The article provides an in-depth look at the thread pool support in the Microsoft .NET Framework, shows why you need a pool and the implementation provided in .NET, and includes a complete reference for its use in your applications.

Today is the scheduled release date for the long-awaited GNOME2 desktop. But instead of a final GNOME2, a second release candidate will be issued. This falls in line with a one-week delay in RC 1, though when its delay was announced it was said that final release would not be delayed. The report is at LinuxAndMain. Our Take: Gnome2 is more than one year old late, while KDE is on track on most of its releases, and it seems to have captivated the userbase, as according to latest stats and polls, KDE has more than 55% of the Linux desktop, as opposed to Gnome's 25% (which continues to decline). UPDATE: Yama from PCLinuxOnline writes: "I have written an article that aims to clear up many misconceptions that many people seem to hold about GNOME. Hopefully it will lead to a greater understanding of The GNOME Project and what it's about."

Apple (silently again) purchased the third video-related company in less than two months. This time, is Prismo Graphics and it comes after the purchase of Nothing Real and Silicon Grail. Our Take: Now that SGI is no longer as "big" as it used to be regarding video software, and no important or many commercial packages have been ported to Linux, MacOSX has a real chance to further strengthen in this niche market about professional video editing. Only problem to solve will be Windows and the faster/cheaper Xeon/P4 PCs. With Steve Jobs being also an exec at Pixar, it should be obvious where he tries to head Apple and why Quartz Extreme is being developed for.

The Danish Technical University (DTU) has developed Scandinavia's largest dedicated Mac cluster, consisting of 32 dedicated Power Mac G4 Dual 800 MHz workstations which is equal to 200 Gigaflop or 6 million instructions per second.

"Imagine a future in which you could tell your computer to move a folder inside another, and just by pointing with your finger, it would happen. Or being able to command your computer to print your vacation pictures on the nearest color printer, and not have to supply any more configuration information." The article is at InfoWorld.

Bill Hayden released version 0.5.2 of his Cosmoe environment for Linux. The new version fixes a dozen of include file problems during compilation, API and source changes etc. The new version should compile now cleanly on all Linux systems, x86 and PPC. Check out the Cosmoe mailing list if you still are getting problems with compilation.

With more than 50 percent share of the Linux server OS market, Red Hat is on a roll. In an exclusive video interview, CEO Matthew Szulik talks about Microsoft, Sun and survival. View the video at ZDNews.

At USENIX 2002, the NetBSD project held an introduction of the NetBSD operating system. You can read in the slides presented about its structure, its release schedule (version 1.6 comes out in 1-2 months), its goals, its future and a lot more.

"IE has grown staid in recent years as the competition has vanished. But it's still the best browser, barely. If Mozilla can improve its reliability and site compatibility, I would have no problem recommending that product over IE to any user. Sadly, I can't honestly recommend Opera to anyone. It's not free, unless you settle for an ad-injected version, and it's most notable features--an MDI option and its configurable UI--are already available in Mozilla, which is completely free." Read the review at WinSuperSite.

Our friends over at PCLinuxOnline are hosting an interview with the Lindows CEO, Michael Robertson. Nothing really new is revealed by Robertson, but an interesting read nonetheless.

"Attorneys for the states seeking tough penalties for Microsoft Corp.'s antitrust actions have backed off of a demand for a modular version of the Windows operating system, saying information sharing is more important than dismantling the Redmond, Wash., software maker's flagship product." Read it at eWeek.

"Announced last autumn, Intel's Hyper-Threading technology has finally made it to market, courtesy of the latest Xeon processors. Hyper-Threading is a clever way of making a single chip operate like two separate devices without implementing two cores on one die. That, claims Intel, makes for higher performance without having to resort to significantly larger chips or even adding a second processor to the system." The story is at TheRegUS. Alan Cox says that the technology can bring up to 30% more performance than the same CPU running without Hyper-Threading, but special conditions have to be met, for example, the applications need to be programmed as multi-threaded. The right hardware for the right software.

Slackware 8.1 has been released and is available for download. An installation ISO image can be found here.You can pre-order the Slackware 8.1 official 4 CD-ROM set at Slackware's store. Highlights of this release include KDE 3.0.1, GNOME 1.4.1 (with new additions like Evolution), the Mozilla 1.0 browser, kernel 2.4.18, support for filesystems like ext3, ReiserFS, JFS, and XFS, and support for several new SCSI and ATA RAID controllers. Mirrors available.

The Lycoris folks released the last beta (named "Build 45") before the final release of Lycoris Update2 next month. The first ISO is 500 MB, while the third one, which contains the dev. tools, is 160 MB.