"Our strangest dreams sometimes take on a reality of their own. In January, Caldera, the latest owners of the "official" Unix source code, decided to release some of the older versions (up to "V7" and "32V") under an open source license. While not as significant as it would have been, say, ten years ago, it is nice that everyone now has access to the code that first made Unix popular, and that led to the development of the 4BSD system that underlies FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and Apple's Darwin (which in turn underlies Mac OS X). Since I was active in the computer field through almost all the years of Unix's development, I'd like to comment briefly on the Caldera announcement in its full context." Read the rest of the story at O'Reilly.

"Looking at desktop applications for Linux these days has become a bit of a balancing act; on the one hand, there is the obligation to review all of the features objectively. One the other, it has become clear that it is necessary to examine how desktop applications will fit into the corporate environment. While we cannot ignore the home users, there is growing evidence that this will not be the arena where Linux will grow on the desktop." Read the Linux office package roundup at LinuxPlanet.

"Finding solid performance data to help choose among competing technologies is as tough as creating the data in the first place. This is particularly true in the database space, where database vendors routinely use no-benchmarking clauses in their license agreements to block publication of benchmarks of which they do not approve. We tested IBM's DB2 7.2 with FixPack 5, Microsoft Corp.'s SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition with Service Pack 2, MySQL AB's MySQL 4.0.1 Max, Oracle Corp.'s Oracle9i Enterprise Edition 9.0.1.1.1 and Sybase Inc.'s ASE (Adative Server Enterprise) 12.5.0.1." Read the rest of the benchmark article at eWeek. Our Take: Hey, where are my PostgreSQL benchmarks?

"Microsoft will ship Service Pack 1 in Q3 this year, a little later than expected. But from the sound of it the company is planning SP1 more as a bundle of goodies and enhancements than as a plain old fix roll-up. It'll include support for the Mira and Freestyle technologies Microsoft intends to unleash on us, and will also apparently support Tablet PCs, which are due out later this year." Read the rest of the report at TheRegister.

FreeHackers.org features two very interesting, long interviews, taken at FOSDEM 2002, the "Free Software and Open Source Developers Meeting" in Brussels just a few days ago. The first interview is with Guido Van Rossum, the Python creator who recently received the FSF 2002 award. The second interview is with six KOffice members talking just about everything.

Kelly McNeill from OSOpinion writes: "A few weeks ago, I wrote an editorial detailing the importance of a well-designed user interface (UI) and the need to keep that interface consistent. Unfortunately, my article was incredibly misunderstood by nearly all those who read it. To help clarify the issues surrounding this choice, I contacted Jef Raskin, arguably the leading authority on user interface design and author of the highly acclaimed user interface book, "The Humane Interface." What follows is an interview I conducted with the interface expert to help clarify the issue of consistency vs. skins."

This bi-monthly report covers development activities on the FreeBSD Project for December 2001 and January 2002. A variety of accomplishments have been made over the last couple of months, including strong progress relating to the KSE project, which brings Scheduler Activations to the FreeBSD kernel, as well as less visible infrastructure projects such as improvements to the mount interface, PAM integration work, and translation efforts. Shortly following the deadline for this status report, the BSD Conference and FreeBSD Developer Summit were held, and will be covered in the next bi-monthly report at the end of March.

Breadbox Inc. has secured a limited number of NewDealOffice 2000 boxes and they are selling them out for $100 USD. Get more info about the GeOS-powered operating system at Breadbox's web pages.

While Mozilla 1.0 is expected in May, the Mac folks released Chimera, a browser which is using the Gecko rendering engine wrapped with a native Cocoa GUI. In other Mac application releases news, Alias|Wavefront released the Mac-based Maya Personal Learning Edition for free.

Virtutech Simics is a systemlevel, instruction set simulator, capable of simulating high-end target systems with sufficient fidelity and speed to boot and run operating systems and commercial workloads. Simics provides a controlled, deterministic, and fully virtualized environment. Simics can simulate a variety of target systems, including systems based on the PC (x86 and x8664), SPARC V9, PowerPC, and Alpha architectures.

"Microsoft .NET provides several ways to think of your code as more than just a bunch of disconnected lines. As a Visual Basic programmer, you're already familiar with the concept of a class, a section of code that defines an object and its behavior. As you'll see in this document, you can use Visual Basic .NET to create both assemblies and namespaces. You'll need to understand both of these concepts to be a productive Visual Basic .NET developer." Read the rest of the article at MSDN. "Reduce your reliance on Win32 API calls by learning about specific and useful classes in the Microsoft .NET Framework; each class discussed here replaces one or more Win32 API calls you might have had to make in Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 to accomplish the same goals." Read the rest of the article at MSDN.

"AMD showed off prototypes of its x86-64 Hammer technology yesterday even as Intel Corp failed to dampen speculation that it is developing a similar hybrid technology,Joe Fay writes. AMD's Hammer technology is designed to support both 32-bit and 64-bit operating systems and applications and yesterday the vendor for the first time publicly demonstrated Hammer chips running Windows XP and a 64 bit version of Linux. The demonstration was held just a few blocks away from the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco." Read the rest of the report at TheRegister.

Today, the major "hobby" Operating Systems are AtheOS (which is currently stalled), MenuetOS and SkyOS. Without doubt, SkyOS is the one that moves with the faster pace. Since our interview back in October (and the subsequent Slashdoting), Robert Szeleney has put all his free time on the (270,000 lines of code) project. He wrote a media player, the documentation for SkyOS, more device drivers and applications, networking, SkyFS, the ability to boot from a CDRom and install on a native partition, speed optimizations, some basic Linux emulation (without having SkyOS to be a UNIX) and much more. Robert expects SkyOS 3.6 (binaries and source under the GPL) to be ready for public consumption in the next few weeks.

"This article describes how to have fun and impress your friends by obtaining old Alpha workstations and installing Debian GNU/Linux on them. I'll be installing "potato" (2.2.R3) on my AlphaStation 250. This is a 1995-vintage workstation with an Alpha CPU. It's the main application/DNS/NFS/DHCP server on my home network, and is presently my favorite machine. I had been running RedHat on it, but after seeing "apt-get dist-upgrade" run for the first time earlier this year, I've been upgrading all my boxes to Debian." Read the rest of the article at DebianPlanet.