Apple's recent announcement of Spoken Interface has moved speech recognition to the forefront. However, Mac OS X has included speech recognition and synthesis technologies for quite some time, and in this article MacDevCenter delves into the often misunderstood world of talking to your Mac.

Microsoft's last-ditch talks aimed at reaching a settlement with the European Union and avoiding antitrust action have failed, paving the way for a landmark legal ruling next week.

Microsoft recognises the benefits of open source but is not prepared to turn over its Windows operating system to the paradigm. Instead, Microsoft provides access to source code on a limited basis, said a Microsoft representative.

Here is a positive Mandrake-Linux-10.0 Community Edition review with screenshots.

Microsoft apologized to jurors for its past anticompetitive practices during opening statements Wednesday in a case alleging the company's antitrust violations include word processing and spreadsheet software. "Yes, we acknowledge that and we apologize for it," said David Tulchin, a Microsoft attorney. "The conduct involved competition that went over the line. The question for you is whether or not consumers were overcharged."

The release candidate of Windows XP SP2 offers several new features not offered in the first beta that shipped in December, including the Windows Security Center accessible from the Windows Control Panel, the Pop-up Blocker on by default and for consumers, the Windows Update V5 RC1.

In response to Havoc Pennington's post on the future of open source desktop development, GNOME's in particular, two prominent GNOME and Mono Hackers, Miguel de Icaza and Paolo provide their interesting perspective on the subject here and here.

The FreeBSD January-February 2004 Status Report has been published to the freebsd-current and freebsd-stable mailing lists. The archived messages are available online here, and the report is here.

As a student I am quite often confronted with (closed-source) Windows programs. These days there are a few tools that can help running Windows applications on Linux. One of these tools is Win4Lin, Win4Lin allowsone to install Windows 95, 98 and ME under Linux. The Windows NT branch is not supported yet, because Win4Lin sets up a special DOS environmentin which Windows runs.

Apple is developing a major upgrade to Remote Desktop, the company's desktop management and screen-sharing software, Think Secret has learned. Sources said Apple Remote Desktop 2 will boast standards-based reporting, task scheduling, VNC support, and other new features.

AMD PowerNow support as found on AMD K6 cpus, the k6-2/3+ models now works on OpenBSD while SMP is going ahead too.

This site is dedicated to the preservation of GUI systems. Would be great if readers with access to older versions or other systems could enrich the collection.

At the 19th annual Technology & Persons with Disabilities Conference, which is taking place this week in Los Angeles, Apple announced "Spoken Interface," an upcoming Mac OS X feature that allows those with visual and learning disabilities to use a Mac through speech, audible cues and keyboard navigation. Read more at MacMinute.

This article is intended on helping those that are interested in either switching to Linux or are curious as to what Linux has to offer. Flexbeta tries to cover the basic components of a desktop and how Fedora can perform these basic tasks.