What if FreeDesktop.org started to become the "free software desktop project" and GNOME and KDE slowly became "flavours aimed at different audiences", Seth Nickell wonders in his blog. Seth is having some good ideas about how the future of X11 DEs should feel like, while down that page there is an extra explanation of Storage, the technology we reported last week that Seth is developing.

You're working into the wee hours trying to fix that bug. But by time the debugger catches it the original cause has long since passed. How are you going to figure out just what went wrong a billion instructions earlier? It's at times like these that you need a reversible computer. The idea is simple: a computer merely executes a sequence of elementary instructions. If we could just run through that list of instructions in reverse we could work backwards and find the original cause of our error. But of course things are never quite that simple.

IBM has previewed the designs for its upcoming 64-bit Power 5 processor, which the company states will augment total system performance by 40 percent over its predecessor. At last week's Hot Chips Conference in Palo Alto, Calif., IBM disclosed that it was incorporating simultaneous multi-threading into Power 5; the process takes chip multiprocessing to a new level where each chip tackles two threads as opposed to one.

The fifth revision of Windows Update is set to enter beta testing, as Microsoft continues efforts to improve its facility for keeping customers' systems up to date. Windows Update V5 is slated to be a significant upgrade, eventually extending the service's reach beyond Windows to all Microsoft products. The company will initially support updates to Office 2003, as well as SQL and Exchange.

Epiphany is a GNOME web browser based on the Mozilla/Gecko rendering engine and today reached 1.0 status. It will be included as the default browser on Gnome 2.4, due to be released Wednesday.

"The more interesting question is whether Apple's QuickTime will also be a part of Mad Hatter or other desktop Linux offerings," says Yankee Group analyst Dana Gardner. The end user ideally should be able to access content in any format with a minimum of hassles. Read the article at NewsFactor.

Novell will be the "catalyst" for desktop and enterprise Linux, according to its chairman and chief executive Jack Messman. VNUnet and TheRegister report. Should Red Hat start to worry?

Intel on Monday released a pair of Itanium 2 processors designed for rack-mounted servers and clusters as it attempts to expand the chip family's reach. On other hardware releases, Apple released faster iMacs, bigger iPods.

"Should Be Inc. settle with Microsoft or should it hold out and wait for Massachusetts attorney general Tom Reilly to press for a fair settlement or penalty for the software giant? Assuming Massachusetts is sucessful, Be's task of being reinbursed for losses would be much easier. If Be settles, Microsoft would not have to admit wrongdoing." This means that Microsoft would be given a proverbial license to pressure PC OEMs to not install alternatives to Windows, the editorial states.

SDL is now available for SkyOS. The popular cross-platform graphic/gaming library was ported to the operating system. Additionally, the complete TCP/IP stack was heavily bugfixed, resulting in much more reliable services like Web Browsing with SkyKruzer, domain name lookup and DHCP. Proxy support for SkyKruzer has been improved. Additionally, round one of the SkyOS GUI ReDesign Contest has begun. Over 30 entries were sent in, and the entries will be whittled down to 3 by way of an open community vote. Everyone is encouraged to view the designs and cast their votes.

A few weeks after Hewlett-Packard disappointed Wall Street for the first time since its $19 billion mega-merger with Compaq, an influential stock analyst has told clients he sees the eventual breakup of the company. Steve Milunovich, who follows big computer companies for Merrill Lynch, said he thinks HP will have to spin off its printer business or separate its consumer business from its corporate business.

Learn the similarities and differences between Web application development using ASP.NET and classic desktop application development. This article is aimed toward Visual Basic 6.0 developers who are interested in getting started with creating ASP.NET Web applications, and examines the differences between creating desktop applications with Visual Basic 6.0 and creating ASP.NET Web applications with Visual Basic .NET.

Chad Dickerson, CTO at InfoWorld, takes a ride with a forgotten 450 Mhz G4 Mac on his workplace and moves it home. Soon, he would be so impressed that the Mac would replace his Linux home server and one of his two Windows PCs. Last week, Chad gave us his opinion regarding Linux too.

What will happen as more corporations see the open source light? Paul Ferris editorializes: "Like it or not, zealots and heretics are finding common ground in the open source holy war."