6 years ago, Microsoft agreed to invest $150 million in Apple, as well as continue to develop Microsoft Office for the Mac platform. That agreement ended last year, has not been renewed, and doesn't seem likely to be renewed at this point.

On top of this, Apple has been developing and recently announced its own web browser, Safari, and its own presentation software, Keynote, which, compete directly with Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Powerpoint.

A recent article on OSopinion discusses these events, what they might mean for Apple, and speculates where it may be heading. An interesting read.

Full story:
http://www.osopinion.com/perl/story/21256.html

Sony is set to release an upgraded version of the PS2 next month in Japan. Improvements mostly focus on DVD playback, including new support for progressive out, recordable DVD media, and a built-in IR receiver for a DVD remote control.

All I can say is, "Kick ass." No release dates set for North America or Europe yet, but I think Sony has plenty more to gain than to lose by releasing it here, so I think it'll make an appearance here as well.

Full story

"This document explains some of the new functionality to be found in the 2.5
Linux kernel, some pitfalls you may encounter, and also points out some new
features which could really use testing."

There's a lot of good stuff here, and worth checking out for a glance at what'll be coming in 2.6.

Full document:
http://www.codemonkey.org.uk/post-halloween-2.5.txt

"After months of discussion and further months of legal investigation, we're finally comfortable moving forward with new names. The new name for the Phoenix browser is 'Firebird'. The documentation and product strings will be updated soon. In addition to securing Firebird, we've also got the OK from those contributing legal resources to use the name 'Thunderbird' for a mail client. Hopefully this will be the end of naming legal issues for a while."

Phoenix/Firebird home page
Minotaur/Thunderbird home page

In an attempt to salvage MS's tattered Security track record, Microsoft is trying to push server 2003 as the new era for software security. While this might be true as compared to other MS server OSes... it remains to be seen how it will stand up against Apple's OSX, Linux, and Solaris which are far more securable platforms.

Here is MS's press release

The author of this article makes the case that there's no longer any question of whether Linux is ready for the corporate desktop (it is), but whether corporations are ready for Linux. The author brings up some valid points, and while there are not revelations, it does counter some of the many arguments agains Linux on the desktop.

To sum up: The only area Linux may not yet be mature enough in is application and document format compatability. I reluctantly have to agree with this. While OpenOffice, as an example, may be fine for anything a company has to do from this point on, it may not be compatable with all existing documents, especially those with complicated templates, macros, etc. Reimplmenting all of these templates and macros in OpenOffice would be possible, of course, but the prospect of doing it is certainly discouraging.

Full Story

I can't really see what good this would do, but interesting and noteworthy nonetheless. Here's the full story:

http://news.com.com/2100-1042-996532.html

The really funny thing is that Apple's stock took an 8% dip after this was announced. Also, a later article on this subject (can't remember the source) reported that Microsoft was also showing more than a passive interest in purchasing Universal Music. Interesting times...

Well, not why I hate MS, but why the author of this article does. He makes many very valid points, and covers everything from Microsoft's founding to its anti-competitive practices to its future. It's a very long article, but a most worthy read.

http://www.euronet.nl/users/frankvw/IhateMS.html

I got this info from looking around at Distrowatch and it looks cool... its name is Morphix and it has boot cd's that are very Knoppix-like in that they have every application known to man fit on the cd and then they have a lite version that runs on older hardware and "flies on newer hardware"... but more importantly they have a games specific version. Apparently they have just released new versions of these isos.

Here is their page

Apparently some mirrors have the gentoo stages for release candidate 4 up for download, but Gentoo's site does not mention it.

Here is the link
http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/gentoo/releases/1.4_rc4/x86/x86/stages/