Let me make it clear. I'm not a fan of Apple. I think that their products are overhyped, overpriced and underperforming. If you're looking for a fair unbiased opinion, you're looking in the wrong place. You've been warned. So, I was at Steve Jobs' 2004 WWDC keynote yesterday, attempting to take pictures for OSNews (an amazingly hard task, by the way, which really explained why people pay big bucks for big lenses equipped with image stabilizers). UPDATE: Stop reading right there, I have rewritten & updated the article here.

The Microsoft .NET Framework version 2.0 beta redistributable package is the most recent update and includes everything you need to run applications developed using the .NET Framework.

Well, Apple's done it again. They've seen a really cool (but simple) idea implemented in a third party shareware app and they've *ahem* been inspired by it to create some new functionality in the new version of Mac OS. This year's victim: Konfabulator. A short article at Mac Critic outlines the other "inspiration."

Microsoft has opened public betas for the upcoming Express edition of its Visual Studio product line as well as SQL Server. The products include "Visual Basic 2005 Express", "Visual C# 2005 Express", "Visual C++ 2005 Express", "Visual J# 2005 Express", "SQL Server 2005 Express" and an interesting "Visual Web Dev 2005 Express" for developing ASP.NET content in Visual Basic, C# or J#. The expected retail pricing for these products is $49-$99.

Seth Nickell put together a PDF file on the Storage concept and he also commented on his blog on it.

As Futurama's Professor Hubert Farnsworth usually says: "Good news everyone...". Apple introduced today its upcoming 64-bit enhanced Tiger operating system due in the first quarter of 2005. Click in for our report from today's WWDC opening which includes 18 pictures of the event.

DistroWatch includes a quick how-to on how to update your Slackware 10 to use a newer kernel.

MadPenguin reviews the free version of Xandros, complete with screenshots.

Sun is putting into the hands of the open-source community Project Looking Glass, its next-generation, 3-D Linux desktop system that has been receiving rave reviews.

This ReactOS release features the new LiveCD image, improved and more stable kernel and win32k kernel graphics subsystem, lots of networking foundation work, improved setup and better bundled explorer, command shell and drivers. Also included is newly ported user DLL code from WINE.

Most enablement efforts, for existing code using batch-oriented grid infrastructure software, are similar. There's a pattern you can follow. You can use this pattern to achieve the first three strategies of grid adoption.

This morning at WWDC Steve Jobs introduced three new Apple Cinema displays. The new 20, 23 and 30-inch displays will use the standard DVI connection instead of Apple's proprietary ADC connection. The 30 inch display, which can run at a resolution up to 2560x1600, will require a special dual link Nvidia card. To read more about what's new at WWDC, head over to MacCentral.

A ZDNet article notes that Sun's JavaOne conference, starting today, will likely have a more somber mood than the one in 2000, when Java was seemingly ruling the world. Sun is facing a two-front assault by Microsoft and Open Source, and though its Java platform is a bright spot in its business plan, many users are clamoring for Sun to cede more control over its direction or even free the source code. Some major Java vendors like BEA and IBM are bypassing Sun's "Java Community Process" and releasing Java extensions on their own.

The antitrust penalties that the EU laid down on Microsoft a few months ago will not be implemented until an appeals court has a chance to decide whether the penalties should be suspended for the entire length of the appeal, which is expected to be several years. Had this step not been taken, the penalties would have gone into effect today.