In part one of EnGadget's interview with Bill Gates, published yesterday, they chatted with him about the next Xbox console, whether or not Microsoft is going to come out with a competitor for the PlayStation Portable, and the future of Windows Mobile. In today's second and final installment they asked him about HD-DVD vs. Blu-ray, IPTV, Windows Media Center and DTV, and why the Tablet PC has struggled so much in the marketplace.

With last month's release of VMware Workstation 5, the virtual machine software is better than ever. VMware Workstation now has 64-bit host support, the ability to capture multiple snapshots for each virtual machine, easier sharing of virtual machines, and the ability to connect multiple virtual machines in a "team" setting.

This document provides information regarding features that differ in functionality from Windows XP SP2. It is important to note that this document uses the Windows XP SP2 feature set as the baseline for comparison with Windows XP Professional x64 Edition. Features not documented here are at parity with Windows XP SP2 and function the same way.

According to Debian Planet, the Sarge freeze is now official and a May 30 release date has been set.

A blog found on the f-secure.com site reveals rumors of Windows XP SP3. The small message on the blog reads this: Windows XP could be released before Longhorn. There is also mention of the new Internet Explorer 7. You can read the story here.

OASIS announced that OpenDocument v1.0 will be recognised as the OASIS standard for documentation. Several open source office suites including Openoffice 2.0, Koffice and Abiword (Planned) will support the new standard.

The fourth release candidate of FreeBSD 5.4 is out. This will be the last Release Candidate, unless a major problem is discovered as part of RC4 testing the final release will be made early next week. This RC contains fixes to all known major issues.

Mandriva has released the CD and DVD ISO images of Mandriva Linux 2005 Limited Edition for i586 to their download mirrors.

With servers, where there is a good economic model, Linux would clearly remain favored over Apple because of much deeper support from companies like HP and IBM. But on the desktop, for most users, Tiger is the clear winner. It has better desktop application bundles, better customer support, better hardware, good value and is easier to use. Read more here. Also, firm expects Apple to grab 4% US market share.

LinuxQuestions.org has just posted an interview with Mandriva founder Gael Duval.

One of the smaller features Windows users will appreciate is Linspire's global spell checker. No matter what application you are using, you will find that suspected misspellings are underlined and suggested corrections are only a click away.

New in GNU Classpath 0.15: Optimized nio and nio.charset packages plus io streams integration leading to large speedups in character stream performance. To complement this new framework a native iconv based charset provider was added. Better support for free swing metal and pluggable lafs. Some org.omg.CORBA support added. Better java.beans support for the Eclipse Visual Editor Project. Completely lock free ThreadLocal implementation added. More javax.swing.text support for RTF and HTML. More flexible runtime interfaces and build configuration options added. Release announcement.

eXpert Zone Founder, Andrew Youll (youlle) has posted about a document he has found on the net detailing the history of "non-UNIX" oses in a timeline it also shows relationships between oses and shows which projects have borrowed from where or which oses have "compatibility" with other projects.

There's an opening for Linux to grab a much larger market share on the consumer desktop side over the next twelve to eighteen months, but penguin advocates need to pull their act together and hope a couple of software companies – or one big hardware company – decides to throw their weight into giving Microsoft heartburn.