Novell's board of directors on Thursday named Ron Hovsepian CEO and president to replace Jack Messman, and ousted the company's chief financial officer. In a conference call on Thursday, company executives said the changes were made to accelerate the growth at Novell, which has had disappointing financial results, particularly in its Linux business.

"Today the growing popularity of the Internet and its inherent advantages have motivated developers and IT departments to migrate complex C/C++ business and scientific applications to a Web-based environment. XML-RPC is a perfect mechanism to integrate existing C/C++ programs with other client-side technologies. This article is a step-by-step guide to exposing C++ methods as services. It includes sample code snippets for C++ integration using an open source XML-RPC Library."

"The Cell processor has seemingly picked up a reputation for being incredibly difficult to program. However, this seems to be based entirely on expectation rather than experience. What’s the real story? Is it really that difficult? This article looks at the concepts involved in Cell programming."

Users of Microsoft Office can now choose one of the Creative Commons licenses for work created in Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Microsoft and Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that offers flexible copyright licenses for creative works, partnered with 3sharp LLC to develop and test this new copyright licensing tool, known as the Creative Commons add-in for Microsoft Office.

The executive who coordinated Microsoft's anti-Linux campaign has quit the company less than three months after moving to a position revamping MSN's marketing. Martin Taylor, a 13-year Microsoft veteran and advisor to chief executive Steve Ballmer, has left in an apparent rush and without official explanation. Such was the speed of Taylor's exit his name still features on one of Microsoft's latest press releases.

Sun Microsystems on Wednesday released the second beta of Java 6, the company's next-generation development language targeted at so-called Web 2.0 programmers. Perhaps most enticing for those new to Java, the update adds a framework for supporting popular scripting languages such as PHP.

The BumpTop structures files and programs as 3D cards with weight that you can shuffle around and move about the desktop. You can throw a bunch of similar cards on a pile to represent stuff you'll get to later, or stack them neatly to represent stuff you've already seen.

"This list is compiled from a variety of sources and is intended for anyone who wishes to find centralized reading material about Eclipse. One of the biggest challenges new Eclipse users face is where to find the right information for a task. This article provides a small step in solving that problem."

Microsoft will release updates to the beta of Windows Vista every month until the gold master release to corporate customers in November, the software giant's Australian Windows chief revealed today. Jeff Putt, Director, Windows Client, Microsoft Australia revealed the plan in a briefing to journalists at Microsoft's headquarters in Sydney today. "We're on the bug-hunt", he said.

Microsoft Australia's Office chief today delivered a frank retrospective on how badly bloated Office had become over the years. Speaking at a briefing to journalists about Windows Vista and Office 2007, Wilkinson launched into a lengthy and frank retrospective on how Office came to be as bloated as it is today. "Little point changes to our user interface design weren't helping the problem. The real problem was the application had increased too much in complexity."

"Let's face it. Google pretty much owns the Internet landscape. Unless something truly unexpected happens within the web community, I see no real indicator that they'll lose their market share anytime soon. This also opens them up to other online opportunities should they decide to pursue them. One such opportunity is believed to be the much famed idea of a Google OS. The rumors have been floating around back and forth for awhile now and many people believe that it's simply a matter of time. Well I'm here to tell you that this is never going to happen; at least not in a form that we might expect to see, that is."

Counterfeiters aren't Microsoft's only opponents in its effort to combat piracy: Some of its customers are against it, too. The company is forging ahead with a program, Windows Genuine Advantage, tied to its free software downloads and updates, that checks whether the Windows installation on a PC is pirated. But some people, including some who say they own a legitimately acquired copy of Windows, have challenged the need for such validation.

"IBM and the Georgia Institute of Technology announced today that their researchers have demonstrated the first silicon-based chip capable of operating at frequencies above 500 GHz - 500 billion cycles per second - by cryogenically 'freezing' the chip to 451 degrees below zero Fahrenheit (4.5 Kelvins)." Now that's what I'd like to see in the new PowerBook. Oh, wait.

The One Laptop per Child scheme is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the history of the IT industry, according to Tony Roberts, chief executive and founder of UK charity Computer Aid International. Speaking to ZDNet UK last week, Roberts claimed that although he would be delighted if the OLPC scheme proved a success, he had severe reservations about the strategy underpinning the project.