There's a new article on computer commentary site "The Idea Basket" detailing the features and importance of the Rendezvous networking protocol that will be shipping with next major release of Mac OS X. It should be a very interesting read for many computer users, as Rendezvous will profoundly affect the way people use their Macs as well as other computer systems in a networked setting.

Today Microsoft launched Microsoft Visual J# .NET, a development tool for Java-language developers building applications and services on the Microsoft .NET Framework.

This is just a reminder about some OSNews-related stuff. First off, by reading the survey results, we saw that a lot of people were complaining about the popup ads, while these have completely stopped as of 2 weeks ago. Also, other people complained that OSNews does not look good on Lynx. OSNews looks pretty good on Lynx and w3m and Links and even AvantGo, while we even have WAP support (check screenshot on the above link). But you will need to read here first how to have these services working for you. Also, we are always looking for people to write articles for OSNews. These days we generally serve more than 40,000 page views per day, so this could be a good way to have your voice heard on OS and other technology-related matters.

Julian Elischer announced that Kernel Scheduled Entities - Milestone 3 (KSE-MIII) have been merged into the -current FreeBSD source tree. The KSE project is a major effort to allow for multi-threaded applications to scale and perform better, especially on SMP servers. The effort involves a considerable amount of re-working the various internal kernel data structures, and though not actually considered part of FreeBSD's "next generation" symmetric multiprocessing project (SMPng), each project greatly enhances the other. Read the full story over at KernelTrap.

Microsoft DirectX 8.1b is the latest version of the DirectX technology, an important and significant part of the Windows operating systems. This version of DirectX can replace the all previous released versions of DirectX. It includes several critical fixes for Direct3D and DirectShow components. In related news, industry sources have confirmed that Microsoft's DirectX 9 is likely to arrive in October, quite a while later than ATI's R300 Nvidia-buster.

This tutorial (reg. required) reviews various network configuration files required by Linux, how to initialize a network interface, and how to edit the system's routing table. The tutorial closes with a brief look at how to analyze your network and ensure that data gets to where it's supposed to go, without error.

From TheRegister: "Ross Anderson of Cambridge Uni has published a lengthy and informative paper, FAQ on Palladium, the Trusted Computing Platform Alliance, their relationship and their implications."

"In this article, I'll ignore for the sake of argument that I am a developer, and side with users. Nowadays we have tens of thousands of applications available for Linux. Some are simple, some are rather complex, some are huge. This ought to be enough to achieve world domination, according to some Linux proponents." Read the editorial at LinuxAndMain.

Today, SuSE Linux announced the release of an updated version of the SuSE Linux Groupware Server as well as the immediate release of the SuSE Linux Pro-Office CD. The release date for SuSE Linux eMail Server 3.1 was also previewed to be in early July.

GNOME 2.0 was released less than two days ago and while I was using its betas on and off, for some time now, I was anticipating this final release with impatience. The project was supposed to see this release almost a year ago, but GTK+ 2.0 was not ready in time, dragging Gnome's development down as well. But now it is here, so let's see what this new release brings to the Unix desktop.

"Opera Soft. CEO Jon von Tetzchner can claim an achievement held by few of his fellow tech entrepreneurs: He's competed head-on against Microsoft and lived to tell the tale." Interview is at CNet.

"Linux seller Caldera International has replaced longtime Chief Executive Ransom Love and agreed to buy back shares held by two major investors." Read the report at News.com.

Gnome 2.0 is finally here! Read the press release, download Gnome 2.0 for various architectures, mirrors here, while the Sun Solaris 8 version can be found here. Update: Compilation instructions here. You might want to use the CVSGnome script which downloads and compiles everything for you, but make sure you will give it a subdir on your ~/ or on /opt/gnome2 as PREFIXDIR, and not anywhere outside your $HOME or /opt. Type "world stable" when you are asked to, and it will do everything for you. You will need to modify the script's compiler CPU defaults from "athlon" to whatever you got. Or, you could use Garnome.

ExtremeTech features a series of articles regarding Microsoft's new security chip, codenamed Palladium. It seems that Intel, AMD and even National are part of this plan, while it is not clear if alternative operating systems will be given specs for this technology. Even if these OSes will choose to not use the chip, Microsoft is quite likely to advertise the "feature" as a Good Thing (TM) for the users (which may or may not be true), making the other OSes to sound unsecure.