Mike Kestner announced today his C# bindings for the well-known GUI Toolkit, GTK+ 2.x. To compile the examples you will still need a Win32 machine with the (freely available on Microsoft.com) .NET Framework installed (137+20 MB for the SDK, 20 MB for the runtime), as the project is not yet self-hosted under Linux. What this means is that developers soon will be able to write C# applications for GNOME.

"Microsoft has quietly shelved a consumer information service that was once planned as the centerpiece of the company's foray into the market for tightly linked Web services. The service, originally code-named Hailstorm and later renamed My Services, was to be the clearest example of the company's ambitious .Net strategy. It was intended to permit an individual to keep an online persona independent of his or her desktop computer, supposedly safely stored as part of a vast data repository where there could be easy access to it from any point on the Internet. At the time of the introduction of My Services, Microsoft also proclaimed that it would have a set of prominent partners in areas like finance and travel for the My Services system. However, according to both industry consultants and Microsoft partners, after nine months of intense effort the company was unable to find any partner willing to commit itself to the program." Read the rest of the report at Yahoo!News. It's worth noting that this is quite a setback for Microsoft's overall .NET strategy.

"Microsoft has decided to support one of two competing formats for popular DVD recording technology , a decision that is intended to make the storage devices as easy to use as current CD burners and floppy drives. At its annual Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC), Microsoft plans to demonstrate software and to provide technical documentation for incorporating the DVD+RW format into its Windows operating system, according to a Microsoft Web site detailing the schedule for the conference." Read the rest of the report at ZDNews.

"Here's the riddle: If Linux is gaining more market share among big-spending corporate customers, why have sales at Red Hat -- the undisputed Linux leader -- been creeping steadily downward? Red Hat now has 90 percent of its 630 employees working to lure corporations looking to move their computing platform from expensive systems running on the rival Unix operating system to Linux, widely considered to be the more cost-effective choice. But it might be the cost-effective part that comes back to haunt Red Hat. With the Linux operating system available for free, Red Hat has struggled to find a way to secure paying customers. After a year of adjusting the focus at Red Hat away from smaller businesses and e-commerce applications, the company now needs to prove that it can translate Linux's growing popularity into stronger sales." Read the rest of the story at NewsObserver.

Princeton professor Andrew Appel testified that WindowsXP Embedded is living proof that middleware can be safely removed from Microsoft's Windows operating system. Read more in the ZDNet Focus.

"In the January/February 2002 issue of Embedded Linux Journal, we examined the fundamental issues of real time with Linux. In this article we examine efforts to bring real-time capabilities to applications by making improvements to the Linux kernel. To date, the majority of this work has been to make the kernel more responsive--to reduce latency by reducing the preemption latency, which can be quite long in Linux." Kevin Dankwardt continues his real-time series by examining efforts to bring real-time capabilities to applications by improving the Linux kernel. Part I can be found here.

Every January, "Linux Magazine" surveys the state of the Linux kernel, bringing their readers up to date on what new kernel features and improvements to expect in the year ahead. "For 2002, the crystal ball is cloudier than usual because at press time, work on Linux 2.5 has not yet begun. Nevertheless, some definite and tentative plans had come to light" the editor writes. The magazine spoke with several key kernel developers to learn more about their plans and hopes for Linux 2.5. This article was first appeared in the printed version of the magazine in December, and it is now online, free for everyone to access it.

While the information is still unconfirmed, the talk is that the leaked slides from a Microsoft presentation regarding the next Office version, are authentic. WindowsSuperSite features two articles, the first talks about the new Office version, codenamed NGO, but the second set of slides, is the truly interesting part, explaining how the subscription/renting .NET model will work with Microsoft's upcoming Web Services. In fact, it seems that Office will be the leading application in this new sales model, which will help promote the subscription model in general, however a "traditional" licensing method will also be available. Update: Some analysis of the NGO presentation can be found at ExtremeTech.

"To help stop the spread of worms, viruses, and other hostile activity, it is important to track down and report the servers used in these attacks along with those used to send spam. Many Web admins, however, don't take the time to track them because the manual process can be quite cumbersome. The Microsoft .NET Framework comes to the rescue with several networking classes, including the Dns class and the TcpClient class, that abstract away the complexity of performing DNS and WHOIS lookups. These classes make it easy to create a simple, straightforward ASP.NET-based utility for performing these lookups and automating this very important task." Read the article at MSDN.

A developer preview snapshot of FreeBSD 5.0-CURRENT is now available. Please see the release notes for more information. Also be sure to check the release errata for a list of known problems.

Improvements include important pam/shadow/util-linux security fixes, new KDE3 ebuilds, many important improvements to Portage, new NVIDIA drivers and seamless OpenGL configuration, and more. Existing Gentoo Linux users can upgrade in-place by following the instructions included in the release announcement. New users can find install instructions and ISOs and build tarballs. Also be sure to read our new Portage Manual to get up to speed with the new Gentoo Linux 1.0+ features.

I have watched the progress of the "new Amiga" (OS and hardware) over the past couple of years. Given the past history of Amiga, I am happy to see that the company has been taken over by true fans of the Amiga OS, who have a workable vision. In general, I think you came up with a good overall strategy:

Apache 2.0 offers numerous enhancements, improvements and performance boosts over the 1.3 codebase. The most visible and noteworthy addition is the ability to run Apache in a hybrid thread/process mode on any platform that supports both threads and processes. This has shown to improve the scalability of the Apache HTTP Server significantly in our testing. Apache 2.0 also includes support for filtered I/O. This allows modules to modify the output of other modules before it is sent to the client. There is also support for IPv6 on any platform that supports IPv6. This version of Apache is known to work on many versions of Unix, BeOS, OS/2, Windows, and Netware.

Red Hat has released the second beta of their upcoming Linux release. This beta includes Kernel 2.4.18, XFree86 4.2.0, GNOME 1.4, including Evolution, Mozilla 0.9.9 etc.