Earlier this month some Australian Amiga User groups represented Amiga at Comdex, the biggest Australian IT show. They demonstrated AmigaDE software running binary identical at full speed across various devices, as well as introducing people to the new AmigaOS XL package. Many developers and users were amazed of what the AmigaDE can do, read the full show report here. Tomorrow Amiga Inc's CEO Bill McEwen will demonstrate Amiga products on TechTV's 'Screen Savers'. Also there will be many interesting demonstrations and seminars at the upcoming AmigaExpo, to be held later this month.

"A production version of the free GNU operating system is likely to be available by the end of this year, according to the president of the Boston-based Free Software Foundation (FSF). "We actually have the GNU kernel working, and we can now produce the GNU system, as opposed to the GNU/Linux system that people have been using so far," said Richard Stallman, who is in India this week to attend a GNU/Linux Day in Pune." Read the rest of the report about GNU/Hurd at IDG.net.

Mozilla 1.0 is only one month away according to the latest roadmap. Today, the Mozilla folks released version 0.9.9 which brings MathML, TTF support under Unix, ZLib security fixes, SOAP scripts support and many additional bug fixes.

"Even though all of us here at MandrakeSoft are excited about the upcoming release, we've also been distracted by financial concerns. Despite continuous good reviews in the press; despite having millions of users throughout the world; despite producing an award-winning Linux distribution that is a solid competitor to both UNIX and Window$, the Mandrake Linux distribution's short-term future is in jeopardy due to a simple factor: money." Read the rest of the article at Mandrake's own web site. IMNSHO Commentary: After the comically tragic news about the end of Loki Games which apparently did not pay some employees since end of 2000 and "a single employee is listed in creditor filings as being owed almost $350,000 in unpaid salary and in expenses the company incurred using the employee's credit card" and many other Linux companies in the past, now is Mandrake's turn to have money trouble. Except Red Hat Linux (who are specifically targetting servers and the Enterprise market instead of desktop users), none of the "desktop" Linux-oriented companies makes real money or even survived the... GPL (you can argue as much as you want about that - be my guest).

"The software bug--known as a buffer overflow--caused key memory-management functions in the zlib compression library to fail, a condition that could allow a smart attacker to compromise Linux computers over the Internet, said Dave Wreski, director for open-source security company Guardian Digital". Read the rest of the report at News.com.

"The introduction of Intel's new Hyper-Threading technology is providing Microsoft with a handy mechanism for getting more money from Windows 2000 Server customers, for encouraging users to switch over to Windows .NET Server, or both. It kind of depends on how .NET Server pricing pans out, but as far as Win2k Server goes it's already clear that people wanting to use the extra oomph in the new Xeons are going to have to stump up. According to a Microsoft backgrounder available here, Win2k Server handles Hyper-Threading by using the processor count from the machine's bios." Read the rest of the report at TheRegister. Our Take: Problem is, a SMT Xeon is not as fast as a real SMP Xeon 2x system at the same Mhz. Therefore, paying double the OS License price for something that only provides a hardware-level feature (Hyper-threading), but not the actual speed you would expect from its SMP counterpart, it is IMNSHO, unjustifiable.

"Building upon its expanding success with the most advanced and open embedded operating systems and tools solutions portfolio, LynuxWorks today announced the general availability of its next major revision to its popular LynxOS real time operating system (RTOS). LynxOS 4.0 raises the bar for RTOS vendors by adding Linux binary compatibility and enhancements in networking, porting support, and performance." Read more at LinuxDevices on the release of LynxOS 4 from LynuxWorks.

"FreeBSD now works with multiple processors on sparc64 systems, thanks to the efforts of Jake Burkholder, and Thomas Moestl", the FreeBSD news page reports.

In the second part of the ZDNet interview, Linux kernel hacker Alan Cox explains why the world needs open source software on the desktop and why Linux was perfect for Iceland. 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. His role of organizing and applying improvements is vital. At an interview with ZDNet U.K. in Swansea he spoke on the latest challenges for Linux at the high- and low-end, the arrival of revolutionary 64-bit hardware and why it's hard to argue with the economics of open-source software.

According to Tiqit, although this feature was previously considered impossible to engineer, the eightythree is not a concept product. Instead, Tiqit says it has built -a mass produced- a fully functioning x86 handheld device out of cutting-edge but available parts, designed specifically for enterprise use and immediate production. In terms of components, eightythree's CPU is the National Semiconductor Geode, 266-300 MHz, RAM is 128 MB or 256 MB, and there is a 10 GB hard drive. The screen is a 4-in 640X480 TFT (18-bit color) with touchscreen and backlight. The external monitor displays up to 1280 x 1024 at 75 Hz, 1024 x 768 at 85 Hz. eightythree is powered by an internal lithium ion rechargeable battery. "This product will greatly accelerate adoption and use of handhelds in the enterprise," said Ian Blasch, CEO, Tiqit Computers. "It uses standard operating systems -- Windows XP, Linux or UNIX -- and is compatible with all associated applications, including legacy software. Almost anything you can do on a laptop or PC, you can do on eightythree -- only it is smaller and more mobile."

"AOL Time Warner's Netscape unit is snooping on searches performed by users of its latest Navigator browser at Google and other search sites. According to a network traffic analysis performed by Newsbytes, Netscape is capturing Navigator 6 users' search terms, along with their Internet protocol (IP) address, the date Navigator was installed and a unique identification number." Read the report at NewsBytes. Our Take: Yet another reason to use the original Mozilla and not the Mozilla-Netscap(-ed) package by AOL.

Sun Microsystems announced it has filed a private antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft Corporation. The suit, filed March 8, 2002 in the United States District Court in San Jose, CA., seeks remedies for the harm inflicted by Microsoft's anticompetitive behavior with respect to the Java platform and for damages resulting from Microsoft's illegal efforts to maintain and expand its monopoly power. In June 2001, the Federal Court of Appeals found Microsoft guilty of illegally abusing its monopoly power with respect to Sun and the Java platform. Sun's suit seeks to redress the competitive and economic harm caused by Microsoft's illegal acts. Read more on ZDNews.

As many people noticed, and quite a few emailed us about, the past couple of days OS News has been displaying a great number of pop-up ads. I'd like to take this opportunity to say that OS News thinks that pop-up ads are generally bad, and that we have stopped using the ad broker that was serving the pop-ups. They made arrangements to not display pop-ups at our request, but didn't follow through on their agreement, so we have yanked them until they do. We're sorry for putting our loyal readers through it, but rest assured that we're trying to balance our need to make a little money and maintaining a good experience for our beloved readers. You may still see the occasional pop-up, but we're determined to keep it to a minimum. By the way, if you'd like to provide support to OSNews, so we don't have to resort to pop-ups and other intrusive advertising, there are two easy ways to do it that won't cost you a cent: First, when you buy something--anything--from Amazon.com, use This Link and OSNews will get a small percentage of your purchase, without costing you more. Also, when you're in the market to buy anything, check OS News' Pricegrabber where we also get a little kick-back.

"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.