The mid-market is hot. It is forecasted to be the main growth segment in the IT market for the next few years. As such, it is fiercely contested by the major software makers. The BBC recently even called it a 60 billion dollar software battle. What exactly constitutes the mid-market is a bit vague, but some define it as businesses ranging from 50 to 1,000 employees.

A few days ago I wrote on my blog about the "sorry state of proper h.264 support on the PC". The bottomline was that if you need some good HD h.264 support for HD videos the solution is Apple's G5 with Qt 7 PRO, or QuickTime 7 PRO for Windows (whenever this is going to be released). The existing PC solutions (Win or Linux) were ranging from bad to terrible with all-time-worse being mplayer's support (about 0.3 fps on the 1080p Serenity trailer on a 2.8 GHz P4) and 'best' the Elecard Moonlight player that could barely do about 10 fps on a brand new 3 GHz P4-630. However...

Novell's SuSE Linux Professional 9.3 is a solid, comprehensive Linux distribution that provides access to the latest technologies the open-source software world has to offer—with a level of polish that's superior to most other general-purpose distributions. SuSE Linux Professional 9.3 fits well as a desktop or notebook distribution, particularly for developers and system administrators new to Linux, says eWeek. Also, this does seem to be the boot ISO for the FTP install.

In this special 50th episode of the .NET Show, Rick Rashid, Brad Abrams, John Shewchuk, and Michael Wallent discuss where the Microsoft platform technologies can, should, and will be going in the future. This show also features a special interview with Bill Gates.

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.