The Part two of the interview with Hillel and Tjeerd focuses on Microsoft's user experience work and corporate culture, the Mac competition, balancing current products with future developments.

New to Java? If you've gotten past the "Hello World" stage, this chapter from "Just Java 2" will help you understand Java application structure, the runtime internals (stack and heap), and the class "object."

PROMELA is not a programming language. PROMELA is a language for building verification models. As a result of this specialization, PROMELA contains many features that are not found in mainstream programming languages. These features are intended to facilitate the construction of high-level models of distributed systems. Gerard Holzmann provides an overview in this chapter from his book, "The SPIN Model Checker: Primer and Reference Manual."

"XandrosOS is a good-looking, Debian-based Linux distro designed to lure Windows XP users. It's exceptionally easy to install and use, has good hardware and peripheral detection and good multimedia support, offers Windows networking compatibility, saves one money -- and the desktop, a tweaked version of KDE, even looks like XP to boot." Read the review at TheRegister.

"I love my black cat. It has served me well since October with its new Finder, refined interface, Fast User Switching, and Exposé. I love Panther so much that I am willing to debate until the wee hours of the night with PC Zealots and die hard Classic supporters about its merits. Even in all of its glory, however, there is always room for improvement." Read the suggested improvements article at MacZealots.com.

Munich is struggling with its planned migration from proprietary software to open-source applications, according to news stories in the German press that paint an increasingly gloomy picture of what had originally been widely described as a shining success story for Linux.

eWEEK.com caught up with PalmSource CTO Larry Slotnick at this week's developer shindig to get an update on the new Palm OS, forthcoming plans and how the company "integrated" the BeOS ideas into the PalmOS.

As part of its initiative to put Linux on the desktop, IBM Corp. wants to migrate Microsoft Corp.'s Office suite to Linux. Microsoft said it's not involved and suggests that IBM might do it by emulation.

"The worst part about this is that the MCSEs involved are right: Linux can never be as good a Windows 2003 server as is Windows 2003. Linux isn't a cheaper form of Windows; direct substitution without change in thinking fails initially from a technology perspective and fails in the longer term from a cost perspective", says Paul Murphy.

VMware's CEO, Diane Greene, gives an interesting interview to IT-Director regarding the recently acquired company.

OperaJournal reviews the newly released Zeta RC2 Deluxe Edition. Screenshots included.

Data binding in its traditional sense means associating some underlying data with one or more user interface elements. The data provides the information to display. The user interface elements render the information in the appropriate format.

David LeBlanc introduces a C++ template class that helps reduce the chances of incurring integer arithmetic errors in your code. The code is fast, flexible, and easy to use. Get a handle on optimizing floating-point code using the Microsoft Visual C++ (v8.0) method of managing floating-point semantics. Create fast programs while ensuring that only safe optimizations are performed on floating-point code.

Microsoft's Research organization is preparing to publicly release in a few weeks the client application for its Aura research project, a researcher told attendees of the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. Research Sociologist Marc Smith, demonstrating Aura during his keynote presentation, explained that the project uses mobile devices to interact with physical objects to retrieve information about them from the Internet as well as to automatically capture and annotate data from them.