"I want to believe. Those words set up my review of Mac OS X 10.1 almost a year ago. Mac OS X began life as the last, best hope for Apple's decade-spanning quest for a modern operating system. At first, it was enough for it to simply exist as a stable, feasible product strategy. But while developer releases revealed some very interesting technology, they also raised some red flags. The public beta was a warning shot across the bow of an anxious community of early adopters. The initial release reinforced the old Apple saying: "real artists ship." Mac OS X 10.0 had arrived, but there were problems." Read the review at ArsTechnica. Also, 19" iMacs are on the way.

Mention the name "Woz," and most Mac users will know exactly who you're talking about. After all, they've been enjoying the fruits of Steve Wozniak's labors for years. Wozniak spends spends most of his time these days focusing on Wheels of Zeus, a company he helped form to develop wireless consumer electronic products, but he still pays attention to that other company he helped establish with Steve Jobs 26 years ago. "I love OS X from a feeling point of view. But from capability and readiness, I still don't rate it ready for me, I'm sorry to say." Woz says.

There's an interesting editorial at Mikhailtech regarding FPS, refresh rates and what the brain really distinguishes. Although he has no scientific background experience he has assembled some interesting facts. You can get more information on how the brain interprets visual data here.

"With all the publicity that Windows and Linux get, you may be forgiven for not being aware of a number of other operating systems. Yet there are many other choices that I find interesting and as useful alternatives. Five Desktop Alternatives..." Read the article at Byte.

Lunar Linux is a fork off Sorcery Linux and it recently had its 1.0 beta release. In the meantime, ROOTLinux was just released version 1.3, and it includes kernel 2.4.19, it is compiled with GCC 3.2 and it has many brand new packages like KDE 3.0.3 and Gnome 2.0.1. We also learned that CRUX will have a new release soon too, and it will be also switched to GCC 3.2.

We have been reporting on Pepper, the programmer's text editor, several times, so this is a follow up on what really made Maarten Hekkelman to stop development of his multi-platform product (Mac/OSX/Win/FreeBSD/Linux). Even Slashdot noticed his interview at DaringFireball. "Programming for BeOS was simple when you just started. But it became quite messy quickly. The problem is the multi-threading." "MacOSX, however, loses on all fronts. It claims to be a Unix but it doesn’t support much of the more advanced Unix features, since it is using such an old kernel. It claims to be user friendly, but I find it more obscure and difficult to use than my Win2k box. And then, it is dog slow." Very good (and long) read about the troubles of an independent developer in today's computing market, who's trying to make a difference with his product. Today, Maarten is trying to find companies or other devs that might be interested in purchasing the source code and rights to Pepper.