"This January not only brought new Apple systems, but also a MAC OS X-adapted benchmark suite by the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) entitled CPU2000. On the one hand, this suite allows comparisons to be made within a certain framework with the Intel competition and, on the other, it shows that Motorola and Apple were able to get more out of the new gigahertz processor than might have been expected by simply taking the pure clock frequency difference to the 866 MHz predecessor model into account." Apple G4 Dual 1 Ghz against a single PIII at 1 Ghz. Which is faster? Heise has the SPEC benchmark results. SPEC is known to be very precise when comparing the CPUs themselves without having major interference from the rest of the system or surrounded hardware. Our Take: AFAIK, the MacOSX license specifically states that no benchmarks results of any kind are allowed to be published. Coolio. UPDATE: Read more for some commentary on the results.

In an interview with ZDNet U.K., the Linux 'kernel hacker' gives his views on the GPL, 64-bit computing and why grandmothers should want to use Linux. Alan Cox is generally referred to in the open-source developer community as a "kernel hacker"--someone whose programming responsibilities cover the Linux kernel, or core, itself. Thousands of developers all over the world, from hobbyists to IBM engineers, are constantly contributing to open source software, so Cox's role of organizing and applying improvements is vital.

Along with our XML or PHP news feeds, OSNews is now offering WAP support for the readers that own a WAP-enabled mobile phone. Just point your WAP device on http://wap.osnews.com/ or on http://wap.osnews.com/index.wml and you should be able to access our 15 latest headlines. Please report any problems you may find on our comments section. Additionally, people with 4th generation mobile phones (mostly sold in Japan) capable of HTML should be able to render OSNews in full HTML, but in a more simple manner (no ads or nested tables). Just follow the same instructions as we have for the AvantGo, Lynx, Links and W3M browsers. Check the screenshot showing some WAP emulators and the three major text browsers rendering the alternative (and simpler) OSNews pages. UPDATE: I did some changes on the WAP source, please let us know if it now works ok with your devices. Thanks!

The Linux (for Playstation 2) kit is now accepting pre-orders on playstation.com for North America. The kit will allow people to run a fully functional Linux environment on their Playstation 2 computer entertainment systems. If you are a developer, you can also install the SDL gaming libraries for the PS2 and port or write your own games for the popular gaming console.

FOX is a C++ based Toolkit for developing GUIs easily and effectively. It offers a wide, and growing, collection of Controls, and provides state of the art facilities such as drag and drop, selection, as well as OpenGL widgets for 3D graphical manipulation. FOX also implements icons, images, and user-convenience features such as status line help, and tooltips. Tooltips may even be used for 3D objects. FOX stands for Free Objects for X. It was first developed under Linux, but it has now been ported to many flavors of UNIX, plus WindowsNT/2k/XP/9x/ME. After 4 years of development, Jeroen van der Zijp released FOX Toolkit 1.0 just a few days ago. FOX Toolkit is the third big cross-platform open source C++ toolkit, after wxWindows and Qt. In related news, Imperial Software Technology announced that it is now shipping X-Designer 7: Enterprise Edition, a major new version of its GUI builder for Motif, Windows and Java.

"Mac OS X gave us a host of interface enhancements, for better or for worse. Some are seemingly frivolous, such as the whiz-bang animations that dominate Aqua, and others haven proven truly useful, such as the Finder’s column view. Personally, I dig it all." The article at O'ReillyNet discusses the main Aqua enhancements, animated window resizing and the drawers.

David Chester has hacked through the Xft library and he achieved an incredibly good quality on antialias rendering under XFree86. With this "hack", at last, XFree can deliver similar aesthetic results with the MacOSX or Windows rendering engines. Check the two screenshots "before" and "after" at his page.

February was a month of rapid growth for Lycoris. Its flagship product, Desktop/LX, has been selling well and attracting worldwide partners. In addition to favorable reviews in the Linux world and surrounding tech community, Lycoris is responding to users' needs by providing Hewlett Packard PCs Pre-Loaded with Desktop/LX. OSNews will be featuring a Lycoris review in the near future.

"Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications today unveiled the P800, the company's first multimedia communicator sporting tri-band GSM/GPRS and integrated Bluetooth, a 208 x 320 pixel resolution color touch-screen, and a built-in digital camera. Running Symbian OS 7.0, the P800 is the most advanced GSM-based communicator in the world to date, and bears the potential to give Nokia's 7650 some serious competition - although the smartphones don't really compete in the same class." Read the rest of the report at InfoSync.

IBM developerWorks has come out with three articles on OpenSSH, a free version of the SSH protocol suite for network connectivity. The first discusses RSA/DSA authentication, the second introduces ssh-agent and keychain, while the last goes over Agent forwarding and keychain improvements. Its a great resource for someone who needs some encryption.

"Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said that the software giant would have to withdraw the Windows operating system from the market if a federal court approves sanctions being sought by nine states in its antitrust case, according to depositions released Monday." Read the rest of the report at News.com. Our Take: A non-development or withdraw of Windows and its support can hurt an immense number of companies, which can have a huge impact to the economy in many countries. I still can't get it. They are fighting Microsoft for the browser case, instead for its dirty business practices. It's comically tragic.

ClosedBSD is a firewall and network address translation utility which boots off of a single floppy disk, and requires no hard drive. ClosedBSD is based off of the FreeBSD kernel, and uses ipfw as it's native ruleset management system, and natd as it's network address translation utility. ClosedBSD also features an advanced ncurses based configuration manager (screenshots) which allows you to seamlessly configure your firewall ruleset using protocol filters, port forwarding, and network address translation mechanisms through a simple to use menu interface. DHCP is disabled for this beta release.

Carson Reynolds writes: "One of the more memorable architectures and operating systems of recent history were the Symbolics Lisp Machine and Genera Operating System. The systems featured such interesting novelties as 36-bit wide processors, hardware support for LISP interpreters, and open source (circa 1986). Those still pining might consider trying to get their own Symbolics system."

"When Mary gets home from work and goes to her PC to check e-mail, the PC isn't just sitting there. It's working for a biotech company, matching gene sequences to a library of protein molecules. Its DSL connection is busy downloading a block of radio telescope data to be analyzed later. Its disk contains, in addition to Mary's own files, encrypted fragments of thousands of other files. Occasionally one of these fragments is read and transmitted; it's part of a movie that someone is watching in Helsinki. Then Mary moves the mouse, and this activity abruptly stops. Now the PC and its network connection are all hers." Read more about an operating system spanning the Internet that would bring the power of millions of the world's Internet-connected PCs to everyone's fingertips.