"On Monday, we had the honor of meeting with Bill Gates to discuss MIX06, IE, DHTML, AJAX, Compatibility, Office 12, and also gain insight into where he surfs on the web. He also shares with us where and how software can make the world a better place." ArsTechnica analyzes the interview.

Just a few days after Mono got ported to SkyOS, SkyOS now has support for System.Windows.Forms. A screenshot of the first C# application using System.Windows.Forms developed in and for SkyOS is available at the SkyOS website. Support is not complete yet, obviously.

Someone who goes by the alias Saikee claims to have a multiboot system booting... 100 Operating systems, which include various flavours of DOS, Windows, Linux, BSD, and Solaris. In this thread he explains how to set up your machine, incuding GRUB, to boot 100 different flavours of various operating systems.

The latest issue of the GNOME Journal has just been published. It features a look at the 0.10 GStreamer release from a user's point of view by Christian Schaller, a short introduction into (de-) forming 3D models with SharpConstruct by Claus Schwarm, an interview with Jeff Waugh in the new 'Behind the Scenes' series by Lucas Rocha, part two of the tutorial on writing a clock using GTK+ and Cairo by Davyd Madeley, and also part two about marketing GNOME by John Williams.

Microsoft on Feb. 16 is set to announce 34 Office suites, programs, servers, services and tools - 13 of which are new - that form part of its 2007 Microsoft Office family of products, previously knows as Office 12. Retail pricing for the comparable versions of the product has not been increased, remaining unchanged from the retail prices for Office 2003, John Cairns, senior director of licensing and pricing in Microsoft's Information Worker division, told eWEEK. More information at CNet.

"After a decade of neglect and increasingly reluctant support from IBM, the manufacturer, the OS/2 community persists. Where users of GNU/Linux or FreeBSD have turned to free and open source software for political and philosophical freedom and software quality, the surviving OS/2 community has been turning to FOSS as a means of defending members' right to use the operating system of their choice. The result is a small but surprisingly diverse collection of projects that, to a GNU/Linux user, is a mixture of the familiar and exotic."

Oracle tried to acquire open-source database maker MySQL, an indication of the profound changes the software giant is willing to make as it adapts to the increasingly significant collaborative programming philosophy. MySQL Chief Executive Marten Mickos confirmed the acquisition attempt in an interview at the Open Source Business Conference here but wouldn't provide details such as when the approach was made or how much money Oracle offered.

"The Treo 700w excels as a phone, and has a number of advantages over the Treo 650, but is still not the best Windows Mobile smartphone on the market. It is rather bulky for a daily-use phone and it fails to take advantage of the full power of Windows Mobile. Rather, it seems to have been designed to move the functions of the the Palm-based Treo over to a Windows platform."

"Recently I inheritted ownership of an SVN server which was misbehaving. Trying to determine why it wasn't working correctly involved a few hours of testing, careful thought, and caffeine. Eventually I got it working correctly using the often-overlooked tool strace. strace is a common tool upon many GNU/Linux systems including Debian. Put simply strace is a 'system call tracer' - which is where it gets its name from. Using strace, as root, you can monitor the system calls made by any process upon your system. This can be enormously beneficial when you have a misbehaving program."

"Looking over our EIST results today using a Pentium M 750, Intel's technology certainly has its advantages. Switching between the five power-modes, there was evident change in the CPU temperature as well as the power consumption. In addition, the frequency/voltages immediately scaled appropriately when switching between demanding and non-demanding environments. For those, however, seeking to over-ride the switching process at a low frequency/voltage, in order to conserve the battery life, heat output, and noise will find the performance to be severely hampered. As the last portion of our tests had shown, the compilation time had increased 212%, encoding time 218%, frame-rate had decreased 5FPS, and the Mflops had dropped over 233%."

With Shark's System Trace, you get a detailed view of how your code interacts with Mac OS X. This advanced article digs deep into Shark, and how it helps you optimize your code.

GNOME 2.13.91 has been released. As always, the odd-numbered branches indicate dev-branches, and as such the 2.13.x series is the step-up to the GNOME 2.14 release, planned for March this year. The 2.13.91 release is the second beta. Release notes: platform, desktop, and bindings; downloads: platform, desktop, and bindings.

Today we're happy to feature an interview by Grant Hayes of MacSlash with Paul Leroux, a technology analyst with QNX Software Systems, who is participating in Embedded World 2006. In the interview, Paul discusses the changes QSS has experienced in the last couple years, new and established competition, and moving forward in the marketplace with new technology.

"Apple has shiny new x86 based iMacs and the eloquently named MacBooks (yech) out on the market, and reviews, barring a few fawning toadies in the print media, are exceptionally rare. The usual Apple cooked benchmarks abound, but there is no real third party analysis, I think mainly because it is afraid of what will be found. The biggest bloomer is its tacit non-denials of the fact that the current x86 macs will never run XP in an approved or corporately acceptable fashion, and Vista is a long long long shot. Apple knows, is doing nothing to quell the rumours and speculation, and I think that's irresponsible."