In about six weeks time developers from all over the world will convene in Prague for the 2005 edition of the Firebird Conference. This year's conference has an even greater abundance of speakers and topics than the previous editions of the event. The various tracks on the conference will cover Firebird itself, development languages and solution stacks, development tools and issues and applications. And, of course, it is a great opportunity to meet the community.

Google chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt will sit down with Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy on Tuesday morning to outline a collaborative effort between the two companies. It's not clear what the partnership will entail, but Sun has already begun to hype the event. More about this here.

"Today, I want to take you on a journey. A journey that starts back into the cold recesses of the mid-1980s, back into the days of EGA and serial port mice and the MS-DOS Executive. Microsoft Word 1.0 for Windows shipped in 1989 after a long development cycle and was designed to run on Windows 386. There's not much more to the program than what you see here, but it gives you an idea of how far Word's come."

Likely the last of the Visopsys 0.5x series (a sparkly new 0.6 is imminent), this maintenance and bugfix release sports some new features such as EXT2 formatting, German keyboard layouts, GUID generation, and filesystem clobber. Version 0.58 also includes a number of important bugfixes to the featured Disk Manager partitioning program. Change log here and downloads here. As always, you can demo this tiny, full-GUI hobby OS from the ISO image or from a single floppy disk.

In a conversation that began as a request to include the SAS Transport Layer in the mainline Linux kernel, there was an interesting thread regarding specifications. Linux creator Linus Torvalds began the discussion saying, "a 'spec' is close to useless. I have _never_ seen a spec that was both big enough to be useful _and_ accurate. And I have seen _lots_ of total crap work that was based on specs. It's _the_ single worst way to write software, because it by definition means that the software was written to match theory, not reality."

"SUSE 10.1 Alpha 1 was recently announced, before 10.0 was even released. All in all, not bad at all, especially for an alpha. No real stability issues were found and not really too much was broken."

The next beta version of Microsoft's operating system is expected in November. The new beta version of Vista will have its graphic component a little bit readier than before as it's already time to start working on a user interface and the gaming part of the API.

In a serious case of I-have-too-much-time-on-my-hands, someone "ported" Mac OS 7.5.5 to the... Sony PSP. It required a few tricks, but in the end you can have an x86 emulator running a 680x0 emulator on a handheld gaming console.

This series of articles teaches you about creating applications using Java technology, Eclipse, and the SWT and JFace libraries. In SWT and JFace Part 3 find out how to use tabular tree, canvas, styled text, slider, spinner, scale and other controls, as well as stack layouts. You might want to look at previous articles in this series. In SWT and JFace Part 1 learn how to to create simple SWT GUIs using Eclipse, Java, basic JFace controls and layouts. In SWT and JFace Part 2, learn how to use combo, list, table, and tree controls, as well as form layouts and reusable helper methods.

Logical partitioning provides POWER processor-based servers with the capability to do server consolidation and optimize system resources. Dynamic logical partitioning enhances this capability by providing control of the allocation of the resources without impacting the logical partitions availability. Linux on POWER supports dynamic LPAR for changes to physical/virtual I/O and proc. resources.

Ravindra Okade explores three different approaches to creating a .NET service: a timer-based service, a service using a single worker thread, and a service using multiple worker threads.

One of the announcements at the current OO.oCon is the decision to build a Cocoa-based version of OpenOffice.org 2.x for Mac OS X. This is a step forward compared to the current X11-based port and the Neo/J Office which is not up-to-date. No timeframe estimation was given for the completion of the project.

Another pre-release build of Mac OS X 10.4.3 was among the software seeds reportedly released by . Now at build 8F31, the third maintenance release to Tiger is is approaching 110MB in size and includes well over 500 minor fixes and enhancements. The frequency in which Apple has released new builds of the update indicates that a release is on tap for the first half of October.

"Today's another exciting day as we move closer to Beta 1. We are just wrapping up the MVP summit here in Redmond and we've finally announced another piece of functionality I've wanted to talk about for a long time now. This afternoon Steven Sinofsky announced to our MVPs that we will build in native support for the PDF format in Office 12."