"For being shrewd about doing good, for rewiring politics and re-engineering justice, for making mercy smarter and hope strategic and then daring the rest of us to follow, Bill and Melinda Gates and Bono are Time's Persons of the Year." Here is an article dedicated to Bill and Melinda Gates, while an interview with all three can be found here.

"Clustering allows an application server to support multiple nodes with failover, session data sharing, and load balancing across many network nodes. This article provides details, direct from Apache Geronimo clustering effort team leader, Jeff Genender. Find out who is working on the details, how they work together to get the code written, and the ramifications these efforts are having on the open source community."

Fans of DragonFly BSD will be getting their Christmas present late this year, and plans for 1.5 have been announced. MP safe networking code, the long awaited cache coherency management system, and a port of Sun's ZFS. Read here for more. Update: Refresh, empty cache, whatever, and check the shiny new beastie icon! And there was much rejoicing. Can we now please discuss DragonFly BSD?

Windows testers will get a new beta version of Windows Vista, dubbed the December Community Technology Preview beta build, just before next week's holidays, according to tester scuttlebutt. New to the December release, testers say, will be a number of features and user-interface tweaks. a new defrag module; tight integration of Windows Defender (formerly known as Windows AntiSpyware); and a functional parental-controls filter are all rumored to be in the December Vista build.

The development of Mac OS X 10.4.4 update appears to be in the final stages at Apple Computer, as tipsters say the latest developer builds of the software are accompanied by only a few outstanding issues. According to sources and reports already present on the Web, Mac OS X 10.4.4 stands to deliver over 120 bug fixes to the Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger operating system. Targeted areas are said to include audio, AppleScript, Bluetooth, Dashboard widgets, DVD Player, graphics, graphics drivers, iChat, Safari, and Spotlight.

Google, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems, along with researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, are helping to set up a software research laboratory. The three companies are providing $ 7.5 million in funding over five years, which combined with other industry funding covers 80 percent of investment in the lab. The other 20 percent will come from government institutions such as the National Science Foundation. The Reliable, Adaptive and Distributed Systems Lab, or RAD Lab, will primarily concentrate on developing technology to assist small groups or individuals in creating, testing, and publishing Internet services.

"TechWorld is reporting that Microsoft plans to move graphics outside of the Windows Vista kernel by pulling the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF, formerly codenamed 'Avalon') out of the Vista kernel. MSWatch asked Microsoft for clarification. Here's the official statement: "Because WPF is largely written in managed code on the common language runtime, it never ran in kernel mode."

You would like to install Linux/BSD but the Windows partition is taking up your whole hard disk space and you don't want to pay money for commercial solutions? Not to worry, you can resize partitions with the KNOPPIX Live Linux CD.

Solaris Express 12/2005 (derived from Nevada Build 27) was posted recently, providing a variety of improvements. ZFS and the "Yosemite" UDP performance project were added. Roughly 700 bugs were fixed. You can obtain a free download. An overview of new features is also available.

"Linux works. This is a very matter-of-fact statement, but it is one many people (myself included) make every day when they boot up their computers. It is not a perfect product, it would not be sensible to expect something as complex as an operating system to be flawless, but fact remains that Linux does work. On the software side of things the open source community has done a very good job of making this clear, but the other half of computing, hardware, this movement has not been as successful. Every day Linux users encounter driver and compatibility issues which Windows users have not had to deal with for years."

"In conclusion, let me say that Martin's book is not an easy read, but then few things worth doing are easy to do. You will be challenged by Martin's book, unless you are a wizard like Martin. But after you have toiled through the intellectually taxing tasks of examining, weighing, lifting, turning and tweaking the multitudinous creatures that inhabit the Debian forest, you will come out with a far, far greater appreciation for the beauty of the Debian System."

"Microsoft will move the graphics for its next version of Windows outside of the operating system's kernel to improve reliability, the software giant has told Techworld. Vista's graphics subsystem, codenamed Avalon and formally known as the Windows Presentation Foundation, will be pulled out the kernel because many lock-ups are the result of the GUI freezing, Microsoft infrastructure architect Giovanni Marchetti told us exclusively yesterday."

"I am not a cynic by nature, but years of experience in the IT world have compelled me to make sure that everything passes the smell test. As a result, I can often tell beforehand whether I am hearing marketspeak or the real deal. For instance, 5 minutes after I figured out what Larry Ellison's network computer was, I knew it would never be successful. And so did Larry Ellison, given that Oracle never actually built any of them. So with that in mind, let's revisit the top 10 overhyped, overmarketed, overbsed (if there is such a word) computer industry events of 2005."

"ActiveState has announced the end of engineering support for Visual Perl, Visual Python, and Visual XSLT, effective immediately. The plug-ins will not be updated for Visual Studio 2005, and there will be no further maintenance on the Visual Studio 2003- and 2002-compatible versions. Due to the necessary inclusion of Visual Studio integration code in Visual Perl, Visual Python, and Visual XSLT, the plug-ins will not be open-sourced."