The antitrust regulator in South Korea will begin a crucial hearing on Tuesday (Monday evening US time) to determine whether Microsoft violated the country's fair trade rules by bundling its instant messenger and Media Player programs into its Windows XP platform. Officials have been reticent about whether the regulator, the Fair Trade Commission, will rule on the case after a closed hearing of two days. The commission held a closed hearing in July to listen to arguments from Microsoft and its local competitors, but it has not clarified how many more hearings it will need before ruling.

Modifying memory functions is never easy on an operating system, as a problem with memory affects everything in the system. OpenBSD developers have put out a call to help testing a new memory management system for the upcoming 3.8 release, which is tentitively set to be released this October.

Madpengiun has a review of the latest release of the trimmed-down Slackware-based Linux distro, Vectorlinux. At the end, the author advocates its use for "PC Recycling," wherein old, decommissioned hardware is set up for schools or nonprofits.

OpenOffice.org instructor Solveig Haugland explains why the upcoming OpenOffice 2.0 is set to make her job a whole lot easier. She says, "As an OpenOffice.org and StarOffice trainer, I teach a lot of one-day classes on the core software features. As I introduce the program and then word processor (Writer), spreadsheet (Calc) and presentation maker (Impress), I teach students how to deal with the oddities of each application before we get into the primary lessons. My first half hour of each section is gone."

Microsoft seems to be making its move into a market that it's left alone for a long time: It's new software, code named "Acrylic," professional design program that combines pixel-based painting and vector graphics. It is supposed to be somewhat based on the Creature House Expression product Microsoft bought in 2003. There's a new Community technology Preview available.

This article introduces PowerPC emulation and cross-compiling for developers without access to real hardware. It is intended for developers familiar with computer architecture who own an x86-based workstation but are interested in experimenting with PowerPC.

The Register notes that due to Intel's developer conference going on this week, and its excellent public relations capabilitites, we'll be seeing a lot of good news about Intel in the press over the next few days. Don't be fooled. Things aren't quite as rosy for the chip giant as they'll make it seem.

It seems that a free Linspire clone has hit the ftp mirrors. DistroWatch reports: "Freespire is a new Linux distribution, a free edition of Linspire with all proprietary components and trademarks removed. The distribution comes with a free repository of over 1,500 packages available via apt-get and Synaptic. This initial release functions as a live CD only and serves as a proof of concept. It certainly looks like an interesting idea: combining the benefits of Linspire's excellent usability and hardware auto-configuration with a free repository of Debian packages." Review.

My search for "the perfect Linux operating system" this time brings me to the latest incarnation of Ubuntu, version 5.04, also known as the "Hoary Hedgehog Release". Previously I was using Fedora Core 4, however due to some minor bugs it had, I wanted to try something different.

Sun Microsystems, weighing in on the fractious issue of protecting copyrighted digital content, on Sunday announced a project it calls the Open Media Commons initiative aimed at creating an open-source, royalty-free digital-rights management standard.

Apple's switch to Intel could lead to a merger that spawns a big power player in the personal computer, home media, and entertainment industries. Apple has already made great advances, so what could they possibly do next that would allow them the potential for yet another large surge of hype, buzz, profit, and success? Intel is already the most dominant chip manufacturer, so what could they possibly do next that would make them bigger, badder, with more diverse profits and services?

"One of the more touchy subjects crowding my inbox lately relates to how Windows Vista will fail to render High Definition video in 'pure' High Definition on most existing monitors. There's quite a bit of hemming and hawing over the probability that Windows Vista users will have to buy new monitors to see HD content. Let's get a few facts out on the table before we oil our rags and tie them to our spears, because there's a considerable amount of misinformation out there."

At its upcoming Professional Developers Conference next month, Microsoft is set to shed more details on its developer-oriented graphics tool, code-named Sparkle. Sparkle will be one element of the upcoming Expression Studio suite of design and developer tools for the Windows Presentation Foundation, formerly known as Avalon. Expression Studio also is expected to be unveiled at the PDC, sources said.

Linux finally has a free mDNS/DNS-SD implementation (Apple Rendezvous/Bonjour, Zeroconf). Avahi 0.1 has been released yesterday and provides a LGPL'd embeddable mDNS core. See the homepage for more details.