MorphZone posted a screenshot of the upcoming MorphOS 1.4, revealing an updated MUI look and feel. OSNews featured a review of the Pegasos platform just a few days ago. Update: In other Amiga-related news, Fleecy's 11th week of Q&As is online.

While Apple grabs publicity for its new 99 cent music download store, Microsoft is quietly preparing for a counterattack by improving its own technology for supporting subscription music services.

"Win 2003 is the foundation for an entire wave of next-generation Microsoft products and feature upgrades that are coupled with the new platform. Without an upgrade, corporations can expect to be in a holding pattern. Win 2003 is the linchpin for forthcoming products and services, including an advanced file system, collaboration environments, identity management infrastructure, digital rights management and a platformwide self-healing management system." Read the article at ComputerWorld.au.

"There's a community within Unix-Linux that has grown to increase its stability, where finding the bugs is considered a positive thing. Whereas, with Windows, there's a rather aggressive community trying to find bugs to denigrate Microsoft and Windows." Read the article at NewsFactor.

"Rumors of a new .NET language have been circulating around the cyber-grapevine for the last year or so, but have picked up speed as of late. The fire was fed by Mary Jo Foley's (columnist, Microsoft Watch) recent news story Add F# To the Alphabet Soup. Strangely enough, there hasn't been a peep from Microsoft. The only published information I can find is hosted on the Microsoft Research (MR) site. So, I donned my thinking cap, and proceeded with reckless abandon. Here begins the tale…" Read the article at ExtremeTech.

Microsoft Corp’s .NET vision, once a confusing morass of marketing hype and technological buzzwords, is now a mature platform for the development and deployment of web-based applications which require inter-device connectivity, the company said.

The software giant's latest operating system saves data to tape using a slightly different format than earlier versions of Windows, a Microsoft representative said Thursday. While older tapes can be read by Windows Server 2003, the opposite isn't true for the new OS. A patch will be finished soon.

The 10-year history of Object Desktop. It's about 50 pages long and has lots of screenshots and also neat insights and OS history and how skinning grew more important over the years.

Microsoft will rely on its time-tested bundling strategy, key to its successful capture of the desktop market, to help jumpstart its server software business. On the other side, at its JavaOne conference next month, Sun Microsystems will demonstrate a tool designed to simplify Java programming and steer users of Microsoft's .Net tools to Java.

"MandrakeSoft has done it's homework. Mandrake 9.1 has a professional and clean looking interface and it's easier to use than ever. This article isn't so much of a review as it is my experience installing and using it. I'll let the pictures do much of the talking." Read the review at TweakHound.

According to the Free Software Foundation, free software includes "the freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits... Access to the source code is a precondition for this." While I agree that the principles of the FSF are noble, I also feel that there is an unspoken assumption - an assumption that pods of hobby developers across the world can coordinate on the same scale that directed companies with a budget can. Where free software has an important place in computing, so does closed-source commercial software.

Opera released v6.02 for the Mac, while promises version 7 soon. Opera Software also released version 7.11 for Linux recently. In other browser news, Gecko-based Epiphany, released version 0.6.1.

J2ME (Java 2 Micro Edition) and the .Net Compact Framework follow different design philosophies and target different developer communities. However, both have important places in the future world of pervasive computing.

"Earlier this year Red Hat split its range into two segments - effectively, business and everything else. It did this in the wrong order, as The Register remarked at the time, but subsequently the company has padded out its Enterprise range to consist of Advanced Server, Enterprise Server and Workstation, so here at least it has a complete set." Read the article at The Register.