After the flood of Fedora Core 6 and Ubuntu 6.10 reviews, here is a review of PC-BSD 1.3 Beta. "PC-BSD has improved quite a bit and the use of its open-source PBI packaging system is a great idea. Although it obviously means there might be a minor delay in newly released products being ported over to the PBI package system, novice users will rejoice because the wait is well worth it. PC-BSD is a well oiled machine with its quick response times, even if you don't have that much memory in your system. Its implementation of a clean interface is welcomed by me and not having a 3D enabled desktop is not something I really would worry about unless you are an eye-candy lover."

Microsoft last week said that it is pushing back the next major service pack for Windows XP until the first half of 2008. The news came just ahead of reports that Vista’s RTM is being pushed back once again, from late October to early November, complicating matters for PC makers. The latest delay has some wondering whether the upgrade will ever see the light of day. "The fear is Service Pack 3 will just get killed off," said Jeff Centimano, an IT consultant at Levi, Ray & Shoup.

"Quite a few new things are now in an alpha/beta stage for the next update of ZETA; one of them is the implementation of the latest stable version of SAMBA, v3.0.23. As you can see from the screenshot, ZETA is now 'dancing' beautifully with Linux servers." Also, Axl has posted a status update concerning networking in Haiku: "Work on the networking stack is making slow but steady progress. UDP and IPv4 protocols are mostly done, TCP can send out data, but receiving is not yet implemented."

"There has been a lot of attention in the last few weeks about the discrepancy in the desktop background appearance between the control panel and Windows Photo Gallery. This is something that we have been tracking internally for quite a while, so I thought I would clue in everyone on the issue here and how we are addressing it for RTM.

At an event in Mumbai, soon after the completion of the acquisition of ATI, AMD announced a line of latest Vista-ready ATI Radeon graphic processors. According to Chris Jones, corporate vice president - Windows Core OS Division, "Microsoft will deliver a series of graphics innovations with Windows Vista that provide a customer experience that is second to none. We could not have achieved this without our partnership with ATI. From day one, ATI has played a key role in helping us design and validate the new driver model at the heart of Windows Vista, and ATI has since developed robust and performant drivers that highlight the capabilities of our new operating system."

For you review freaks out there: "All the Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft) reviews you can dream of. So far reviews from Linux.com, Arsgeek, Lunapark6, Element14, mo79online, sencer.de, Manufactured Enviroments, first impressions at Technical Itch and the Ubuntu forums and screenshot tours at TheCodingStudio and several blog entries."

"As you know OpenSUSE released the first beta in the 10.2 dev cycle on the 26th and Tuxmachines has been checking it out in preparation for our report. This feature and version freeze release came with quite a few annoying bugs, but most didn't apply to my testing. I did encounter a coupla problems of my own and little or no new eye candy was found. But how did the system perform overall?"

"Oracle's offer of free support for Red Hat Linux was designed to inflict maximum pain on Red Hat. So it did. One day after the announcement, Red Hat shares lost 24 percent of their value. After watching his stock take a tumble, Red Hat's CEO Matthew Szulik is in a bind. He has just absorbed the equivalent of a cyber-kick in the groin from a bigger, badder bully."

The Spring framework allows you to design web and enterprise applications that use custom isolation levels in global transactions. This article shows you how you can use Spring to specify custom isolation levels in global transactions. The article walks you through the process in seven detailed steps.

"Microsoft's DirectX application programming interface (API) was first introduced in 1995. DirectX was designed to make life easier for software developers by providing a standard platform developers could use to easily make multimedia software and game programming for the Windows Platform." More here.

The UFS file system is the general-purpose, disk-based file system that is shipped with Solaris today and has been the default file system since early versions of SunOS 4.x. This sample chapter covers its history, architecture, and some basic administrative concepts.

As Moore's Law continues to hold, IC designers are finding that they have more and more silicon real estate to play with. David Chisnall hazards some guesses as to what they might do with it.

In this chapter, learn how to create, register/unregister, and deploy custom .NET cultures.

The Web has been rife with bogus rumors of an Apple cell phone since 2004, and each ridiculous 'leak' or faked 'photo' sets off a torrent of fruitless discussion, speculation and hysteria. What does that say about current cell phones? That they're claustrophobic and oppressively complex. That the world craves a phone that conveys, like Apple's iPod, a feeling of beauty, elegance and instantaneous mastery. This week, a cell phone matching that description has finally arrived - but it's not from Apple. Its design comes from Bang & Olufsen, maker of expensive, hyperstylish stereos and cordless phones, and its guts come from Samsung.