A lot was brewing at Sun Microsystems' recent JavaOne developer conference in San Francisco, California. Between bouts of latter-gulping, M. Madhavan checked out what was happening with Sun's platform-independent programming language.

The other day I attended the Chat with the Internet Explorer team. While I found it interesting and the fact that Microsoft is opening itself up more to the public by allowing developers to blog and allowing more public exposure at their conferences I will say I was very disappointed in the chat. Microsoft totally ignored the issues and the questions that really mattered were deflected and basically passed on for something more that Microsoft wanted to talk about.

Datamation takes a look at OpenVMS. Thought by many to be long since dead and buried, the OpenVMS operating system persists inside many enterprises.

Could Apple be skimping on Windows integration with its forthcoming "Tiger" version of Mac OS X? Support for Mac clients in the enterprise still looks scant to many on the front lines, says eWEEK.

The beta release of Progeny Debian 2.0 Developer Edition is now available. "This version of Progeny Debian was built using the new Anaconda for Debian, based on Anaconda from Fedora Core 2, and contains many updates to components from Debian's current testing distribution ("sarge")." This is the second snapshot of Progeny Debian 2.0 Developer Edition and it contains three ISO images.

After personal computers arrived in the 1970's they went through a series of revolutionary changes delivered by a series of different platforms. It's been over a decade since we've seen anything truly revolutionary, will we see a revolution again? I believe we could not only see revolution again, we could build it today.

Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer came out swinging -- verbally and even physically at times, at the Worldwide Partner Conference where he mocked open source technology, Linux in particular, while touting opportunities on the company's own platforms. During a keynote address, Ballmer also identified Novell customers as prime targets for Microsoft's partners to pick off as potential new customers.

Steve Jobs is not attending the Macworld event in Boston this week, though a panel moderator laid a black turtleneck and jeans on an empty seat in his honor. Early Apple engineers took advantage of the absence of Steve's reality distortion field™ and discussed Apple's early days and setting the record straight about the origins of the mac.

John Gruber has written an in-depth look at Apple's filesystem work and Tiger's new Spotlight search technology by John Gruber. Since the introduction of OS X, Apple's HFS+ filesystem has taken a lot of abuse "from the peanut gallery," but it has seen steady improvements, and Dominic Giampaolo (of BeFS fame) has extended it further to support Spotlight.

The Jackito PDA, which they're calling a TDA (Tactile Digital Assistant) because it uses only the thumbs to control and no stylus, has been announced by French company Novinit. It has in interesting internal architecture, with 7 parallel processors, allowing speed and power savings. They claim that a single AA battery will last a few months. It runs an OS called 3ActilOS but the site doesn't have very much information on it. The images on the web site look like Photoshop jobs, so we'll be interested to see if the $600 machines that they're selling actually exist.

Fedora Core 3 Test 1 has been released for download. See the announcement here.

Onebase Linux Project has created a special flavor of itsOnebaseGo Live CD that comes with a complete KDE 3.3 Beta desktop and Koffice 1.3.2. It is intended for reporting bugs in KDE and as a Technology preview. It can be installed to hard-disk to have a fully functional Onebase Linux OS. However it is not meant for production use and only users who prefer using the unstable repository are recommended to perform an HD-installation.

Congratulations to the winners of the Gnomefiles.org prizes for developers who submited applications during the launch. Our launch was very successful, and dozens of apps were submitted in the first few days. I'm pleased to announce that the following people won our prizes.

ADO.NET 2.0 includes a new base-class provider model, features for all providers, and changes to System.Data.SqlClient. Get an overview of these new features, examples of their use, and a chart of which features are provider-neutral and SqlClient-specific. Elsewhere, get an overview of the new services, controls, and features in ASP.NET 2.0.