While DVD technology was initially much-needed and impressive, it quickly showed its limitations, as demand for higher-resolution movies and more bonus features (and, of course, the use of DVD for data storage) quickly outstripped DVD's data capacity. Some new technologies are on the horizon, and in true tech industry fashion, there is more than one incompatible contender for the spot.

A report in today’s Wall Street Journal suggests Microsoft has fiddled with the registry in its stripped-down Windows offerings and the result is that video clips embedded into Microsoft Word documents don’t run properly, for example. The Journal quotes Jonathan Todd, a spokesman for European antitrust chief Neelie Kroes, as saying: 'The commission is still in the process of assessing ... whether Microsoft is complying properly with the requirement to offer a fully functioning version of Windows without Media Player.'

Project Looking Glass is a 3D windowing and visualization system for Sun's Java Desktop System. There is currently a proof of concept demo available, and if you're interested in trying it out, here's a quick tutorial.

Many screenshots and info for the leaked, upcoming, Windows Mobile 2005.

A group of underground programmers has posted code online they say will reopen a back door in Apple Computer's iTunes store, allowing Linux computer users to purchase music free of copy protection. The release comes just a day after Apple blocked a previous version of the program, called PyMusique.

Paul Thurrott has updated his "Road to Longhorn" article with new, never seen before screenshots of Longhorn. Some interesting new approaches to usability and UI can be seen there.

This alpha release contains a large number of new features, including derived tables, support for Execute Block, increased table sizes, new improved index code (the 252-byte index length limit is no longer applicable), expression indices, numerous optimiser improvements, enhanced security features, support for on-line incremental backups along with many other improvements & bug fixes.

Though great advances in Linux Desktop usability have been made in recent years, one rather large area of difficulty still exists, posing some serious issues on the ease-of-use front. There is, however, a little-known solution to these problems...

Visopsys is an alternative operating system for PC compatible computers. This is a maintenance release, with numerous small improvements and bugfixes including some general back- porting from the 0.6 development branch. In addition, IDE disk-to-disk operations have been improved so that they can happen in parallel, the kernel hardware drivers have been given a new interrupt handing interface, and there is some improved efficiency in a performance-critical section of the multitasker.

NewsForge offers a preview of yellowTAB's upcoming Zeta 1.0 while elsewhere, the Haiku app_server is now able to draw to screen, accelerated, under Haiku.

After some months without releases, MonoDevelop 0.6 is now available . It uses GTK# 2.0.

A patchset against -CURRENT enables readonly XFS support for FreeBSD.

eComStation is an Internet enabled platform for business desktop computing. To keep users informed, Serenity Systems International published their roadmap.

As seen here and being discussed here, Sun has decided to restrict support for: