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.

"The primary goal of Project Ridley is to cut down on the number of problem libraries that are part of the GNOME platform. We propose to do this by moving functionality into GTK+, wherever it makes sense. These libraries are generally small, undermaintained, and buggy."

Crisot has made available a new demonstration video (xvid avi mirror1|mirror2 MPEG1 mirror1|mirror2) showing the AmigaOS4-beta implementation of the unique AmigaOS feature, screen dragging. For recent user screenshots of the AmigaOS4 pre-release look here.

CherryPy uses the same concepts as CGI to bind a Web server to a Web application, but it improves performance and gains persistence across requests by handling all its requests within a single process. Find out how to write Web applications with CherryPy, an application framework for Python that makes Web applications easier to write than plain CGI.

Systemsim970 written in C, is a full-system simulation infrastructure and tools for the PowerPC 970 instruction set built upon the IBM Power architecture. It provides a Linux full-system simulation to develop, run, and evaluate PowerPC software stack solutions in the absence of PowerPC system hardware.