Rob Enderle visits Intel's Lab to see what's cooking in the fab. And what he finds should give IBM and Apple reason to grab their torches and pitchforks, he claims.

The next version of Windows is still several years away, but PC Magazine offers a sneak peek. Take a guided tour of the 4072 build of Longhorn from the disc handed to WinHEC attendees in Seattle. PCMag has a preview too. Also, Microsoft plans to release versions of Longhorn, for Itanium and 64-bit extended systems as well as a 32-bit edition, a company spokesman said Wednesday.

The next version of Windows will sport some fancy, three-dimensional graphics, but for those with an older video card (as in the case of Mac OS X on non-QuartzExtreme capable gfx cards), Longhorn will look a lot like Windows 2000. Elsewhere, Microsoft seeks to merge Flash & hard drive storage.

Jeremy Hogan's commentary, Red Hat's community relations manager, is a response to NewsForge's Joe Barr, who asserted earlier this week that the company had given numerous confusing messages about its intent to enter the desktop market.

After reading the recent article by a user who has switched to a Mac I thought I'd write of my experience. I've was used a Mac from October 2002 to March 2004. It was provided to me when I started working for another PPC manufacturer but they are not really in the same market and in any case don't make laptops.

Resellers are enthusiastic about recent moves by Novell and Red Hat to move Linux onto the desktop but warn that fear of the unknown and missing applications are holding progress back. Asked if he thought Linux was ready to grace the desktops of the average business Philip Burgess, sales manager at Sire Technology, said: "Blimey, I've just put the phone down after talking to SUSE Linux - I'm going to see them next week."

If you're coming from a different programming background, one feature of XSLT (all versions) may seem especially difficult to grasp. I'm not referring to the XML-based syntax; once you get a feel for it, it is surprisingly transparent (even if bulky). For many novices, much more puzzling is XSLT's lack of an assignment operator. Read the article at DevChannel.

"With price-performance, we've seen a lot of interest in our products coming from places we never dreamed we'd seen an Apple logo," Apple director of server software Tom Goguen told MacNewsWorld. "I believe we'll have lots of opportunities -- we'll hit video hard and we'll succeed -- but over the long term, we'll be even more successful outside the video market." Read the analysis at MacNewsWorld. Elsewhere, Apple Computer is preparing its developer forces for yet another run through the jungle with its next Mac OS X build, code-named Tiger.

In the Unix world of computing, it is possible to exchange your window manager with an advanced one. The window manager's main purpose is to move/resize windows on the screen. These improved window managers differ from the way people are used to interact with windows in the Microsoft Windows world.

The new programming model of grid services allows applications to be abstracted through their interface, enabling cross-platform and cross-programming language interoperability. This article demonstrates this by showing how to implement and deploy an existing application as a grid service using the IBM® Grid Toolbox for Multiplatform.

Zonker wrote a review of the Sun JDS 1 at Unixreview, in the dawn of the JDS 2 release.

Microsoft officials poured cold water on a published report that said its Next-Generation Secure Computing Base (NGSCB, code-named Palladium) project is being canned. "The project is continuing full steam ahead. It's alive and kicking and we're very excited about it. The vision has been refined over the last year but it's absolutely not true that it's being killed," MS product manager Mario Juarez said.

It would appear that a little tinkering with Longhorn's DLL files allows users to enable a few DWM effects. These include fancy drop shadows on windows, and nice longhorn style icons are noticable on the left of the title bars. Also, animation is visible when opening windows. Also, this review takes a look at what is new in the recently released Longhorn build which was given to WinHEC attendees. Update: Screenshots of Longhorn Build 4074. MSDN subscribers can now download an ISO of the build.

Konstantin Ryabitsev sent a funny message to the development discussions related to Fedora Core, published at LWN. In the meantime, Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik answered to this querstion: "So is Red Hat Consumer Desktop next?": "Now that's interesting. That won't be function-based, it'll be form-based. And when you look at the computing you and I will be using over the next 10 years, we won't have software resident on our hard drive. You'll go to somebody -- it may well be Red Hat -- and you'll get an e-mail package, a calendaring function, and it will be a subscription-based Web service. It's not that far away, look at what people do with their cellular phones today."