Has it been three years already? A quick glance at the calendar tells us that the date is March 24, 2004, three years to the day after Mac OS X 10.0 began shipping. Join Mac.Ars in a trip down memory lane as they look at three years of Unix-y/NeXT-y/pinstripe-y goodness on the Macintosh.

Recent advocacy from Havoc Pennington and Miguel de Icaza may disagree on the exact high-level language to use for GNOME, but they both agree that a change needs to be made. However, Edd Dumbill thinks the debate so far has been taking a rather introspective view. To focus purely on language choice is to miss the biggest part of the picture, he says.

Bill Gates launched the combined VSLive!, Microsoft Mobile DevCon, and AVIOS SpeechTEK conferences on Wednesday, March 24, 2004 with his keynote speech to a standing-room-only crowd at San Francisco's Moscone Center West. The first of the three demos showed new productivity features for VB developers in the Visual Studio .NET 2005 Community Technical Preview (CTP). The CTP is the second preview of the next version of VS.NET, formerly known as "Whidbey," scheduled for release in the first half of 2005.

Syllable gets a beta of a brand new installer and an ISO is up for testing. Update: A VMWare driver too.

Parts 1 – 6 of this series describe a service domain that represents a collection of comparable or related Web services through a common services entry point. In this article, we discuss how to keep up with the information that is available from the service domain. Why should you and why shouldn't you care about the information? We introduce several ways of using the information and discuss some approaches for optimizing its management.

Slashdot reports that Sun CEO Scott McNealy has finally answered the long awaited question that has been on the minds of open source and Java developers and the answer is "no". He stated today that Sun sees no solution solved from open sourcing Java that isn't already addressed.

Microsoft plans to formally announce later Wednesday an update to Windows Mobile, the company's operating system for handhelds and cell phones. The press release is here while a translated article with many screenshots showing the new features of the new Windows Mobile operating system is here (IE now sports SSR, support for Landscape and VGA modes, pixel doubling etc).

Novell, which sells Linux for servers and desktop computers, is considering a move into the market for embedded computing for devices such as cell phones and vending machines. Elsewhere, IBM has made a promised $50 million investment in new Linux power Novell, tightening the companies' technology partnership. Similarly, HP is expanding its own Novell relationship with a push into desktop PCs.

Apple has released Xgrid Preview 2, the latest version of its powerful computational clustering software that turns a group of Macs into a supercomputer.

From the PR: :"Microsoft Corp. today took another step forward in its strategy to make the business value of speech technology more broadly available to mainstream enterprise companies as Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates launched Microsoft Speech Server 2004 at the co-located AVIOS~SpeechTEK Spring 2004, Microsoft Mobile Developer Conference (DevCon) 2004 and Fawcette Technical Publications' VSLive! San Francisco 2004 events." Elsewhere, Microsoft has announced XNATM, a powerful next-generation software development platform. XNA empowers developers to deliver breakthrough games while combating rising production costs and ever-increasing hardware complexity.

If you are a Linux kernel and device driver developer with a moderate level of experience, the benefit of using the DSF template is twofold: You can develop test cases faster and more consistently since the DSF template can be used for many different tests. Also, you can target specific areas of the kernel for execution, which eliminates the typical userspace test case hit-or-miss approach to executing kernel code. This article will get you started simulating devices of your choice.

This document aims to combine the experience of many of the top KDE developers about Qt and KDE frameworks dos and dont's and provide a good source of advice to new KDE programmers.

The Syllable Team is pleased to announce that Gcc 3.3.3 and Binutils 2.14 are now available for download in Syllable. A new Glibc version is also under way.

The Mac maker suffers a snub at the hands of software powerhouse Adobe Systems, manages to shuttle its Xserve G5 server out the door after a month's delay, and gets a tip on the iPod and iTunes from RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser, while Wal-Mart now offers cheaper song downloads at .88 cents.