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.

When in the 2.5 builds the GNOME project changed directions of the ever infamous Nautilus to make the interface spatially oriented I was one of the skeptics. Yet, over the years I have used almost every type desktop configuration imaginable with very few that I found not to like or learn from at least at some points. With this in mind I was bound and determined to find the positives of the spatial file paradigm and, glean what I could from it.

From the DragonFly BSD Project website, "One year after starting the project as a fork off the FreeBSD-4.x tree, the DragonFly Team is pleased to announce our 1.0 release! ... We have done so much that it cannot all be listed here. Please check out the Diary for technical details."

The HP-UX kernel is a multitasking, multiuser, multiprocessor, multithreaded, load-leveling, supercalifragilisticexpialidocious modular operating system with real-time scheduling extensions. To get a handle on it, read this introduction to the basic organization of the kernel and its data structures.

Apple recently provided developers with a new pre-release beta of Xcode 1.5, an upgrade to Mac OS X's suite of development tools. Release notes for the beta say that Version 1.5 will feature dead-code stripping, code completion for Java, support for the Subversion source-code control system, AppleScriptable CodeWarrior importing, and AppleScript support in the native build system. Xcode 1.5 will also boast speed improvements, Ant templates, faster editor performance, remote debugging, and an enhanced debugger with a globals browser and memory browser.

"Folks in the software industry doubt Linux will suffer from the same kind of forking and fragmenting that limited Unix and its ISV support, but the idea may nevertheless be pushed as an offensive against Linux by Microsoft, which is already running ads in Europe depicting mutant penguins assembled with other animal parts as if to suggest they are unsure what they are." Read the article at NewsForge.

Microsoft is set to include its Services for Unix (SFU) add-on for Windows as an integral part of the next major release of the Windows server operating system, codenamed Longhorn and expected in 2007. Some analysts said the move could eventually sideline conventional Linux and Unix operating systems. A growing number of firms are using SFU, currently a free add-on for Windows 2000, 2003 and XP Professional, because it enables a single system to run Windows, Linux and Unix software.