Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was in a lighthearted mood during a swing through the Netherlands, but did he give a serious clue about Longhorn?

Here you can find a show report of last weekend's multi-platform 'Fun of Computing 2004' event which was held in Ilmenau, Germany. The highlight was a demonstration of AmigaOS4. These presentation sheets from a French Amiga event which was held one week prior to this event, shows the current development status of AmigaOS4.

While the benefits of virtual machines on a workstation may be quite straightforward, there are more far-reaching ramifications for virtual machines on a server. Micrososft's Virtual Server 2005 integrates with Microsoft's management & third-party tools, while VMware's Virtual Server GSX has its own virtual infrastructure management software called VirtualCentre and can also integrate with third-party tools.

Linare Corp sent us in the Pro version of their Linare Linux flavor. We are taking a quick look at the product, at it's advantages and occasional... missteps.

Red Hat Inc. recently announced a project to provide a centralized management solution for connected and disconnected users that provides administrators with tight control over the systems they manage, using the same tools for connected and disconnected users.

GP Software have released the latest edition of Directory Opus, aka DOpus. In skipping revision numbers from v6 to v8, DOpus has gained a vast amount of flexibility for viewing and managing different document types. Some of the highlights include:

Over the last few weeks there were a lot of articles and discussions about how to manage a project well. From commercial success to user support nearly every subject was set on proof. However, after I've read the comments to the articles my conclusion was very plain: some minds will never change!

Fixes and enhancements made since BETA6 on FreeBSD 5.3: fix timekeeping on sparc64 and alpha that would result in the day of the week being stored incorrectly in NVRAM; add support to the fxp driver for the ICH6 chipset; fix the panic on detach problem with USB hubs; import BIND 9.3.0, this completely replaces the old BIND 8.x nameserver in the base system; fix panic when allocating swap on a busy system; fix loader crash when using the 'lsdev' command".

Trove, an open source Java collection package, provides an efficient alternative to the core Java collection classes, especially for implementing collections whose keys or values are primitive types.

Learn the basics of Windows graphics programming as you build a lightweight game. Between the use of software patterns and the graphics techniques, you'll polish your fundamental programming skills while having a bit of fun.

A free technology preview for Windows XP Embedded with Service Pack 2 (SP2) is available for download and testing. Enhancements coming in Service Pack 2 include stronger default security settings, advanced remote device management, and additional networking and multimedia features that enable further device innovation. Microsoft also announced today Windows Embedded for Point of Service, a new standardized software platform for POS terminals, which will be based on Windows XP Embedded with SP2.

There's an interesting interview with the project leader for Gentoo Linux PPC and Gentoo Mac OS, a Portage port to PPC.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says the task of trying to stay one step ahead of virus writers and hackers will be a never-ending battle.

Xfce 4.2 includes many new features and several new applications, as you can see here. You can download the test it here and rate the desktop environment here. Xfce Window Manager also includes an embedded compositing manager for the newer X.org 6.8.x (screenshot).