A lot of news on Bill Gates's stepping back. Mary Jo Foley wonders if Microsoft will still be the same after Gates has left, while also compiling a list of his 10 biggest Microsoft flops. Elsewhere, Bill Gates's successor, Craig Mundie, talks to eWeek. In addition, Cnet features an interview with both Mundie as well as Ray Ozzie: "Bill Gates leaves some pretty big shoes to fill. Think of Ray Ozzie as the left shoe and Craig Mundie as the right one."

An update to Apple's Mac OS X Tiger due within a matter of days will deliver audio enhancements for several of the company's applications, AppleInsider has learned. Specifically, people who claim to have tested the latest pre-release builds of Mac OS X 10.4.7 say the update will offer fixes for audio playback in iTunes, Final Cut Pro, Soundtrack and QuickTime. It will also improve Bluetooth file transfers, mobile phone synching and mouse pairings, these people have said.

GNOME 2.15.3 has been released. This is a development release, en route to GNOME 2.16, scheduled for September 2006. Release notes and download instructions are listed in the release anouncement. In the meantime, GNOME needs girls.

Four large mobile phone vendors, together with two major wireless operators, will create an open Linux implementation for mobile phones. Motorola, NEC, NTT DoCoMo, Panasonic, Samsung, and Vodafone say their Linux implementation will provide a global standard, and prevent the 'fragmentation' of mobile phone Linux.

"The Ubuntu team is proud to announce the release of Ubuntu 6.06 LTS server for SUN Sparc 64bit architecture. This release is an Ubuntu distribution for your servers, with a fast and easy install, regular releases, and a tight selection of excellent packages installed by default. Other packages and applications are available from a global network of mirrors, and professional, commercial technical support from Canonical Ltd and hundreds of other companies around the world."

"On June 15, Bill Gates announced that he would be retiring from Microsoft in July 2008, and everything changed. It may be two years away, but when a giant the size of Gates moves, the world moves with him. And, in that movement, in this period of change, Linux may have its best chance ever to seize the marketplace momentum from Microsoft."

The latest issue of the GNOME Journal has just been published. Itfeatures insights into the role of end-users in the GNOME community, and an interview with Emmanuele Bassi, gnome-utils maintainer and GTK+ developer. Writers in this edition are Vincent Untz, and Lucas Rocha, respectively.

An hour or so ago Sun Microsystems made good on an earlier pledge to issue further 'non-assertion covenants' in support of open standards. This type of IPR tool facilitates easy implementation of new standards, and also makes open source implementations possible. The new NACs relate to the OASIS Security Assertion Markup Language v2.0 standard and two 'single sign-on' specifications co-developed with Microsoft.

Bill Gates is transitioning out of his full-time role at Microsoft, the software giant that's been under pressure due to a sagging stock price, competition from Google and nagging delays in the Vista operating system. In a press conference held Thursday after the stock markets had closed for regular trading, Gates announced that over the next two years he will gradually step away from his daily responsibilities at the company he co-founded some 30 years ago.

A lot of people seem to have this idea that Windows Vista looks an awful lot like the MacOS. LifeHacker.com sets some screenshots side-by-side for comparison, and even though they refrain from judgement ("We're just saying"), I do wish to make a few sidenotes about this issue. Read more for a mini-article on the issue.

The Nexenta project, which builds a distribution combining the OpenSolaris kernel with applications from Ubuntu, has announced a new alpha release of NexentaOS: "This release provides a fully integrated Ubuntu Dapper Drake userland, OpenSolaris core (build #40), and contains overall 11800 packages. In addition, Alpha 5 contains: Sun's Java SE 5.0 Java Development Kit (via NexentaOS APT); live upgrade; and OpenOffice.org 2.0, natively compiled on Nexenta OS."

The 2006 Windows Hardware Engineering conference presentations have been posted. They include a vast number of topics ranging from the devices, drivers, storage and servers. There are details on Microsoft's new hypervisor and virtualization architecture, as well as a lot of details on optimizing hardware for Vista.

"Network attached storage has been known to Unix users for a very long time with NFS. NFS is reliable, performs well on the performance front, but it is infamous for its security. The biggest problem with NFS is that the client is responsible for controlling user file access. The NFS server just accepts file system operations on behalf of a given UID and enforces nearly no control. NFS require you trust your clients, something that may not be adequate. Andrew File System is an alternative network file system. In this interview, I ask Ty Sarna about his experience with AFS. Ty Sarna has been an AFS user since 1992 and is a NetBSD developer since 1998."

In in Part 1 of this series, you'll learn how to use the LDAP Tools for Eclipse to configure Geronimo's built-in Apache Directory LDAP server. In Part 2 you'll query the LDAP server and update the Web page using Ajax. You'll also get familiar with some of the techniques to build LDAP-centric applications using the toolsets available in the Java platform and Ajax.