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.

So, with WinHEC coming to a close, the biggest talk was of course the newest release of Microsoft (R) Windows (R) Codename Longhorn, now at build 5048. With nearly one year since the previous release (build 4074) build 5048 sports some new features and lacks some others. Recently, the talk was centered around the lack of WinFS, the new futuristic Windows File system. However, we'll get to all that a little later.

Qemu 0.7.0 has been released. Changelog here: Full x86_64 and MMX/SSE/SSE2 emulation support. SPARC target can now boot Linux. Much improved ARM user mode emulation. Many bug fixes.

The topic of polymorphism is given mystical status in some programming texts and is ignored in others, but it's a simple, useful concept that the C++ language supports. Find out all about it in this sample chapter by Stephen Dewhurst.

MorphOS version 1.4.5 is now available. This is hopefully the last bugfix update before the next full release, and solves many bugs and problems with the previous releases.

Review of Tiger from an end user's perspective: likes and dislikes discussed.

"Friday evening, 18:00 CET, Apple released Mac OS 10.4 'Tiger' to us Europeans. I attended a 'launch event' (which is a posh means of saying free drinks and snacks) at an Apple Center in Berlin to be among the first mortals to see and use it. They had set up various Macs with the much anticipated new version of Mac OS. After playing around for a while, making good use of the free drinks and snacks, I shelled out the €120,- (somehow they didn't charge €129,-) and walked out a happy, but poorer, man." eXpert Zone takes a quick look at Tiger.

A new major version of Nemerle is out there. Nemerle is a high-level statically-typed programming language for the .NET platform. It offers functional, object-oriented and imperative features. It has a simple C#-like syntax and a powerful compiler extensibility capabilities by means of hygienic macros. New release brings custom implicit conversions, interactive shell and many bugfixes.

Edd Dumbill, valuable member and developer of the GNOME Desktop Environment, author of the "Mono: A Developer's Notebook" book, speaks up his mind about GNOME in one of his recent blog entries.

Now that Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger has been released into the wild, many users are looking for things to do with their new operating system. Apple has you covered.

Microsoft has extended an olive branch to the open-source community, calling for a sit-down to discuss how the software giant can better work with the open-source world.

While most of the attention Friday is on the client version of Apple's latest release of its Mac OS X operating system, Tiger Server is a major event in itself. It bridges the worlds of open source, Unix and Windows, and may be the key to finally gaining Apple a foothold in the corporate data center.

Microsoft has offered an early peek at Longhorn's file navigation and search capabilities -- and fired a shot across the bow of the emerging desktop search tool vendors.

Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy is disparaging a report that suggests an investment firm is planning a leveraged buyout of the server and software company.