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.

Members of the "xbox-windows project" recently announced that Windows CE .NET is now booting on the Xbox. "Currently, we have a partial BSP for CE .NET 4.20, and working PCI, USB, Display, and Mouse drivers. Most of the "important" parts of the BSP are done, however some features are still lacking or bug ridden. We also have a simple, preliminary bootloader based on xbeboot from the xbox-linux project. With these in place, CE loads and runs properly, but is not yet very useful." WindowsForDevices contacted the project's originator, who prefers to be known by the pseudonym "Artifex", to gain insight into the project's origins, goals, and plans for the future. The result is this interview.

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.

When Knoppix was first released it was heralded as revolutionary in the Linux world. Its autodetection and configuration capabilities were unsurpassed. Many of my colleagues remarked that if 'KNOPPIX can't do it, Linux can't do it'. Theoretically, one would be able to get a Knoppix CD, pop it into an arbitrary system, run it, save one's data to a partition, USB stick, etc....), reboot and the existing system would be left completely as it was before the CD was placed in the system.

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

"I've heard a lot of negatives about LindowsOS since its debut. I've heard the installation procedure encourages users to run as root, and worse, to do so without a password. I've heard the company doesn't adhere to the GPL by providing access to the source code for LindowsOS. I've also heard the company didn't play nice with others at a desktop Linux trade show last year. From personal experience I know company reps are a lot more eager to talk to the Windows trade press than to the Linux press." Read the review at NewsForge by Joe Barr.

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.

The C programming language defines two standard memory management functions: malloc() and free(). C programmers frequently use those functions to allocate buffers at run time to pass data between functions. In many situations, however, you cannot predetermine the actual sizes required for the buffers, which may cause several fundamental problems for constructing complex C programs. This article advocates a self-managing, abstract data buffer. It outlines a pseudo-C implementation of the abstract buffer and details the advantages of adopting this mechanism.

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.

Martin Hansen draws parallels between our 8bit ancestors and today's computers.

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.

"The recent release of Xandros Linux 2.0 marks an important milestone in the company's short history. Not only is the Linux desktop market growing and changing in ways we never imagined, but the inner workings of the distro have been completely updated to more modern standards. Xandros has caught up with the rest of the Linux world and things couldn't be better. In this market, they should turn into a major contender for the Windows conversion revolution." Read MadPenguin's review here, ours is here.

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.

As of this writing Steve Jobs' keynote is taking place, he has already announced a new Final Cut version, a new XServe, a new MS Office for Mac, iTunes and iLife 04, GarageBand, iPod Mini and more. View the keynote live or go to MacMinute for up to the minute updates.