It took 12 years and more than $10 billion (E8.3 billion), but one of Microsoft's biggest dreams may finally be coming true: The company is close to becoming a major player in the television business.This is not about PCs that play video, but rather a whole new platform for delivering television over the Internet, through software that's mostly invisible to consumers."

"The third annual LinuxFest was held on Saturday, October 1 at the Greater Columbus Convention Center. It's the first time I attended this one day conference so I didn't know what to expect. Overall, I found it to be an interesting and generally well-planned affair with a good balance of informative presentations, relevant vendor displays, and some general Linux geek fun."

Frank Schoep recently wrote this article on the rendering improvements of Swing applications in the upcoming Mustang version of Java.

Mobile-review reviews a great product, the Sharp Zaurus SL-C3100, which only comes short on its lack of integrated WiFi & Bluetooth. Update: Another Zaurus review.

You decide over the realness of this: "Without giving much details, those captures shows MacOSX x86 running on a 4 physical CPU-based MacIntel with Hyperthreading enable. One can clearly see 4 physical processors recognized while 8 logical processors are recorded by the CPU monitor."

The Open Document Fellowship was launched to add momentum to what appears to be a growing movement to support the open standard for the production, storage and dissemination of documents.

Microsoft's phase-out of Visual Basic 6 and move to Visual Basic .Net set up an uproar in the ranks of some of Microsoft's most loyal developers. Earlier this year, several thousand developers, including many Microsoft MVPs (Most Valuable Professionals), signed a petition calling for Microsoft to continue to support VB6. However, enhancements in the VB platform stand to bring some of those people back.

There are over 300 distributions listed on DistroWatch.com, but Red Hat's CEO, Matthew Szulik, maintained that choice and specialization outweighed any advantage that might be gained by focusing customer attention on a smaller number of offerings.

Tango is a project to create a new icon theme for all f.d.o-compatible DEs, using a standard style guide. Regarding the BetterDesktop, there are over 200 usability test videos in ogg and mpeg format.

Microsoft is taking a stand on an emerging tech that threatens to reshape software pricing models.

This phone could be placed by some as the most advanced smartphone to date (only some new, unreleased yet, PocketPC-phones come close in terms of features): Sony Ericsson announced the P990, based on Symbian 9.1. It supports UMTS, GSM/GPRS/3G, WiFi, Bluetooth, IrDA and it has an FM radio. It sports a 2.8" QVGA touchscreen, 80 MBs free storage, a 64 MB MemoryStickPRODuo (expandable to 4 GB), Blackberry Push Email, a QWERTY keyboard, and two cameras: a 2 MP on the back and a VGA on the front. For web browser it uses Opera 8.x.

Massachusetts' plan to standardize desktop applications on OpenDocument, an open standard not supported by Microsoft Office, essentially comes down to a matter of control, according Stephen O'Grady. O'Grady has been following the story closely and explains that as a sovereign entity, Massachusetts feels the need to be in complete control of its desktop technology, rather than relying on a single company for its office productivity needs.

STI (Sony-IBM-Toshiba) has said all along that they plan to see Cell commercialized far beyond the upcoming PS3, so it was no surprise when Mercury Computer Systems announced back in June that they planned to use the Cell in unspecified aerospace, defense, and medical imaging applications. Today, Mercury unveiled the first fruits of those plans, in the form of a dual-Cell blade server.

"The magic in CheckInstall is that it learns everything your new app or package will add to your system, and then creates a binary installable package geared to the package manager you use, whether that be Slackware, RPM, or Debian. Optionally, it will also install the newly created package. But whether you install then or later, when the time comes that you want to remove the package from your system, all you need to do is run the appropriate command for your package manager."