Windows Server 2003 for 64-Bit Extended Systems provides high performance for both 32-bit and 64-bit applications on the same system. The underlying architecture is based on 64-bit extensions to the industry-standard x86 instruction set, allowing today's 32-bit applications to run natively on 64-bit extended processors such as AMD Opteron. At the same time, new 64-bit applications are executed in 64-bit mode, which processes more data per clock cycle, allows greater access to memory, and speeds numeric calculations. Read the newly published information here.

Gates' keynote address features new Media Center technologies, MSN Services and smart watches for MSN Direct; Gates highlights growing role of software in consumer electronics. Here is the web siet for the newly announced Media Center Devices.

"Overall, and more so for its targeted market, Xandros 2.0 is a very well thought out and put together distribution. That's not to say Xandros is perfect, or perfect for everyone, but it is an excellent place to start for people coming from Windows who want to use Linux and don't care about learning all the interworkings of the operating system." Read the review at LinuxReview.

Some say that Microsoft's major markets are mature and saturated. What lies ahead for the software giant? A retrospective and overview on the issue here.

"The FreeBSD installation process requires what many Windows users would likely call "a lot of command-line interaction." Coming from a Windows environment to something like FreeBSD takes a bit of getting used to, if you have to install the operating system yourself. If you're slightly above average in experience, I'd say go for it; you'll like it, and you should have no trouble to speak of." Read the installation overview at NewsForge.

This document attempts to give a hacker over-friendly answer to the question "What is Mac OS X?".

Voice User Interfaces (VUIs) are a new concept to many who now have the task of doing everything it takes to develop a VoiceXML application. This (old but interesting) article describes the difference between the VUI and the long-familiar GUI.

There is now an Exposé-clone available for Windows-users to purchase. Exposé is a new function of managing open windows on Mac OS X Panther.

Novell, who recently acquired both German Linux distributor SUSE and Gnome developer Ximian, Inc., announced Tuesday the release of Ximian Desktop 2 for SUSE Linux 9. The story is also here.

A lot of waiting and criticism has being wasted on Gnome/GTK's new file selector window. I decided to give my two cents on how I would personally perceive a good GTK+ file selector and make an honest suggestion. Special thanks to Tigert who gave me the motivation to work on this earlier today.

Apple today previewed Xgrid, a computational clustering technology from Apple’s Advanced Computation Group (ACG). Xgrid helps scientists and others working in compute intensive environments to fully utilize all IT resources, including desktops and servers, by creating a grid enabled "virtual" IT environment that takes advantage of unused computing capacity to run batch and workload processing.

On the eve of the giant annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Microsoft is set to deep-six its short-lived Windows XP Media Center Edition, according to industry reports received by The Register.

Firebird 1.5 Linux CS RC8 released. This RC has many small enhancements in install procedure made by Mark O'Donohue and it should install more "smoothly". Additionally, this is the first RC built with external debug info which you can download separately.

Mandrake Linux 10.0-preview edition pretty much defines the shape of things to come in Linux land in 2004. With Kernel 2.6, KDE 3.2 beta and XFree86 4.4 beta, it doesn't leave much to be desired. This article refers to cooker snapshot as of December 31, 2003. Please note that this release is not a beta release. This is not even an alpha release. Its just something put together to show what we can expect from Mandrake 10.0. This release comes on only two CDs so some of the packages are missing. And as there are bound to be lot of bugs in this kind of release, I'll be concentrating more on the usability aspect. So let's see if it is worth drooling over.