eWeek's Debra Donston has penned down five ways the end user desktop in enterprises will look different in five years. While some of her ideas and predictions make a low of sense, there are a few things which are slightly debatable. Mostly, the reliance on virtualisation and web applications.

Microsoft has published a free 335-page book in .pdf format that explains all the details of developing for the Windows CE platform. "The kit, implemented as a 335-page book, provides valuable technical information for developers wanting to know more about Windows CE, regardless of whether they plan to take Microsoft's certification exam. The book is available for download - without cost or registration - as nine PDF files."

Two Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring reviews came out in the last couple of days. ZDNet notes that "Mandriva Linux is popular with developers and enthusiasts, and there's a thriving community ready and able to help with problems" and concludes that "overall we liked what we saw. Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring may not be the best distro for the newcomer moving over from Windows, but if you're used to the way Linux works and want to try something different, give it a try". Linux.com praised the hardware support and the Control Center, and declared that "despite a few minor glitches, after several weeks of testing the two Mandriva flavors, I have finally come across a distro that gives you the best of the GNU/Linux and proprietary worlds in terms of ease of use, range of software, and stability on hardware that ranges from old Celerons to newer multi-core machines".

Tuesday, we reported that the KDE project had released the first beta of KDE 4.1, the release that is supposed to be ready to replace KDE3 on normal users' desktops. The information and marketing speak in the press release sure was promising, so Ars decided to take the KDE 4.1 beta out for a spin.

Yesterday, during the opening hours of the D6 conference, Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher jointly interviewed Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates. While the interview dealt mostly with the past, Yahoo, and a bit of Vista, by far the most interesting part was the first ever public appearance of Vista's successor: Windows 7. Earlier today, the team behind D6 posted a video of the demonstration, which was conducted by Microsoft's Julie Larson-Green. From a graphical user interface point of view, there were some interesting things in there.

Our advertising partner, Cnet Networks, has posted a reader survey, and I promise that they really will give $2000 to three lucky survey respondents. Since they've chosen to place the survey request as an ad itself, and most OSNews readers wouldn't know why Cnet was doing a survey on OSNews anyway, I thought I'd mention that this survey, and the $2000 drawing, are legitimate, and encourage you to participate. They don't want me to link straight to the survey for some reason, but if you see the survey invite above, click on it. Update: I didn't realize this before, but the drawing is only open to US residents.

Back in 1996, Palm released its first Palm Pilot PDAs onto the market, and quickly became a household name in the PDa business - so far as that Palm and Palm Pilot became synonyms for any PDA device. The company has hit some rough waters lately, but if it's up to CEO Ed Colligan, that's all going to change in the coming years.

Comic: "Eee".

The idea of open-source hardware is slowly slowly but surely gaining traction. VIA Technologies, Inc., joined in on the fun today by unveiling an open source reference platform for low power notebooks, based on its own processor technology (obviously). The CAD files have been released under a Creative Commons license. The machine is tentatively named OpenBook.

KDE 4.0 was released to mixed reviews; more or less everyone recognised the enormous potential of the still young platform, but some doubted whether or not the KDE project had made the right choice by releasing KDE 4.0 as, well, 4.0. The KDE developers were clear: just you wait for KDE 4.1. They released the first beta of KDE 4.1 today.

In spite of (or, thanks to?) Windows Vista, a recent release and all, Windows 7 has been getting a lot attention all over the web - even in the non-tech mainstream and print media. Since Microsoft is holding its cards close, people try to get by on little droplets of information, side remarks by Microsoft employees, slip-of-the-tongues, and, of course, plain-old forgery. PC World thinks these screenshots come from a scheduled May 2008 Windows 7 build, but if you look at them with a little more attention to detail, you will easily spot they are - at best - random mockups from Microsoft, or, - most likely - fake.

AWK is one of the most common UNIX tools to process text-based data in either files or datastreams. Written by Alfred Aho, Peter Weinberger, and Brian Kernighan, AWK "extensively uses the string datatype, associative arrays (that is, arrays indexed by key strings), and regular expressions." ComputerWorld interviewed Alfred Aho.

Comic: "Feet".

Ivan Krstic' critique of the One Laptop Per Child Project has made its ripples around the pond of the intertubes. Apart from the obvious part where it criticises a major project from an insider's point of view, it also had a few other remarks that caught people's attention - most notably the admission that despite his ability to do Linux kernel hacking, his main development laptop is a Macintosh running Mac OS X.