Personal computing is about to undergo a fundamental transformation, if industry cheerleaders are to be believed -- and to stunning effect. Rebounding basketballs or ricocheting bullets in today's computer games, shown only as rough approximations of reality, will become more true-to-life. Voice recognition, now so error-prone as to be scarcely usable, will morph into a dependable tool as computers become able to understand and execute complex verbal commands.

On Saturday March 20, I spent my lazy Saturday morning browsing the web for Linux news. I surfed over to DistroWatch.com & read the latest happenings in regards to Linux distributions. I read a news blurb on latest release of dyne:bolic 1.2. dyne:bolic is self described as a free multimedia studio in a GNU/Linux live CD. I was intrigued by the prospect of playing with a multimedia studio on live CD that won't interfere with my PC's current setup. I downloaded the ISO via Azureus Java bittorrent client. I burned it to CDR using K3B and booted my DAW off the dyne:bolic CD.

The European Commission's order for Microsoft Corp. to ship a version of Windows without the Windows Media Player could stifle innovation and help Microsoft's rivals instead of promoting fair competition, the U.S. Department of Justice's antitrust chief said Wednesday.

Mandrake 10 has it, SUSE's rolling it out in 9.1, Gentoo has had a "test" version with it since last year, and now we'll probably see almost every commercial distribution move to 2.6.x within the next month or two because of competitive pressure . This is not in line with the basic "it's ready when it's ready" dictum that is given as the reason open source software is often technically superior to proprietary competitors, says NewsForge.

Trusted Computing (TC) continues to be one of the most controversial technologies to come along in many years. Ross Anderson's (anti) TCPA FAQ, Lucky Green's apocalyptic DEFCON presentation, and sites such as notcpa.org and againsttcpa.com are full of predictions of online disaster if TC technology is allowed to go forward.

Qt# is back: a new build system has been hacked into place to avoid dependency on Portable.NET's csant. Miscellaneous bugfixes have also been made to this version.

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.

The presentation subsystem in "Longhorn" (code-named "Avalon") provides powerful new APIs for input. This article gives an overview of these APIs: What services are provided to applications, the architecture of the input system, and how new input devices can be supported.

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

Dare Obasanjo looks at the available options for representing XML-based data that is shared between components within a single process/AppDomain and discusses the design tradeoffs of each approach.

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.

Last week I reviewed Win4Lin, a solution that makes it possible to run certain versions of Microsoft Windows on Linux. This week CrossOver Office is the next tool I am going to have a look at. Again my main focus will be programs I need to run myself.

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.

In a decision that could affect consumers, competitors and PC makers, the European Commission requires Microsoft to unbundle Media Player from Windows and pay a $613 million fine.