Epic's Tim Sweeney has been advocating AMD's 64-bit platform since its official unveiling at Comdex last November. With this in mind, Firingsquad decided to ask Tim about Epic's 64-bit UT2K3 port, Epic's 64-bit plans for their next generation Unreal engine, and his thoughts on the Opteron architecture.

Jobs has a new direction. While the 48-year-old chief executive's roots are in the arcane programming codes of Silicon Valley, Jobs is today increasingly fashioning himself as a digital entertainment impresario. Over the past two years, he has turned Apple into a producer of entertainment technology for digital photos, movies and music, culminating in Monday's unveiling of the online music service. Read the news here, here, here or here. "Faster Than the Speed of Software: The record labels have a new idea for selling music online. The only catch: This time, they are ahead of the technology needed for it to happen" Los Angeles Times report.

Found a couple interesting links over at NooFace, a site dedicated to user interfaces. First, Microsoft Research is plugging away at one of the growing dilemmas in computing: so much data, so little time. XTend is a next generation product which uses a powerful Relational File System to deliver the world's first "Save With" oriented interface. And speaking of Knowledge Management (where XTend can be useful), you can read this recent interview over at TheIdeaBasket with the CEO of YellowPen, Inc.

IntelliJ IDEA is a Java IDE packed with leading-edge development features which include: industry setting refactoring support, intelligent code editing assistance, a wide range of J2EE development features for rapid web-application and other enterprise development, a powerful Code Inspection tool, integrated CVS, VSS and StarTeam support, an Open API for third-party plug-in support, and a mountain of other productivity features that make Java development a pleasure. Version 3.0.4 was released recently for Mac OS X, Windows, Solaris/Unix and Linux.

XPde 0.3.5 has been released, which according to the site is a major upgrade to the XPde desktop environment and window manager. We reported on the (Pascal-written) XPde before (shots). On other X11 news, InterfaceWM 0.2.4 was recently released, XFCE 4 is getting closer to release (screenshots and one more), while the XWin.org team had another conference call last week.

Sun is attacking the low end x86-based server market with force, as it has announcements around both AMD's Opteron processor and Intel's Xeon processor on the way, executives told TheRegister.

Unfortunately, these days people seem to not be able to keep... any 'secret'. Longhorn 4015 has leaked and Neowin has aquired some tailor-made screenshots showing off a few of the new features taking shape in what is becoming known as Milestone 5. Also, Apple-X.net claims to have the first leaked screenshots of of MacOSX Panther 10.3, clearly showing the "piles". UPDATE: Gsurface writes: "A quick look at what's new in the new 4015 build. To my surprise, it was actually an upgrade rather than the full version. Luckily, I still had my Longhorn 4008 installed on my D:\ drive. Continue to read with tons of screenshots here."

Microsoft Corp. on Thursday released a massive set of documents and guidelines meant to help administrators lock down servers running the company's new Windows Server 2003 operating system.

Microsoft's .NET strategy and framework have done more to raise the industry's awareness of Web services and XML (extensible markup language) than any product or public relations campaign. They also saved Microsoft's keister just as enterprises were beginning to realize the company's previous Web platforms were not going to work as advertised, and the mood was turning sour. Read the article at NewsFactor.

Lack of hardware and application support eclipses OS' potential benefits. When it comes to Unix, Sun Microsystems' Solaris operating system shines on the company's 64-bit SPARC processors. Unfortunately, the picture is less bright for the version of Solaris written for Intel's 32-bit Pentium family.

Billboard is the latest to report on Apple's digital music service, today posting an article that further describes the service. According to Billboard, the service is an "a la carte" download store that is built into iTunes. No subscription will be required for the service, and tracks will retail for an average of 99 cents. Once purchased, songs are automatically transferred to your iTunes library and synched to an iPod (if available). The content can also be burned to CD. Read more here, here and here.

Someone has created a Flash preview of what he thinks Apple's new "Piles" features could be like. My Take: It is worth checking out, but it seems lacking- as implemented in the preview, it doesn't seem very useful; the author also mistakenly claims that such a feature couldn't be done on Windows.

Week 7 of the 'Weekly Questions and Answers' sessions with Amiga's Chief Technology Officer Fleecy Moss is now live at AmigaWorld.net. A few days earlier than originally planned.

AROS, the AmigaOS re-implementation posted a status update dicussing their latest advancements. Two new screenshots also posted. The team is looking for active developers to join them.