Microsoft Corp. will spend about $6.8 billion on research and development in its new fiscal year, an increase of 8% from the previous 12 months, said Bill Gates. They will be moving more deeply into the model-based programming space, said company chairman and chief software architect Bill Gates.

This is the fifth installment of ThinkSecret's "Inside Panther" series, covering Mac OS X Version 10.3. Elsewhere, the iTunes Store puts the Apple company at forefront of digital media market.

HP developers move some features from Compaq's version of Unix to its own HP-UX, an important part of the company's plan to eventually merge the two product lines. This was known to happen since Day 1 of the merger of HP-Compaq. Additionally, read our recent interview with an HP-UX engineer.

MandrakeSoft issued an urgent message for all 9.1 users to back out of the 24mdk kernel update and downgrade to 18mdk or 13mdk. A problem exists in all kernels (except kernel-secure) where newly created files are created mode 0666 (world writeable) on any filesystem other than XFS, including remote NFS mounts. A corrected kernel is to be released soon. Update: The official announcement of 9.2-b1 is out.

Microsoft has released DirectX 9.0b enduser runtime via WindowsUpdate and the release fixes some security problems and performance improvements. Download here, bug fix for 9.0a, more information on both issues here and here, SDK here.

Small business owners now have a software choice. Just a few years ago the only business choice was to either run legitimate or pirated versions of proprietary software. Open source is now in a position to challenge proprietary software on the business and home desktop.

Trolltech today announced the release of Qt, version 3.2. Qt, Trolltech's C++ multiplatform application framework, is the industry-leading C++ tool used to create applications that run natively on Windows, Linux/Unix and Mac OS X, all from the same codebase. The release of Qt 3.2 includes hundreds of enhancements and features that enable developers to build high-performance, low-maintenance multiplatform applications.

The mission of the newly re-opened Computer History Museum (CHM) in Mountain View, California, is to preserve and present for posterity the artifacts and stories of the information age. As such, we wouldn't miss the opportunity to visit the museum last weekend, trying to be part and have a "feel" of how computers where like before the desktop home computers took off only two decades ago. Before that time, computers were much different, and I am sure that every geek on this planet would like to witness how they looked and felt like. Read more for the report and plenty of pictures from our visit.

"There aren't many major changes, just a bunch of minor tweaks. Most of these are welcome additions though. The one gripe I have is that Red Hat doesn't seem sure if they want to have this be a desktop for the average, not-very technical person (e.g., they hide the boot messages) or be one for the more advanced or technical user (e.g., Emacs is installed by default for a personal desktop)." Read the review at Linux-Universe. Screenshots are here.

Pixelglow Software announced the availability of macstl 0.1 -- a new C++ source library.

Researchers outline a way to speed the cracking of alphanumeric Windows passwords, reducing the time to break such codes to an average of 13.6 seconds from 1 minute 41 seconds.

These AROS mpeg videos are made by Paul Gallant and show the AROS operating system running a few demos and Directory Opus. Higher quality versions of the videos are planned soon too.

REAL Software announced that the next version of REALbasic will generate native applications for Linux (in addition to Mac Classic, Mac OS X and Windows). The IDE is not ported, you will have to cross-compile a Linux binary. And they now have a Visual Basic migration tool that will help developers port their VB applications to these other platforms.

Bare Feats has some interesting benchmarks to show: Fastest G5 so far to the fastest G4 MP. G5 is much faster on memory operations, but not all operations are faster than the G4. Bare Feats says that until developers optimize their code for the G5, users won't see G5 being speedier than G4 on all tests. Same thing happens with all new CPUs though, including the P4s which included a new instruction set and developers had to compile for it in order to take advantage of what it really had to offer.