"Microsoft on Tuesday announced several new efforts to bring wireless capabilities to devices using its operating systems. Among them is its Phone Edition application, which will help handheld owners access data and make voice calls. The software runs on the Pocket PC 2002 operating system and will be used with Hewlett-Packard's Jornada 928 Wireless Digital Assistant, which the PC maker is also expected to announce Tuesday. Microsoft also revealed plans to work with Intel as well as Texas Instruments to develop reference designs for phones that will run its Windows Powered Smartphone 2002 operating system. A reference design is basically a blueprint for a technical system that lets different manufacturers build essentially the same device. This process will help wireless phone manufacturers get products to market faster." Read the rest of the article at C|Net News.com and check some screenshots of the SmartPhone operating system running on a Texas Instrument mobile phone.

"We've discussed sharing filesystems via SMB a few times. SMB lets you access files shared by a Windows system after jumping through only half a dozen loops. Sharing files with another Unix system is much, much simpler. FreeBSD supports the Unix standard Network File System out of the box. NFS intimidates many junior system administrators, but it's really quite simple once you know what's going on." Read the rest of the article at O'Reilly's BSD column.

Hewlett-Packard has begun selling new Intel-based workstations with Linux, the company said. The x1100, an Intel-based machine first introduced with Windows in January, is available with Red Hat Linux version 7.1, HP said Thursday. HP had Linux versions of the two systems' predecessors, the x1000 and x2000, which have a slower memory subsystem than the new models.

"Yes I’m a Linux nut, but it's also no surprise that I'm a huge fan of Mac OS X, it’s what I use on a daily basis and is what I’m using right now to write this. Well I was recently tasked with the duty of moving our servers at work over to OS X Server two of which are Linux servers. This was the first time I’d ever used OS X Server so I thought it would be a good idea to share my experiences, some good, some bad." Read the rest of the review at ReactiveLinux.

Unix is steadily evolving into something much easier to use. The trick is to find tools that make things friendlier, but which fit in well with existing tools and are easier for people to take and use for new projects. Read more at Freshmeat.

If you are the lucky owner of one of these Intel motherboard chipsets, you can now install the Intel Application Accelerator 2.0, a new performance software package for Intel-based desktop PCs. This new version brings the following enhancements: faster boot time, accelerated disk I/O for games, graphics Applications, disk utilities, and edia authoring applications, performance-enhancing data pre-fetcher for Intel Pentium 4 processor-based systems, support for 137+ GB IDE hard drives. Check a benchmark here. The download supports Windows NT4/2000, Windows 98/SE/Me & WindowsXP Home/Pro.

"It happens to everyone eventually. You walk into the office, turn on the desktop PC and you're greeted with ugly beeping and no video. The slightly acrid tang of electrical smoke reaches your nostrils and you know that before you've even begun your day, it's already over. You say a small prayer to the computing gods that it's not the hard drive that's fried and you turn everything off before you begin unplugging peripherals." Read the rest of the article at LinuxOrbit.

"Microsoft Corp. will have to supply the computer code for its Windows program to a group of states seeking stiffer antitrust sanctions against the software giant, a federal judge ruled on Friday. Nine state attorneys general had argued that they needed to see the Windows source code in order to verify Microsoft's claim it could not offer a simpler version of the Windows personal computer operating system, stripped of features like the Internet Explorer browser." The Reuters report is at Yahoo!News.

"For those who aren't familiar with OS X, it is a full implementation of BSD Unix with a Macintosh front end, which is to say world class inside and out. OS X is faster, smarter, prettier, and easier to use than any version of Windows. In short, it is exactly the competitor Microsoft needs. And the timing couldn't be better." Very interesting and easy-reading article, but I would not say "faster" in the above excerpt. Robert Cringely is at it again, this time discussing how the best thing for Apple, for users, and even for Microsoft, would be an Intel version of OSX.

"Microsoft Corp. is going on the offensive to restore confidence in its .Net platform after a security consulting firm claimed it had found a critical flaw in a new compiler Microsoft released earlier this week. In an unusual move, a member of the team that developed the product in question--the Visual C++.Net compiler--posted a lengthy message to the Bugtraq security mailing list excoriating Cigital Inc. for making what Microsoft deems to be false claims in its press release and inciting unnecessary concerns about the security of .Net applications built with the compiler. Brandon Bray, a member of the product's development team said: 'The allegation that applications compiled with Visual C++'s /GS switch somehow expose themselves to more attacks is unfounded and patently false.'" Read the rest of the story at ExtremeTech.

The OpenBeOS folks released their first ever test version for their BeOS clone operating system. This first release is not self-hosted, it is just a collection of individual components that replace their equivelant under the original BeOS 5. The components released so far are OpenTracker, OpenDeskbar, MDR(Mail Daemon Replacement) and some of the preference panels: Keyboard, Menu, Mouse, Screen, Virtual Memory, WorkSpaces. The OBOS developers are looking for beta testing and feedback.

"Welcome to today's multiple-choice quiz. Apple Computer is: (a) the top design shop in the computer industry; (b) the manufacturer of the best PC on the market; or (c) destined to forever remain a prisoner of its own success. Actually, the answer is all of the above." Editorial at News.com regarding the failure of Apple to attract the corporate market. OSOpinion features an editorial called "Apple Bidding To Regain Speed Throne". On ZDNews you will also find the editorial by Stephan Somogyi "Why Apple should support Microsoft's .Net".

"Microsoft .NET applications are built from components. All .NET objects expose important attributes, such as properties, methods, and events. These attributes form the foundation of object-oriented programming. As the architect of Visual Basic .NET objects, you are also responsible for implementing the interface (that is, the properties, methods, and events) necessary for other programmers to use your application's services. Much of your development time will be spent designing objects and writing the code defining the objects and components exposed and used by your applications." Read the rest of the article at MSDN.

"In Ed's previous column, he focused on socket programming and performance within a single system. In a future column he will pick up where he left off, but his topic this month is management of threads and processes in Linux and Windows systems. He walks through the differences between processes and threads, shows how to create and destroy them, and writes a program you can use to study thread management on your systems." Read the intersting aricle at IBM DeveloperWorks.