Time Warner and Microsoft are in advanced talks over Microsoft buying a stake in Time Warner's America Online unit, the New York Post reported on Thursday. Citing two unnamed sources familiar with the matter, the Post said the talks concern Microsoft acquiring an AOL stake and then combining it with Microsoft's Web unit MSN.

Again, more news from the PDC. Microsoft senior vice president Steven Sinofsky took the stage Wednesday to discuss Office 12, which he said would hit Beta 1 within a "couple months." Betas of the Open Office XML format schemes are available starting today. Also, more screenshots of Vista build 5219 can be found here, shots of IE7 here. MS also announced a developer's toolbar for IE 6 and 7. The toolbar would allow the developer to see how pages would look in various screen resolutions, validate HTML and CSS code, and perform numerous other functions that Web designers would find useful. You can read transcripts of the various keynotes here.

Sun Microsystems is expected to revamp its core Unix server line on Tuesday with the debut of its high-end UltraSparc IV+ processor. The big UltraSparc IV+ improvement is the inclusion of 2MB of built-in high-speed cache memory where UltraSparc IV had none. The initial clock speed of the dual-core chip is expected to be 1.5GHz.

In PDC related news: "Windows Workflow Foundation is the programming model, engine and tools for quickly building workflow enabled applications on Windows. It consists of a WinFX namespace, an in-process workflow engine, and designers for Visual Studio 2005. Windows Workflow Foundation is available (currently in beta) for both client and server versions of Windows."

A consortium of Linux vendors created to promote the commercial use of the Debian GNU/Linux distribution has released its first product, and plans more. "The first preview release of DCC 3.0 PR1 was made available last week," Progeny chairman and Debian founder Ian Murdock wrote in his blog. He added that the next version was due late this week or early next week.

With Breezy Badger on its way its time for the announcement of what the next +1 release will be called, and the Ubuntu team has decided that the next +1 release (6.04) will be called The Dapper Drake. This release of Ubuntu will be supported for 3 years after release, and the Ubuntu developers are going to work as hard and as long as possible on Dapper Drake, as it's what they're going to release in response to MS's release of Windows Vista.

Again, a lot of news from the PDC. Microsoft unveiled its Expression Studio, which contains Acrylic, a vector and bitmap graphic editing and creation tool; Sparkle, a 2D and 3D animation tool; and Quartz, a design tool for page layouts and web sites. About Quartz: it does not require IE. In other news from the PDC: while at first look Microsoft Gadgets may appear a lot like Apple/Konfabulator Widgets, Microsoft has bigger plans for the technology.

"As nice as Open Office Excel is for a free application, it doesn't even come close to the performance and usability of Microsoft Office Excel. There is no shame in losing to a commercially funded application, but no one should make false statements that Microsoft Office is bloated and inferior. The only remaining question for businesses and homes is whether Excel is worth the money and most have apparently decided yes." Update: OOo 1.1.5 has been released.

Google has emerged as the poster child for a new wave of applications assembled from the piece-parts of several Web sites. No Windows necessary. Microsoft has its own ideas, of course. Gates sat down with CNET to talk about competitors old and new, why software hasn't fulfilled promises and the mixed blessing of controlling 90 percent of the world's PCs.

An interview was recently done with Rickford Grant, the author of "Linux for Non-Geeks" and the new "Linux Made Easy". Grant is outspoken in his opinions and offers a number of unique views on topics as diverse as Windows Vista, desktop Linux, GNOME vs. KDE, and lots more. Part of the interview is spent talking about his new book but the bulk of the interview is a discussion of his views on pertinent topics and news.

The recent Blade.org announcement heralds that IBM and Intel are looking to standardize blade hardware designs, allowing blade systems from multiple vendors to work together. It's no surprise that Intel is interested in this -- its own ATX standard has been a massive success. This article looks at the history of ATX and some of the lessons learned about power supply and chassis standardization.

A new major version of Nemerle language was released. Nemerle features a very high level .NET language with functional programming support. This version brings full support to .NET 2.0 generics and a bunch of other things. After the release of C# 3.0 spec preview it might be interesting to see how could next generation of .NET languages look like.

Support for mouse gesture recognition has been implemented. By using the System Manager "Gesture" plugin you can add, remove and configure your own mouse gestures. Whenever SkyOS recognizes a conigured mouse gesture, the desired action is performed. You can select from many pre-configured actions like: maximize/minimize window, close application, launch application, etc. The entire gesture recognition is fully intergrated into SkyOS/SkyGI as a service application which can easily be enabled/disabled. The obligatory screenshot.

The new Developer Transition Resource Center is targeted at developers who have been tasked with moving their applications to Apple's forthcoming Intel-based Macs, scheduled for release in 2006. The site ties together topics, resources and tutorials, some of which were previously available on other parts of Apple's site, including QuickTime archives of WWDC sessions. In addition, Apple today updated its Xserve RAID storage system, a 3U high-availability, rack storage system to deliver a massive 7 terabytes of storage capacity at an aggressive price of just $1.86 per GB.