Last week Eyetech began shipping the first finalized AmigaOneG3-SE boards to developers. Apart from the boot ROM, these boards are identical to consumer AmigaOneG3-SE boards. Eyetech also announced a more expensive version called AmigaOne-XE motherboard, which will come with socketed PPC CPU(s) and an AmigaOne trade-in option will be available through AmigaOne dealers. Soon more dealers like i.e. Forefront Technologies, a company which is also developing ATI Radeon drivers for AmigaOS4, are to be included on this list.

"Both Microsoft and AMD have taken the unusual step of re-affirming their collaboration on 64-bit computing. The companies issued a joint press release in Taiwan today claiming that future Microsoft Windows operating systems and AMD's K8 family, formerly codenamed Hammer, would be developed closely together." Read the report at the Inquirer.

"A move by four sellers of Linux to unite behind a single version of the operating system might help those allies--and boost Linux's popularity--but it isn't likely to dent the dominance of the top dog, Red Hat." Read the article at ZDNews. Update: Interesting interview with Caldera's CEO, about UnitedLinux.

"Solaris 9 for Intel could be poised to ship after all, Register spies at Sun suggest. The official line is currently that Sun is shipping Solaris 9 for Sparc, but that "Sun is deferring the productization and release of the Solaris 9 OE for Intel IA-32." In English this means that Sun has (probably) more or less finished it but is hesitating as to whether or not to ship it, while in ITspeak this sort of phrasing generally means that the product is headed for a lingering death in the netherworld." The story is at TheRegister.

"A group of self-proclaimed civil libertarians have launched an effort to create an OS and a set of applications that prevent computer eavesdropping and data collection, even by government agencies. The new open-source OS, dubbed "M-o-o-t," will ship in the form of a single CD_ROM that you can boot on popular PC hardware platforms. The CD-ROM will contain the OS and a set of applications that includes an email client, word processor, spreadsheet program, graphics program, and other unspecified software." Read the news at WinInformant.

"After a long break between releases, Microsoft on Tuesday issued the Windows 2000 SP3 Release Candidate, marked build 3.140. The long awaited update weighs in at 17MB and 30MB for Professional and Server versions of the operating system, respectively." Read the report at BetaNews.

KernelTrap reports: "Roland McGrath recently announced version 1.3 of the GNU Mach kernel, offering several bug fixes. He also noted, "We are no longer actively developing version 1.x of GNU Mach. We plan to make only necessary bug fixes or trivial enhancements in the 1.x line, and make further 1.x releases only as necessary for those purposes." A new 2.x version of GNU Mach is under development, utilizing the University of Utah's OSKit."

"The most tantalising net rumour burning up the wires this week is the one about the Apple iBrowser. Heard it? It goes like this. Apple co-opts the Mozilla code base for a skunkworks native OS X browser that's both super fast and grannie-friendly. A Galeon for OS X. "iBrowser" thus completes the set of consumer software apps gradually introduced with iTunes, iPhoto and iMovie, which are being advertised under the slogan 'everything's easier on a Mac'." Read the article at TheRegister. In other browser news, Opera 6.03 for Windows and Opera 6.01 for Linux were released today.

"Does anyone really know what "object oriented" means? Does the phrase signify anything, or are the words just strung together because of an historical misnomer? One thing is clear. No one understands what the phrase "object oriented" means when they first hear it. While it does appear to be a juxtaposition of two ordinary words, its meaning does not jump out at you." Read it at CobolReport.

I keep reading review after review after review of the current crop of linux distributions. And everytime I'm annoyed at the end. I'm not annoyed by the style, or the comments, but more at the way they always end far too soon? One of the latest reviews of Lycoris is a prime example. What is this a review of? It's a review of the installation, and a quick insight into some of the packages found. To compare, it's like reviewing the opening cinematic sequence of game. You need to review the way the game plays as well! And people need to start reviewing how the distributions function over a period of time greater than a day or two. So here's my Mandrake 8.x experience.

DigitalVideoEditing.com features an article listing the 10 top reasons why someone would or should use Mac over the PC, or a PC instead of a Mac for Video Editing. Update: Another one here, submitted by CattBeMac.

"The first release candidate for Slackware 8.1 is now available on ftp.slackware.com (and hopefully some mirrors by now). Recent additions to -current include Mozilla-1.0rc3, KDE-3.0.1, and gcc-3.1. This is all leading up to what we're hoping will be the best Slackware release ever!" Changelog, mirrors.

XP-Erience.org carries the news about the release of an in-game footage of Doom III. The 37 MB video is in the DivX format (captured by a camera, so the quality is not great, but it is more than enough to show the impressive lighting effects in the game). Real screenshots can be found at Avault. ExtremeTech reported that the demo was running on a Pentium4 2.2 GHz, with an unreleased ATi graphics chip, codenamed R300. In other graphics news, Microsoft has just released the SDK of DirectX 9 Beta 1 to their beta testers.

"I'm one of those people who is sacrificing a small portion of their mental health to the greater good, by testing FreeBSD-current. Now that we're approaching FreeBSD 5.0, the FreeBSD Project needs people to test -current in a wide variety of installations and environments." Read the tutorial at OReilly.