"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.

"For the software publishing industry, video games are a numbers game. And for now, Microsoft is on the losing end. That's the upshot from the Electronics Entertainment Expo, the game industry's main trade show, where new games for Microsoft's Xbox have largely been limited to "me too" titles--games already appearing on other consoles. Microsoft has said it expects to have more than 200 games for the Xbox by the end of the year, but less than two dozen of those will be exclusive Xbox titles from third-party publishers." Read the story at ZDNews.

"Sometimes it seems that Linux fanatics are the open source movement's own worst enemy. Perhaps it is time that the "revolution" started to employ a few marketing people." Read the editorial at ITWeb. Our Take: I agree with the author. There were many times that I asked articles, interviews, screenshots and other "marketing" material from maintainers of open source projects and they either never replied, or they replied... months later, or their reply was rushed and half-baked. Real companies or people who understood the importance of marketing, were truly responsive. Marketing is important, and each major open source project needs at least one good marketing/PR person.

"I understand there are several different philosophies of application development. Some people prefer GTK not because it is the better tool kit, but because the approach makes more sense to them, because GTK is more granular than Qt, prefer C to C++, or another reason. I cannot address all of these factors, but I will try to take them into account wherever they matter." Part I and Part II at LinuxWorld.

"If you have followed GNU/Linux for the last few years you know that GNOME has long been a stronghold of C, Perl and Python GUI programming. With Ximian's work on Mono, C# seems also to be a language that will see wide use in GNOME. Sun's involvement should also make Java applications integrate strongly with GNOME. But what about C++? Even in the GNU/Linux and Unix world this language has received many advocates and developers. I sat down with Murray Cumming, lead developer on the gtkmm and gnomemm C++ bindings for GTK+ and GNOME to get some information on the status of C++ development in GNOME." Read the interview at LinuxOrbit.