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.

"For many years now, the question "Which should I use: Direct3D or OpenGL?" has elicited heated arguments. Most of the things said do very little to help you decide which API you should use. There are fanatics on both sides; some people will tell you that OpenGL is the only way to go, and others will swear by Direct3D. Others will talk about how they have used both, and that you should do the same and decide which you like better, but for someone starting out, that's not much help either. The point is, it can be a tough decision to make, and I am writing this article to help you do it. My specialty is primarily in Win32 programming, so that will be my focus. No need to fear though, I discuss other platforms as well." Read the rest of the article at GameDev.

"Franco-Italian chipmaker STMicroelectronics and Philips Electronics agreed on Tuesday to jointly develop and promote a software system for the next generation of interactive set-top boxes and television sets. Philips said STMicro would back the Multimedia Home Platform software in the emerging fight for the supremacy over the next operating system used by cable operators as they unveil new interactive TV services." Read the rest of the report at ZDNews. Update: Ken writes: "The Multimedia Home Platform (MHP) software is not really an OS, but a set of middleware services that provide basic STB functions. It can sit on top of any OS (like pSoS that Philips currently uses)."

KernelTrap has posted an interview with Rik Van Riel. Rik is most recognized for his impressive rmap VM efforts. He's also the founder of kernelnewbies. Living in Brazil, he works for Conectiva Linux.

Macintosh has iCab, Windows has OffByOne, Linux has Dillo and BeOS has NetOptimist. These are home brewed, coded-from-scratch web browsers. NetOptimist was created to replace NetPositive (a Netscape 2+ compliant browser which is still the default BeOS web browser) and add more capabilities like Javascript and CSS. There is still lots of work to be done, so the main developer, Stephane Fritsch, asks for more developers to join him. Stephane has also made a preliminary port of the browser to Solaris/X11. Check out the screenshots at the SourceForge NetOptimist web site and download version Preview 14 from BeBits.

The new Xeons server-oriented CPUs, known by the code name Prestonia, will be offered at 2.2GHz for $615, 2GHz for $417 and 1.8GHz for $251. The Xeons, based on the Pentium 4 architecture, are also the first to incorporate a performance-enhancing technology called hyperthreading. The new feature essentially enables a single Xeon to act like virtual dual processors. When used in conjunction with software designed for multi-CPU systems, hyperthreading can provide up to a 40 percent boost in performance compared with a same-speed Xeon with hyperthreading disabled, Intel officials said. In other hardware news, Seagate demonstrated a Serial ATA-enabled hard drive at the Intel Developer Forum today in San Francisco.

David Faure is a well known developer in the KDE & Linux community. His work can be found in KFM, Konqueror source code and he recently also picked up KOffice's KWord development. David is also one of the people who have commited in bug squashing under KDE, especially after he got hired by Mandrake Software. Read more for our interview with David regarding Konqueror, KDE object prelinking, Gnome and much more.