I recognize that Open Source folks are passionate. I understand and I applaud the dedication and fierce loyalty. But for the love of all that is warm and fuzzy, could you please give it a rest? Just for a little while? There is something else that really needs some attention: proper documentation.

For two decades, Bill Gates has used his Comdex keynote speech to mark out his vision for technologies from the Internet to XML. This year he used the bully pulpit to make it clear that the industry is at one of its perennial crossroads. CNET News.com caught up with the Microsoft co-founder and chairman earlier this week to talk about the leadup to his "seamless computing" speech.

Without announcing to the press, the GNOME project released GNOME 2.4.1 a few days ago. (Note: Epiphany was updated once more since then). Update: New GtkFileChooser shot for Gnome 2.6.

I had been keeping a watchful eye on the developments in the Apple world ever since Steve Jobs’ revamped company revealed the first fruity iMacs in the mid-90s. Mac OS 8 and 9 never really appealed to me, and Windows ran all my games and software, so I never thought about making a switch any time soon. Then one day I met Unix for the first time in my life.

Jonathan Schwartz, Sun Microsystems Inc.'s executive vice president of software, took time after his quarterly Town Hall in San Francisco to sit down with eWEEK Contributing Editor Steve Gillmor in a conversation about Microsoft Corp.'s Longhorn Wave and the market challenges and opportunities it may present for Sun.

Open-source database software maker MySQL AB has released a new, more powerful complement to its MySQL flagship database. Called MaxDB version 7.5.00.06, the latest release, which was built on database assets it acquired from SAP in May, is more robust than MySQL's main product and also boasts such features as stored procedures, triggers and views, which MySQL lacks.

This article by veteran real-time trainer David Kalinsky provides an introduction to real-time operating system (RTOS) kernel services. The paper is of particular interest to developers new to real-time concepts and vocabulary. Kalinsky begins by offering a comparison of RTOSs and general-purpose operating systems. He then covers real-time kernel services including task scheduling; fixed-time task switching; intertask communication and synchronization; determinism and high-speed message passing; and, dynamic memory allocation.

"Since they cannot show infringement of SCO Unix code, SCO now plans to challenge the 9-year-old settlement between AT&T and BSD. If it can successfully do that, then its claims that Linux contains tainted code can be substantiated. If it can't, SCO is dead meat." Says NewsForge. *Updated*

Here are two new screenshots showing the SkyOS 5.0 transparent/freeform-windows and rounded-windows support as well as window shadows.

Sun Microsystems and open-source software maker JBoss Group have resolved a long-standing dispute over a key Java standard.

Byte's "Serving with Linux" columnist Moshe Bar writes a brief review of his new G5, the new 15" Powerbook & Panther. Read more for some feedback on the article from contributor Diganta Saha.

From Internetnews: "Shares of Sun jumped 10% after hours Monday on news that the company will help build a nationwide standard desktop software system in China. Sun said the China Standard Software Co. (CSSC) will use Sun's Java Desktop System as the foundation for standard desktop development and deployment in the People's Republic of China. CSSC is a consortium of Chinese technology companies backed by the Chinese government to produce a nationwide standard desktop software system, and Sun said it is now the CSCC's preferred technology partner for reaching this goal."

LinuxElectrons features a mini-review of Gentoo Linux 1.4 along with many screenshots.

Now that Solaris Express 11/03 is publicly available for download, Bryan Cantrill (Solaris Kernel Development) from the DTrace engineering team wanted to take a moment to post some slightly more elaborate examples of this new technology.