"Our CEO has said that the path to Redmond is through Mountain View," Red Hat's Mark de Visser said. "We focus on Unix now, and once we gain the upper hand... we believe we can ultimately displace Microsoft, even on the desktop." Can Linux replace Unix? This question would have seemed ridiculous just a few years ago, even as Linux vendor Red Hat's stock shot toward the stratosphere. Read the article at NewsFactor by Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier.

With Microsoft buying Virtual PC, which lets Macs run Windows wares, Apple's independence may well rest with programs such as Bochs. Read the article at BusinessWeek. OSCast has a similar editorial as well, in Mpeg4 audio format.

Sun Microsystems' software chief on Tuesday unveiled details of Project Orion, the company's utility-based pricing model for its Solaris operating system. Slated for rollout in June, Orion will build all of Sun's software into the Solaris OS and offer a yearly subscription for Solaris, Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's executive vice president of software, said at the vendor's Worldwide Analyst Conference.

The popular X11 desktop environment XFCE, which originally created to offer a free CDE-like DE for Unix/Linux, is closer on releasing the next big version, 4.0. XFce 4 has a radically different architecture from XFce 3. It embodies the traditional UNIX philosophy of modularity and re-usability. All of XFce 4's core components have been written from scratch in order to fit into the new architecture. Another priority of XFce 4 is adhereance to standards, specifically those defined at freedesktop.org (new screenshots, the first one in that list is the newest and most relevant one, showing the components of the DE). You can visit the CVS, or you can download a daily CVS snapshot and compile it. XFce 4 is under active development and should be considered alpha quality.

"A long time ago, in an economy far, far away, computer manufacturer Silicon Graphics Inc. was a powerful force. Hollywood studios courted its executives. They spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the company's colorful and whimsically named machines - "Indigo," "Crimson" and "Onyx," among others. Not anymore. Consumed by its own ambition and wounded by the surging popularity of the free Linux operating system, SGI has lost its star power in Hollywood." Read the article at NewsObserver by P.J. Huffstutter.

Apple's Chief Financial Officer Fred Anderson said the company's aim is to expand its share of the computer market. Speaking at the Goldman Sachs Technology Symposium, Anderson said a "good intermediate" goal would be to reach 5% marketshare from 3% today (some statistic companies actually put Apple between 2,2% and 2,6%).

The registry controls almost all aspects of your Windows server's configuration. See how to deal with problems that can occur in one of the most important parts of the registry -- the system hive. Read the article at ZDNet-UK TechUpdate written by MCSE Peter Parsons.

"Linux, Windows, Mac. All have their place, and before long that place will be in history books. The seeds of a new style of computing device have been sown, and as they grow they will inevitably lead to a world where the computer operating system as we know it today is as dead as the planetary transmission that drove the Model T Ford." Read the editorial at NewsForge, by Roblimo.

Sun Microsystems will build its entire collection of software into a single, gigantic version of its Solaris operating system and release updates once a quarter, Sun's top software executive said Tuesday.

SkyOS 3.9.6a has been released. This version includes new drivers, faster ATA/ATAPI drivers, a new OpenGL implementation, a new TCP/IP stack and many other new features and bug fixes. You can download the new version from the SkyOS website.

Over at ActiveWin you will find a variety of shots, including those of Outlook, Excel, Word etc, from the second beta of Microsoft Office 2003. Our Take: You can clearly see the task-based interface being more prominent than ever in these Office shots, and despite the questionable choice of colors used, Outlook's three-vertical-pane interface as the default makes sense UI-wise (documents are generally long, not wide).

"Since Java is no longer the "next big thing," and hype-heavy headlines about it have largely disappeared from tech and mainstream publications, one might harbor the impression that the language and platform are falling by the wayside. In fact, Java has finally achieved one of the highest honors the tech industry can bestow: It is taken for granted as part of the infrastructure on which many companies depend." Read the article at Yahoo!News by Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier.

"Sun Microsystems will use processors from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) in future blade servers that it first announced on Feb. 10. Sun will use Athlon XP-M processors, originally developed for mobile computing, running at 1.2GHz or 1.4GHz." Read more at InfoWorld.

"When someone mentions "Microsoft Windows", most experienced computer users have an idea of what the operating system does. Whether it's Windows 95/98, ME, 2000 or XP, Microsoft has managed to maintain an identity for their OS that has translated into a monopoly-sized chunk of the desktop business and home market. Maintaining the look and feel of their desktop OS over several revisions and upgrades, Microsoft has established a standard for most desktop computer users." Read the editorial at LinuxOrbit.