Amiga Information Online has interviewed one of the early AmigaDE developer pioneers, Zeoneo. Two of Zeoneo`s PDA targetting titles, namely "Convex" and "Planet Zed" are already selling at Amiga`s online shop. Also GetBoinged recently interviewed Pagan Games. Their first PDA targetted gravity game "Blobula" is already selling and it is the first among the currently available AmigaDE PDA titles to include a music soundtrack. John Harris (orginal Frogger designer) of Pulsar Interactive will hold a class and seminar on AmigaDE Programming at the AmigaExpo which will be held on the 29th till 31st of March in the US. For an earlier look at the hardware-agnostic Amiga Digital Environment and the new PPC based AmigaOS 4.0, be sure to attend the upcoming Alt-WoA 2002 show which will be held on the 23rd of February in the UK.

There is a brand new version of the Unix windowing system, XFree86 4.2, available for download. This is mostly a bug fixed release, no major new features were introduced. Our Take: XFree does the job just right when it comes to serve just what it was designed to do back in the '80s: provide a windowing system to a Unix workstation or server. But these days, everyone seems so busy trying to shapeshift X11 with themes or funky window managers and squeeze its architecture and code hard to push it to perform adequate with 3D games. But X was not designed for all that. Proof of that is the fact that X is not as smooth as MacOSX's Aqua or BeOS is, is not multithreading, it does not have good response times or latencies, it does not support font antialias correctly, no double buffering, and even 3D gaming support is a hack. Should X be pushed to do things it was not designed to do, or should it be re-implemented in such a way that it features all the latest tech gizmos, but in a more "natural" way that it also stays compatible with most of today's X applications? Discuss.

With the release of WindowsXP, the Microsoft operating system has shown new levels of stability and performance, but analysts say that security is not up to par yet. Bill Gates, chairman of the Microsoft corporation has now set security as the top priority for the software maker's products, a shift that analysts say can't happen soon enough. The internal memo Gates sent to Microsoft employees and subsidiaries was leaked to the press yesterday.

"Java inventor James Gosling says he isn't losing much sleep over Microsoft these days, despite the software giant's effort to stem Java's popularity with its own Java-like language. The next battle in Web services software development pits Microsoft against Java creator Sun Microsystems, along with Java adherents IBM, Oracle and others. Crucial to Microsoft's effort is C#, a Java-like language that will soon be part of the company's new Visual Studio.Net package of software-development tools, which was released to developers Wednesday." Read the rest of the interview with James Gosling at C|Net News.

From TheRegister article regarding the Be liquidation auction that took place yesterday: "Afternoon engagements called us, and we never got the chance to bid for the 29 Be mugs, the lot of a hundred Be T-shirts (we'd dearly one of either - will swap), or the iMac we'd promised shacker. Let alone the BeBoxes. Or, gasp! the Hobbit prototypes which preceded the PPC BeBox." In the second photo you can also see sitting Marco Nellisen (SoundPlay author, Palm engineer now) and behind him, Arve Hjonnevag (ex-Be kernel engineer, at Palm now too). In the meantime, BeUnited, after was rejected a license from Palm, they now state that they will focus on supporting Open BeOS, while Palm, Inc. revealed some information about PalmOS 5: "Three significant improvements include the ability to use multitasking and multithreading in applications, improved performance using OS 5 with the faster processor, and compatibility with current applications." However, not all Palm developers are happy because: "Some of the old programs will run faster, some will run slower, and some won't run at all."

"Online vandals are using a two-month-old security hole in Sun Microsystems' Solaris operating system to break into servers on the Internet, a security expert said Tuesday. Researchers witnessed the attack when one intruder broke into a Solaris server under intense observation as part of the Honeynet Project, an initiative to develop ways to turn spare computers into digital fly traps to study and document actual Internet attacks." Get the rest of the story at C|Net News.com.