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.

Real will be distributing its RealPlayer 10 for Linux with both Red Hat and Novell/SuSE desktop Linux distributions. In other news, RealPlayer 10 for Mac OS X will be out this week.

Matt Dillon has announced the availability of DragonFly BSD's 1.0 Release Candidate #1. Changes and features include: variant symbolic links, UDF support, lightweight kernel threads, message passing, GCC 3.4 in the tree, binutils 2.14, Kernighan's awk 2004-02-07, BIND 9.2.4 rc4, CVS 1.12.8, libpcap 0.8.3, tcpdump 3.8.3, less 381, MMX/XMM kernel optimizations are now on by default, greatly improving bcopy/bzero/copyin/copyout performance for large (>4K) buffers, XIO, acpica5, new AC'97 codec support, network stack revamping, long standing bug fixes for wide variety of support and stability issues, and more. A final is expected in two weeks.