(Note: First published in the Mercury News in January, 1984): "When Apple Computer Inc. rolls out its Macintosh computer on Jan. 24, the company's self-proclaimed ``pirates'' will have delivered their treasure. Since 1981, when Macintosh took form in an internal memo, Apple founder Steve Jobs, now 28, has led a maverick clan of programmers and designers on a mission to prove that the success of the Apple II was not a fluke."

Some of the more experienced among the readers can surely configure CUPS with Samba by editing configuration files with closed eyes. This kind of exercise is useful and fun the first few times, but it can quickly become a mundane task if it has to repeated often. Wouldn't it be nice if we had a distribution that could do it near-automatically? In other words, wouldn't it be nice if we just used Xandros? And despite our natural resistance to use GUI for any kind of configuration, could we still love Xandros? Robert Storey investigates.

MSDN posted three articles describing the new features found on Longhorn and the next VisualStudio.

The BSD family of Unix-like operating systems evolved from the last release of 4.4BSD, released by the University of California some years ago. This article discusses why you might want to run the -current branch of NetBSD, how you would go about it, and a bit of what could go wrong.

HP has issued patches for HP-UX. These fixes are for an old vulnerability, which potentially can cause DoS and the for dtterm.

"One of my dirty little secrets is that I have never successfully installed Linux on anything. I've tried many times over the years, because I bought into the idea that it could revitalize old computers. I'd cobble together a 486 processor, some no-name disk controller, a clonky old hard disk, a VGA card from the Boer War, and off we'd go. My Linux experience terminated shortly thereafter with an incomprehensible error message concerning IRQ 9, lost interrupts or goblins in the bidirectional bus buffers." Read the commentary at ZDNews.

Both Apple and Advanced Micro Devices are producing 64-bit processors for consumer PCs. Apple put its new PowerPC G5 chips into its latest line of Macintosh desktops, and AMD has several flavors of its Athlon 64 processor, which is found in computers from various manufacturers. Read the rest of the article at Houston Chronicle.

Will a rising tide of technology spending raise all boats? Sun Microsystems Inc.'s quarterly results underscored a growing consensus that a recovery in technology spending is underway. But analysts on Friday questioned whether the network computer maker will lag in the good times as it has in the bad.

In the dawn of the news that well known artist Everaldo, of CrystalSVG fame, now works for Lindows.com, a long discussion has started on kde-core-devel because Everaldo hasn't released the source code of some of the SVG icons that was supposed to be shipped with KDE 3.2. Update: Lindows.com's Kevin Carmony (President & COO) responds.

Microsoft is considering an expansion of a program that would allow companies to see the source code underlying its Office software and other applications. Elsewhere, the U.S. Justice Department on Friday expressed concern that Microsoft has not completely lived up to its agreement to disclose Windows communications protocols, as required by a 2002 antitrust agreement.

OSFocus.net have just posted an report from last month's Microsoft UK Platform Developer Briefing, which took place on the 12th of December 2003. The report outlines the events of the day, and also introduces some of the features of Microsoft Longhorn and its associated technologies.

Here is the sixth lesson in MacDevCenter's ongoing Cocoa tutorial series.

Yesterday we reported on NBOR's Blackspace/Dyoun followed Assosiated Press' reports. Blackspace is a new way of doing things in computing. The free NBOR player was made available for download last night and it included a number of pre-recorded demos of what Blackspace can do. Based on these demos, here is what we think about the product.

Today yellowTAB announced that Zeta RC2 has gone to press and will be entering retail channels within the next couple of weeks. This new release candidate incorporates hundreds of changes and bugfixes since the RC1 including many submissions from users. A few days ago a misunderstanding aroused among the Zeta customers and YellowTAB regarding the free availability of RC2 or not. RC2 is just RC1 with Service Packs 2 and 3 applied. Current customers will receive the ServicePack 3 download for free. They will also have the option of getting an RC2 CD at an upgrade price.