From DaemonNews: "A new area of the FreeBSD web site has been created dedicated to release engineering. This new section contains information about future releases of FreeBSD, a specific schedule for the upcoming releases of FreeBSD 4.6 and 5.0, and more." According to the web site, FreeBSD 4.6 is scheduled for June 1st, while there will be two Developer Previews for FreeBSD 5, one at April 1st and a second one on 25th of June. The final version of FreeBSD 5.0 is expected at 20th of November.

"To achieve the long-elusive goal of easily finding information hidden in computer files, Microsoft is returning to a decade-old idea. The company is building new file organization software that will begin to form the underpinnings of the next major version of its Windows operating system. The complex data software is meant to address a conundrum as old as the computer industry itself: how to quickly find and work with a piece of information, no matter what its format, from any location." We have already reported on this here and here, but News.com has more information on the subject today.

From the press release: "Red Hat, Inc., the world's premier open source and Linux provider, today announced a strategic agreement with Motorola, Inc. to develop a GNUPro Linux toolchain and cross compiler for Motorola's Altivec-enabled host processors based on the PowerPC instruction set architecture. As the leader in GNUPro tool development, Red Hat will provide a complete toolchain for the PowerPC instruction set architecture with full support for Motorola's AltiVec technology."

David Pogue is a well known author of a whole series of computer and other technical books. His latest book "Mac OS X: The Missing Manual" was published about 2 months ago in assosiation with O'Reilly.

"What’s New in HP-UX 11i?" The new HP-UX 11i sports an 'Internet-centric' focus for end-to-end e-services. Irene Maltzan covers the major new features of the HP-UX 11i operating environment -including better scalability and availability- in this article. "Example File Systems" This chapter excerpt from 'Modern Operating Systems' book discusses several example file systems, ranging from quite simple to highly sophisticated. "Clustering Microsoft Exchange Server 2000" Ensuring reliability and scalability within your email system can be a trying experience. Let author and columnist Joseph M. Lamb guide you through the construction of a clustered Exchange Server utilizing Windows 2000 Advanced Server and Exchange Server 2000. "What is a Microsoft Cluster?" Let author and columnist Joseph M. Lamb guide you through the various cluster types, and how you can implement clusters that best serve the needs of your application using Microsoft's Windows 2000 Advanced Server. "Optimizing Disk Performance in Windows XP Professional" In this second article on getting better performance from Windows XP Professional, Louis Columbus provides step-by-step directions for increasing disk drive performance on your Windows XP system. Read all these articles at InformIT.

"Apple has two performance headaches right now: the processor and the OS. Apple's director of core engineering Brett Halle last month promised us that OS X performance was a paramount concern, and to be fair, his division need take no blame. The BSD he inherited has the industry's best respected IP stack, for example. The problem is, one former Apple engineer told us, in serializing the twenty five year old BSD layer with the fifteen year old code of the extensions NeXT began to add in the mid 1980s." Read TheRegister's analysis of the G4 SPEC benchmarks Heise reported last week.