"Virus writers took another shot at Microsoft's .Net vision. On Friday, antivirus companies received a copy of a worm called Sharpei, which is partially written in Microsoft's newest computer language, C#, and designed to infect computers loaded with the .Net framework. Antivirus company Network Associates gave the infectious program a "low" rating for risk but highlighted it as the second example of a virus writer attempting to infect parts of the .Net framework." Read the rest of the story at C|Net.

"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.

"Like almost all things in life, good security costs good money. It has to be that way, because there are simply not enough skilled security specialists to look after all of the networks that need their attention. An unfortunate result of low supply and high demand is the migration of highly skilled personnel to clients who can meet their salary requirements. This leaves a lot of small and underfunded networks in the hands of less experienced administrators, who might not know how to design, configure, and monitor these networks' safety mechanisms, leaving them vulnerable to attacks from unscrupulous people looking for inside information, free warez storage, zombie hosts for DDoS attacks, or systems they can simply destroy for fun of doing it." Read the rest of the article at O'Reilly.

"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?

"Canadian scientists have opened a powerful computing lab they said will help speed up research into diseases like cancer and diabetes by allowing researchers to view three-dimensional models of cells in a room similar to the holodeck in the Star Trek television series. The $3.7 million University of Calgary facility is a step ahead of the handful of other virtual-reality labs used in such research because users for the first time can build models on their own computers, rather than be tied up for days or weeks programming at the site, officials said." Read more about the Java3D-based system at ZDNews.

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.

Descriptive quote from the editorial at OSOpinion: "Even though Palm's operating system still owns more than half of the PDA (personal digital assistant) market, Microsoft's marketing engines are roaring. With Microsoft aligning with Intel, and making a full-court press to capture more of the mobile operating system market, it is not hard to see a new Microsoft-Netscape battle brewing. This time, though, the battle is more than just browsers. It is about full operating systems, and Palm now is the would-be David facing the Goliath of the software industry."

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.

The once Mac-skeptical, David Coursey (executive editor at ZD AnchorDesk), seems to have turned into a huge Mac fan, it seems. In his latest editorial he says that "These desktop Linux people are just like the adherents to any concept that has failed in the marketplace of ideas: They don't know when to let go, and make fools of themselves as a result." and "How you build a vibrant computing platform when nobody is willing to spend money on it escapes me." and "Linux servers are a cause for concern in Redmond and a source for happiness in data centers worldwide. Desktop Linux, on the other hand, is rapidly being assigned to the trash pile of computing history. Like scientific socialism, it will go down as an idea that sounded good on paper but didn't work in the real world."

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.

Members of developerWorks open source projects can now compile their code on the first compiler farm in the open source community that runs on an IBM eServer zSeries server. The zSeries is the world's first dedicated Linux mainframe server.

"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.

"One of the great advantages of Cocoa is getting a lot of functionality with little code. There are classes in the Cocoa Framework that handle much of the necessary work in creating applications that have multiple documents. NSDocumentController, NSDocument and its closely related cohort NSWindowController combine to give you a powerful starting point when building your own multiple document applications. The best way to illustrate the power that these classes offer is with an example; that's how HTMLEditor.app was born. HTMLEditor is a basic text editor that has file associations for HTML. No big deal right? Well, over the next month or so, HTMLEditor will be extended to include a number of additional features, forming the basis of a series of articles." Read the rest of the MacOSX Cocoa/Project Builder step-by-step tutorial at StepWise.

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.