After 1-2 years of waiting, Microsoft has finally updated their Windows Media Player for OSX and brings version 9 to the Mac. Along with it, it also brings DRM and a Safari browser plugin. Now, someone go tell Yahoo! to fix their code so the Safari WMV/A plugin can work with launch.yahoo.com.

"Apple thoroughly overhauled a large portion of its server operating system in this release. This is the most significant change to the Mac OS since Apple moved from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X" says the AFP548 web site on their review of Mac OS X Server Panther.

ISOs and Changelog information about Mandrake's AMD64-RC1 Linux can be found here.

At an Apple financial analyst conference on Wednesday CEO Steve Jobs admitted that Apple makes no revenue from the online download service, the iTunes Music Store, that he launched in April. As iTMS is the leading download service, with 80 per cent market share (or so Jobs claimed), where's your 99 cents per song going?

While Intel's Extreme Edition is coming out soon but with crazy prices, AMD on Thursday sketched out its strategy for the PC and cell phone markets for the next two years at its annual analysts' meeting and disclosed its plans for another multibillion-dollar chip fabrication facility, or fab.

One popular Open Source RAD tool is QT Designer which is part of the QT package. If you run the KDE desktop, QT will be installed already, and QT Designer may be installed as well. DevChannel features the tutorial.

Debian is widely considered the Linux distribution with the best package management tool, APT and one of the largest software bases (>13,000). However, the installation horror stories kept me away. Nevertheless, eager to try it out, I failed to install various other Debian GNU/Linux based distributions. Some failed to boot even after I tried to reinstall for the fourth time, and others just couldn’t detect my hardware. While Knoppix is highly recommended, I decided to stick with hard-drive based distros (Although it is the distribution of choice for LiveCDs). Then came Libranet.

In his new book "Illustrator CS for Dummies," Ted Alspach, Adobe's Group Product Manager for Illustration Products, advises new computer buyers to get a PC: "As of 2003, Windows systems have taken a decisive lead over Macs when it comes to performance. The difference is most apparent with graphics applications such as Photoshop and Illustrator, but you''ll notice it with other applications as well. If you?'re thinking of purchasing a new system, and speed and responsiveness is important (or at least more important than the feel of the OS, I suggest getting a zippy PC over a (comparably) sluggish Mac". This is not the first time Adobe (Apple's #1 third party software house) pushes its customers towards the PC. The previous time it ended with Apple's PR firing back at Adobe through the media.

Is Microsoft's new version of Windows a radical innovation or a return to the company's winner-take-all software strategy from a decade ago? Read the report at News.com.

The Linux phenomenon gets bigger by the day and more developers are drawn into developing for it. The heart of this very phenonmenon is its kernel and as time goes by it becomes more mature but also bigger and more complex. New developers would have trouble diving in and code for it, hence the "Linux Kernel Development" book by well known kernel hacker Robert Love (of preemptive-patch fame).

Microsoft's acquisition of Connectix's assets is beginning to bear fruit on the Windows side of the market. The software giant Monday plans to announce the release to manufacturing of its newly branded and enhanced Microsoft Virtual PC 2004, formerly known as Connectix Virtual PC.

KernelTrap has a very interesting article about a recent attempt to sneak a "back door" into the Linux 2.6 kernel. Evidently someone managed to break into the CVS server that mirrors the kernel source tree and add a small patch allowing one to locally obtain "root" super-user access. Fortunately, during an export from the master BitKeeper version of the kernel source tree into the CVS mirror, the change was detected and quickly removed.

Red Hat plans to push a similar open-source infrastructure stack as part of its recent debut of Enterprise Linux 3. However, the Raleigh, N.C.-based company, which did not offer comment on the Novell-SuSE merger, lacks a global channel and a scaled-up technical-support organization of Novell, whose NetWare networking software continues to serve more than 80 percent of Fortune 500 companies, Novell executives said. Read the report at Yahoo! news.

The latest version of the Mac OS X operating system could easily run on Intel chips, but Apple Computer CEO Steve Jobs said on Wednesday that the company has little interest in changing processors. "It's perfectly technically feasible to port Panther to any processor," Jobs said at a meeting with financial analysts. But Jobs said the company is happy with IBM's PowerPC family of chips and feels the performance is "quite competitive."