Today, the Dutch headquarters of Apple held a press conference concerning the announcements made by Apple's CEO, Steve Jobs, last week during MacWorld in San Fransisco. During the conference, the new products would be presented by speakers from Apple Europe, and afterwards there was time to get hands-on with the new products. I got invited to this event, so read on for a few notes.

Genesi has launched their EFIKA developer's program. The EFIKA is a "performance evaluation board based around the MPC5200B PowerPC system-on-chip from Freescale Semiconductor" The only thing you need to do, so it seems, is post a possible use for the EFIKA board on a thread on Power.org.

"I figured out a way to get into the EFI menu on the new Intel iMac. I was attempting to install Vista, which did not work. As I discovered from poking around in the EFI there is no support for UDF or El Torito volumes. It seems only GPT and APM is supported. Writing a driver for EFI to support UDF should be easy enough for someone who knows how, one might even exist already. I'm going to give step-by-step instructions for getting in to the EFI so that some enterprising people will get to work on installing Windows."

LinuxHelp reviewed Gentoo, and in spite of being a lot of work to set up, Gentoo offers something unique few other distributions are able to offer:"One thing I found unique to Gentoo was the knowledge gained by the user in the process of installing it on the hard disk. And if you are an experienced Linux user/administrator, it will be a revision time well spent."

"When I first got into open source many moons ago, the advocacy movement was a thriving and vocal part of the community. Most of the movers and shakers back in the day were advocating the use of free and open software at work, to their friends and to their local community via LUGs and other groups. Back then, advocacy was a key part of the community, not only in showing existing computer users this alternative software, but also advising disadvantaged people for whom free software could really open up the doors to skill, employment and potential. Recently it seems this community-driven advocacy effort has petered out somewhat, and there are far fewer people talking about, conducting, exploring, refining and pushing open aource advocacy."

"Since the first rumors of an Apple switch to Intel, everyone has been wondering about the potential speed of Intel-based Macs. Last week's announcement of the first shipping Intel-based Macs brought with it the promise of a major speed boost: Apple's Web pages suggest that the new iMac, powered by the Intel Core Duo processor, is twice as fast as its G5 predecessor. Macworld Lab's tests do show that the new Intel-based iMac is faster than the iMac G5 when running native applications. However, we found that those improvements are generally much less than what Apple claims is a 2x improvement in speed."

"The sockets API lets you develop client and server applications that can communicate across a local network or across the world via the Internet. Like any API, you can use the sockets API in ways that promote high performance - or inhibit it. This article explores four ways to use the sockets API to squeeze the greatest performance out your application and to tune the GNU/Linux environment to achieve the best results."

On the strength of higher iPod and Macintosh sales, Apple on Wednesday posted a profit of $565 million for its fiscal 2006 first quarter. Picking up from where it left off last year, Apple once again reported the highest revenue and earnings in the company's history. These results compare to revenue of $3.49 billion and a net profit of $295 million . Apple said that international sales accounted for 40 percent of the quarter's revenue. Apple shipped over 1.2 million Macs and more than 14 million iPods during the quarter. This represents a 20 percent growth in Macs and a 207 percent growth in iPods over the year-ago quarter.

Engadget has two great articles (Part I & Part II) on Digital Television (mobile and normal). However, if all these new standards and acronyms were not enough, Sprint is trying to push one more on us.

DragonFly BSD 1.4 is the third major release of Matthew Dillon's fork of the FreeBSD operating system, and significant progress has been made towards reaching many of the project's numerous goals. New in this release include a more up to date version of the GNU Compiler Collection (required due to the incread use of thread local storage in DragonFly), an import of NetBSD's Citrus code (Comprehensive I18N Framework Towards Respectable Unix Systems), major reworking of all core subsystems in preparation for removing the MP lock, rewrites of various VFS related code and many updated drivers, frameworks and contributed programs.

"This article shows you how to implement a Web browser-based SOAP Web services client using Ajax design patterns. In the Part 1 of this series, the author introduced a simple Web browser-based JavaScript library for invoking SOAP Web services using AJAX. In the discussion that follows, the author expands on functions of that JavaScript library by implementing basic support for the Web Services."

Microsoft on Wednesday gave developers access to a key piece of Windows Vista, months ahead of the operating system's release. The company posted near-final versions of two software development technologies that are part of WinFX, the underlying programming model being introduced with Vista, which is slated to ship late this year. The release is "a significant checkpoint" on the road toward delivery of the company's new programming model since it allows developers to build and deploy applications on their core production systems, according to Ari Bixhorn, director of Web services strategy at Microsoft.

"For software that's been around since the late '70s, before any of today's more popular operating systems, open source BSDs (in their current avatars) don't get their due share of hard disks. FreeBSD, one of the first BSD flavors to emerge from the 386BSD project, is a Unix-like free operating system based originally on the BSD branch of 386BSD and later 4.4BSD-Lite. This makes BSDs more like traditional Unixes than Linux. Late last year FreeBSD unleashed release 6.0, with better support for 64-bit and wireless hardware. Here's our review."

Corel is targeting disaffected Microsoft customers with discounted 'upgrade' offers for those who switch to the new WordPerfect Office X3. Corel on Tuesday announced an updated version of WordPerfect Office, its rival to Microsoft's dominant Office suite. The new program adds the ability to import and export its files to Adobe's PDF. The software also has a new interface and promises better support for multilingual characters and an easy way to strip out metadata from a file. ZDNet has a review too.