If you take Apple at its word, the company has no long-term strategy of aiming its products beyond its traditional markets. That message was repeated every which way I posed the question to Jon Rubinstein, Apple's senior vice president of hardware engineering, when we sat down at the 2004 Macworld. In the context of an Xserve road map, I asked Rubinstein whether Apple built products with a target audience in mind. The answer was no. “It was our customers who asked us to build these products,” Rubinstein said. It seems video editors in particular wanted more performance, he added.

Steve Jobs says analysts should stop worrying about market share and focus on profits. And moving the company beyond Macs could boost both. Yet Apple's market share has slipped inexorably. It dropped from 9.4% in 1993 to just 3% in 1997, the year Jobs was rehired to run the company. According to Gartner's preliminary market-share data, Apple held just 1.8% of the worldwide PC market in the fourth quarter of 2003. And some think Apple's share will fall further, if it can't keep pace with surging overall PC demand. In the meantime, the Street yawned when Jobs & Co. recently reported strong results, citing slack sales of the new G5 and ignoring plenty of good news.

This paper by veteran real-time instructor David Kalinsky provides an introduction to the subject of task scheduling, from the perspective of novice embedded systems software developers. It begins with a survey of simple "home-made" task schedulers. Then it introduces the concept of preemption and priority-based preemptive schedulers, as used in off-the-shelf real-time operating systems. It ends with a glimpse into deadline scheduling for hard real-time systems.

Daniel Stone writes over at Slashdot: "A short time ago, freedesktop.org xlibs 1.0 was released. Simply put, this is the collection of libX11, libXext, and other little-used libraries that kind of power your whole desktop. The xlibs team at fd.o are now maintaining all these libraries, and more, and we're going to be making releases as part of the fd.o platform, which is far more wide-ranging, but it still forms an important part of the platform. Share and enjoy!"

Microsoft will release Service Pack 2 for Windows XP (both Home and Professional) in the first half of 2004. PCMag's look at the beta version, released to testers in December, revealed a number of interesting security enhancements in Web browsing, e-mail, and networking.

This study is going to be significant from the standpoint of OS development and the inability of governments to 'stem the flow of information'. Most, if not all, of the people in this survey want only a "turn key" solution for their computer activities.