Given yesterday's exposure of the Microsoft PPT slides from WinHEC, Joe Beda takes the time to reply to some questions people had in the forums: he discusses about the importance of eye candy, Windows and 64bit, the Longhorn machine requirements and more.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced a few new developer tools but otherwise played a greatest-hits set before an audience of about 10,000 information technology professionals at the TechEd conference.

Linux & Open-Source Center Editor Steven Vaughan-Nichols wishes Sun would either embrace Linux or stop using Solaris on Intel as a pawn against it.

ThinkSecret reports some new details about Apple reorganization in two divisions (Macintosh and iPod). Longtime hardware developer Steve Sakoman, a former Palm and Be executive, had rejoined Apple Computer as a vice president and now he will lead iPod software development. Mr Sakoman was involved in the Mac II development and was the main guy behind the creation of the Newton. At Be, he designed the first generation H0bbit-based BeBox (the one that had 5 AT&T chips), back in the early days of Be. He later left and when he came back became Be's CTO and then PalmSource's exec.

More than two years ago we reviewed the first edition of the excellent book by Aaron Hillegass, "Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X". The second edition has just being released and we will be taking a quick look as to what's new.

The current version of MorphOS 1.5 has been presented at PUSH. From the slides of a presentation given at the show you can see these improvements. There is also a video (12 MB) available.

If you're tired of creating zillions of dialog boxes needed for your application's UI, try the Qt GUI toolkit! In just a few steps, you can build great-looking dialogs that are automatically resizable, skip from one language to another, and even switch with ease from reading left-to-right to reading right-to-left.

This is the Platform SDK for Windows XP Service Pack 2 Release Candidate 1. Developers can use this to build and test pre-release applications for Windows XP Service pack 2.

"The Power Mac G5 is a formidable machine, representing a giant leap in performance over the G4. But the 64-bit transition so far only represents a small step. Even though there's not much of a benefit from 64-bit computing yet, this marks the beginning of a new era for Apple, where the 64-bit world will enable new capabilities for the content creation community" the reviewer concludes in his benchmark article.

The Russian security site securitylab.ru reported that the source code of the CISCO IOS 12.3, 12.3t operating system has probably been stolen. The leak of Cisco's source code for its latest network devices will not result in a large number of discovered vulnerabilities, security experts said.

"I'm not sure what to think about Longhorn yet. On the one hand, it looks like it will potentially be a truly revolutionary new version of Windows that has all kinds of new potential built into it. On the other hand, it looks like it could be made into the most proprietary operating system ever. One in which only Microsoft can extend or do anything meaningful to it." Read the editorial by Stardock's Brad Wardell.

The Sun-Tomax solution was to get rid of the Windows servers and substitute a cluster of eight Sun servers running Linux sitting in a data-center that is professionally managed in a high-availability environment. Soon, the companies plan to add six more servers to that cluster, according to Klingler.

In this new version, there is more refinement on the UI (layout, new icons, Look'n'Feel), and the editor now supports code folding.

First, allow me to say that I have only been using Linux for about 5 months, so I'm a comparative newbie to many in the Linux world. I don't make presumptions to know everything. With that in mind, this review is not geared toward the Linux veteran, but for people who have more curiosity than experience with Linux.