Read here.

There's a new article on computer commentary site "The Idea Basket" detailing the features and importance of the Rendezvous networking protocol that will be shipping with next major release of Mac OS X. It should be a very interesting read for many computer users, as Rendezvous will profoundly affect the way people use their Macs as well as other computer systems in a networked setting.

"Apple dropped a bombshell on music makers today by acquiring Emagic which, with Steinberg, dominates the market for sequencing software. Apple said it will axe the Windows version of Emagic's Logic sequencer come September." Read the report at TheRegister.

This is just a reminder about some OSNews-related stuff. First off, by reading the survey results, we saw that a lot of people were complaining about the popup ads, while these have completely stopped as of 2 weeks ago. Also, other people complained that OSNews does not look good on Lynx. OSNews looks pretty good on Lynx and w3m and Links and even AvantGo, while we even have WAP support (check screenshot on the above link). But you will need to read here first how to have these services working for you. Also, we are always looking for people to write articles for OSNews. These days we generally serve more than 40,000 page views per day, so this could be a good way to have your voice heard on OS and other technology-related matters.

This article summarizes Microsoft's decades-long effort to evolve Windows from a single, one-size-fits-all desktop operating system for everyone into a robust family of server and desktop operating systems.

Microsoft DirectX 8.1b is the latest version of the DirectX technology, an important and significant part of the Windows operating systems. This version of DirectX can replace the all previous released versions of DirectX. It includes several critical fixes for Direct3D and DirectShow components. In related news, industry sources have confirmed that Microsoft's DirectX 9 is likely to arrive in October, quite a while later than ATI's R300 Nvidia-buster.

Security Update July 2002 includes the updated components, Apache v1.3.26, mod_ssl v2.8.9 and OpenSSH v3.4p1, which provide increased security to prevent unauthorized access to applications, servers, and the MacOSX operating system. Download it via Software Update on your Mac.

From TheRegister: "Ross Anderson of Cambridge Uni has published a lengthy and informative paper, FAQ on Palladium, the Trusted Computing Platform Alliance, their relationship and their implications."

AMD touts Athlon and Opteron, pointing out that Hammer-based servers don't require different chipsets for systems with one, two, four or eight processors--unlike Intel-based machines. Via will release its first Hammer chipsets in late 2002, the same time the chip will begin to ship to manufacturers. MandrakeSoft will adapt its distribution of Linux to Advanced Micro Devices' next-generation chip platform, the companies said on Thursday.

Today, SuSE Linux announced the release of an updated version of the SuSE Linux Groupware Server as well as the immediate release of the SuSE Linux Pro-Office CD. The release date for SuSE Linux eMail Server 3.1 was also previewed to be in early July.

Six Degrees is a remarkable new piece of software for Mac OS X and Windows. This article describes my experiences with the application and discusses some of its implications for the future of all software.

"Opera Soft. CEO Jon von Tetzchner can claim an achievement held by few of his fellow tech entrepreneurs: He's competed head-on against Microsoft and lived to tell the tale." Interview is at CNet.