Today, MacOS X has made Apple the world's largest Unix workstation manufacturer while Microsoft advertises (but can't yet deliver) a reinvented Pick OS for the Internet age. As someone like Dave Barry might say, you couldn't make this stuff up on a bet.

This article discusses a "Minority Report"-alike user interface developed at Microsoft (video here). In the meantime, Windows Forms 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005 (both codenamed "Whidbey") are the next release of Microsoft’s smart client platform and tools.

BlueEyedOS reports that after a few weeks of hard work, compilation and linking of OpenTracker is now complete, and seems almost ready to make it work properly. In the meantime, OpenBeOS gets some ethernet drivers and the ability to run BeOS-native command line apps.

This article aims to provide an insight into some aspects of KDE usability as seen by a long term Gnome user making the switch, as well as provide a mini-review of SUSE LIVE CD 9.1 - including the obligatory screenshot of course!

Mandrakesoft today announced the availability of Mandrakelinux 10.0 Official for the AMD64 platform (Athlon64 and Opteron). Mandrakelinux 10.0 for AMD64 delivers all the features and robustness of Mandrakelinux 10.0 Official to the 64-bit platform from AMD, with an average performance gain of 20% compared to the IA32 version. Read more for the rest of the PR:

In their keynotes at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference, Jim Allchin and Bill Gates plan to stress the value of melding hardware and software innovation, as well as demonstrating what some of Microsoft's new technologies can do. In the meantime, Bill Gates confirms that there will be no AMD Windows 64 until Q4, but he calls for 64-bit software support.

A recent discussion on the lkml looked into a reproducable random file I/O regression in 2.6 compared to the 2.4 kernel. Alexey Kopytov posted the benchmark results, attempting to simulate the workload of a database under intensive load. The tests were tried with all I/O schedulers, including the anticipatory, deadline and CFQ, and in all cases 2.4 outperformed 2.6. Read the report at KernelTrap.

Concerns about open source use can fuel internal naysayers at the acquiror who favor an internal solution over acquisition, says LinuxInsider. Embedded open source software may raise questions about maintaining segregation of the acquired code after the acquisition or potential costs to replace portions of the acquired code base.

The KOffice team is proud to announce the first bugfix version in KOffice 1.3 series.

As reported at MacCentral, Apple CEO Steve Jobs will preview Mac OS X 10.4, codenamed Tiger, in his keynote speech at the upcoming Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) this June. More details on Apple's website.

Microsoft's big new product is way overdue, according to Times. And Linux is challenging Windows' desktop dominance. What will it take to get the software titan moving again?

Knoppix, the most popular LiveCD linux distribution (a complete linux distribution that boots off a CD-Rom) version 3.4 is out. New features include Kernel 2.6 (default is still 2.4), KDE 3.2.2, OpenOffice.org 1.1.1 and Gimp 2.0. Complete changelog, torrent.

Apple on Monday released Security Update 2004-05-03 via the Mac OS X Software Update preference pane. More info at MacMinute.

This years first festival of BeOSing was held again at the Dusseldorf Youth Hostel April 17-18th April 2004. As ever it started on the Friday night and these days you can also stay the Sunday night, I missed number 11 (which I am told was the biggest ever) but I made it this time for my 8th BeGeistert. Article includes 6 pages of pictures.