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Microsoft is hitting back at critics with subpoenas of its own. Among those affected is Caldera. Microsoft is trying to back up its claim that all other OS's include Internet support, so they should too. I wonder though whether Caldera was chosen for OpenLinux or OpenDOS. Thanks to Joe Merlino for alerting us. Here's some historical background

Nicholas Petreley writes "Though NC World may have closed its doors, we have published one last article, The Last 10 Minutes. This article attempts to analyze the contributing forces that are likely to make Windows NT 5.0 a disaster of patchwork programming. We put together this last installment in our Next 10 Minutes series in large part because links to our previous stories from Slashdot and Red Hat helped make the series extremely successful. (Thanks a million, Slashdot readers!) Unfortunately, we didn't get to publish the number of installments this topic required. So this last installment is a bit rushed and compacted, and it lacks the polish that would normally have been added by Kane Scarlett (a spectacular but unsung hero of NC World, Kane had a hand in every word of every issue). But I hope you'll enjoy reading it in spite of the rough edges - whether you agree with our conclusion or not. Thanks again for your support. ". Thank you Nicholas! I'm glad Slashdot could help, and only wish we could have done more. NC World was an excellent mag, and I'm sad to see it go.

Rick Moen writes "Some very sad news: Nick Petreley's good-beyond-hope magazine NC World has folded, as you can read on the InfoWorld site. While the NC World site is still up, do browse its simply amazing series of articles on thin-client computing, and the merits of the NT/Hydra/Citrix/WinTerminal kludge versus open-source and *ix-based alternatives. These are masterpieces of analysis and explanation. Let's hope that these very talented people (the NC World staff) land on their feet somewhere where they can, once again, show the trade mags how to do it competently and with integrity. " Hey Nick! Want a job? The pay is terrible but at least the hours are bad *grin*. Seriously, good mag. I'll miss it.

An anymous reader writes " NC World has a refreshing article arguing that the "new Unix" is going to give Windows NT a run for its money. The Unix-based internet and the proliferation of both free and commercial Unix-on-Intel implementations could very well derail Microsoft's overly ambitious Windows NT plans. The article defends its claims that the NT plan is overly ambitious by meticulously documenting NT's shortcomings when compared to Free Unices like Linux. "

Con Zymaris writes "NC World does an interesting analysis on NT and Unix (including Linux) Among the comments are: "While NT has a few advantages over Unix (it has a more flexible security model for its NTFS filesystem, for example), one could go on almost indefinitely about its disadvantages. Windows NT suffers from design flaws as annoying as its inexcusable handling of system DLLs to a dangerous kernel model that invites driver crashes."" Read the whole thing at NC World"

While HotSpot will be delayed until the summer, other vendors are testing alternative technologies. A favorite seems to be compilation to a native instruction set, which gives an insight into the speeds that could be obtained. New garbage collection algorithms and a better understanding of memory allocation issues should also help. And while current JIT's deliver lower performance, there are reasons to believe that JIT compilers might eventually become more efficient than native code. However, this does not mean that Java need be the portability solution: Taos is selling a new portable OS, Elate, written in a virtual assembly code based upon a run-time translator.