Apple yesterday conceded corporate IT workers are 'always' complaining about its secretive product roadmap - but warned the only way to get up to speed is to invest thousands of dollars and a full working week attending its annual US-based developer conference. Elsewhere, someone noticed Apple is now promoting Parallels instead of its own Boot Camp. Does it mean anything?

PC-BSD 1.11 has been released. Major changes: updated installed ports to current versions as of 6-12-06; updated KDE to 3.5.3 (more than 800 bugs fixed compared to 3.5.2); added additional DRM video drivers to default kernel, 3D/DRI support for Intel 3D, Voodoo, ATI, S3, SiS, Matrox, etc.; and much more. Get it from the download page (update or complete .iso), read the changelog, or read the release notes.

"QTKit brings a deeper level of integration with QuickTime to the premier programming environment on Mac OS X. This article shows how the QTKit framework is structured and introduces you to the essential concepts you'll need to understand to get up and running. First, let's review why QuickTIme is so important and what it brings to developers."

"Immediately after the release of new Virtual Infrastructure 3, Virtualization.info had the pleasure to reach Raghu Raghuram, Vice President of Platform Products at VMware, to ask him details about the just launched products, the recent Akimbi acquisition announcement, the secret VMware Integrity product, a planned presence in the Apple operating system, and further steps in the virtualization market leader's strategy. From his answers a revelation came out: VMware is going to partially support Microsoft'svirtualization technologies."

According to a Novell confidential memo dated June 14, Novell is delaying its next release of both the server and desktop versions of SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 "to address final issues with our new package management, registration, and update system and also fix the remaining blocker defects."

Opera 9.0 has been released. The new features in this major release include BitTorrent support, content blocking, tab preview, widgets (small desktop applets), and a source viewer, among others. Update: First impressions.

"There's been a lot of talk about the Mac OS X kernel in the past few months. When Avie Tevanian left Apple in March, there was much speculation that Apple had plans to abandon the Mach microkernel that underpins Mac OS X, and that Avie helped to develop many years ago. There were two lines of reasoning to support this, both pretty silly." Update: Follow-up has been posted. Thanks to eMagius pointing that out.

Now that Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates has started his two-year goodbye from a day-to-day role at the company, it's time for CEO Steve Ballmer to set a resignation date, too. Since Gates stepped down as CEO in 2000 in favor of Ballmer, the company has floundered technically and strategically. As the company's chairman, chief software architect and supposed visionary, Gates deserves blame for missing the wave of Web-based software that has propelled Google and Yahoo. But Ballmer has made gaffes of his own in his longtime role as head of the company's business side. In addition, Microsoft has started a wiki-like thing to allow its employees to ventilate ideas to the higher echelons of the company.

Despite having been on the market only a few months, ultramobile PCs, the keyboard-less handheld computers capable of running Windows XP, have already been panned by analysts and many reviewers. Now they're being targeted by the likes of Sony and startup OQO, who are offering their own diminutive computers for businesses. But Microsoft and partners - the UMPC has been backed by Intel and VIA Technologies - expect to see more diversity in the UMPC space in the near term.

Silicon Valley startup a la Mobile has announced what it calls the industry's first 'complete' Linux-based smartphone operating system. The Convergent Linux Platform will enter a field crowded with alternatives from MontaVista, Trolltech, ACCESS/PalmSource, and Wind River, among others.

After several months of work, research, and a massive platform change, The Gnu-HALO Project (formerly BSD-HALO) has finally released a proof-of-concept alpha bootable ISO to the public. It is now based very closely on SLAX Linux for the time being, and there are plans to keep software binary compatability as the project matures.

Two reviews of Mandriva One 2006. "ReviewLinux.Com takes a quick look at the new and free Mandriva One 2006 LiveCD. This review is full of pictures to show everyone the ease and use of this Linux distribution. This distribution is only one cd and perfect for anyone that maybe new to Linux." MintLinux starts: "After Ubuntu 6.06, Fedora Core 5 and SUSE 10.1 were released in the first two quarters of this year, I started to wonder about Mandriva. Was there still any reason for people to use Mandriva over Fedora, SUSE and Ubuntu? Had the distribution become outdated?"

Linux Format has a short interview with Greg Kroah-Hartman, the well-known Linux kernel hacker behind many drivers and the USB subsystem. Greg explains why drivers aren't a popular area of kernel development, how the kernel is stabilising in 2.6, and the impact of the SCO lawsuits.

"Google Spreadsheets are in the 'sneak peek' phase. The two big questions seem to be a) why would anyone want to use a potentially non-secure spreadsheet with limited capabilities, and b) how will we refer to the primitive era before online spreadsheets, which revolutionized life as we know it (which, of course, leads to a related question: what kind of silver jumpsuit is most comfortable when you're crunching numbers?)?"