Microsoft is about to give Media Center PCs a new point of view. The software giant is expected to unveil on Friday an update for its Windows XP Media Center Edition operating system that will boost the computers' abilities to tap online entertainment such as movies, access e-mail and even let users go shopping via the special user interface, designed to allow easy access to multimedia.

Apple reported fiscal fourth-quarter earnings of $430 million (E358 million), or 50 cents (E0.42) per share, on revenue of $3.68 billion (E3.06 billion). That compares with earnings of $106 million (E88 miillon), or 13 cents (E0.11) per share, on revenue of $2.35 billion (E1.96 billion) for the same period a year earlier. The most recent quarter's earnings included a benefit from tax-related issues. Excluding that benefit, Apple would have had earnings of 38 cents (E0.32) per share. Sales were somewhat less than some analysts were projecting, and investors sent shares down more than 10 percent in after-hours trading. Apple said it sold 1.24 million Macs and 6.45 million iPods during the past quarter.

Peter Naulls has released the fifth Firefox beta for RISC OS. The new version feels more like a conventional RISC OS application thanks to the icon bar icon and pop up menus. The browser also responds to URI requests from other applications.

"Quartz is the heart and soul of Mac OS X's graphics layer, which directly supports the defining features of the Aqua desktop experience. Quartz is largely based upon Adobe's PDF specification, but it has roots tracing all the way back to PostScript. The two defining components of Quartz are Quartz Compositor and Quartz 2D. Tiger introduced Quartz 2D Extreme and Quartz Composer, an alternative way to explore the power of Quartz through a powerful visual programming environment."

Microsoft and Yahoo have agreed to make their two instant-messaging programs work together, a partnership that could threaten market leader America Online, people familiar with the situation said.

Slimline Open Firmware provides a largely machine-independent BIOS, illustrating what is needed to initialize and boot Linux. Three of the original SLOF developers discuss the development and usage of SLOF, initialization/boot source code for the PowerPC based on the Open Firmware standard.

"The KDE Project today announced the release of KOffice 1.4.2 for Linux and Unix operating systems. Support for the OpenDocument format, recently adopted by Massachusetts state in the USA, has been greatly improved, especially in KWord, KSpread and KPresenter. Karbon, a vector-based drawing program, has also seen a lot of development lately, and many fixes have gone into it."

As promised, Microsoft on Tuesday issued nine separate security patches, fixing vulnerabilities in DirectX, Exchange, Internet Explorer, and Windows itself. Three of the fixes were deemed "critical," four "important," and two "moderate".

"Boo is a new object oriented statically typed programming language for the Common Language Infrastructure with a python inspired syntax and a special focus on language and compiler extensibility." Version 0.7 was released on Sunday.

"Xara is pleased to announce that it intends to make its flagship graphics product, Xara X, open oource. Xara is also working to bring it to the Linux and Mac platforms. Xara X is the world's fastest and we believe the most versatile graphics software. It's primarily a vector graphics program but is one of the new generation of cross-over products that handles photos and drawings with equal ease."

Th first release candidate of FreeBSD 6.0 has been released to ftp. As of yet, there are no announcements or release notes. Be sure to use a mirror.

Microsoft is nearing a settlement of RealNetworks' long-running antitrust lawsuit with a deal valued at $750 million (E624 million), according to reports. Under terms of the settlement, which could still fall through, Microsoft would offer a combination of cash and promotions for RealNetworks' music and game services through Microsoft's online services and software, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter. In addition, the newspaper said, the two companies would collaborate on technology initiatives in the future. Update: It's official.

This humorous article depicts the computing world without Microsoft-- Apple has the biggest marketshare (15%), HP bought Commodore, IBM thinks text-based interfaces are the best thing for customers, and hardware-accelerated 3D is a no-go because all the various parties cannot agree on a standard. And Microsoft? Aren't they selling BASIC?

"Yesterday, I was among a few lucky journalists in New York City who got a rare chance to play a collection of new games on the eagerly awaited Microsoft Xbox 360 gaming console. In short, I was impressed. The brain, capable of one teraflop, is three symmetrical IBM cores running at 3.2 GHz each. Stellar graphics performance is provided by a 500 MHz custom ATI graphics processor and backed up by super fast memory, 512 MB of GDDR3 RAM that is shared with the CPUs via a unified memory architecture."