"We just released Mono 1.1.10, our best release so far. The major feature missing from this release to call it Mono 1.2 is the completion of our Windows.Forms implementation. In this document I only present the direction of development of the Mono team at Novell; a more comprehensive view of other Mono developments by the Mono community is something that am working on and will post at a later date. I also present how our team's priorities are shifting in response to Novell's own internal use of Mono and external factors like the final release of .NET 2.0."

"One day, while the boss was away, I shoved a spare hard-drive into my computer and installed Ubuntu 5.04. I managed to work for a month and a half before the Boss noticed I was using Linux - and that was only because he happened to glance at my screen. Half a year later, I am still using Ubuntu (now version 5.10) at work and I am more productive than ever."

"Mac GNU Privacy Guard is the Mac OS X port of the popular security utility. I have been using GnuPG for more than 5 years now and it is the best available open source solution for various encryption purposes. This article guides the reader through Mac GNU Privacy Guard installation, as well as its basic functions."

Microsoft's SQL Server development team learned a hard lesson from its work on SQL Server 2005: customers do not want to wait five years for an upgrade. From now on, a new development regime called the Software Reengineering Initiative will ensure that releases ship every two years whether new features are ready or not, said Mark Souza, who heads the SRI team.

"While the move to ODF seems to offer clear benefits to the Massachusetts government and citizens in general, a move to ODF and a change in office application has significant accessibility implications for people with disabilities. Today people with disabilities are predominantly on the Microsoft Windows desktop. The proportion on Windows increases further when you look at employees of the Executive Branch of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. When it comes to the move to ODF for people with disabilities, there are two basic questions to ask." UPDATE: ODF turned into nothing but a forgotton political football in the Massachusetts Senate today when Senator William Morrissey pulled his own amendment to S 2256 and replaced it with something even worse.

GNOME 2.13.2 has been released. Odd-numbered versions of GNOME represent developmental branches, hence this is the second development release on the road towards GNOME 2.14 in March 2006. You can compile this new test release using these jhbuild modulesets. Now, can you hear the new Zipdisk Mount Error Dialog HIG-compliant console beep?

OpenDocument got a lot of publicity lately. StarOffice 8 and OpenOffice.org 2.0 finally arrived, and all the other makers of office suites (with the notable exception of Microsoft) have started implementing the new standard into their programs. Massachusetts recently decided to use OpenDocument as the standard file format, effectively locking out MS Office as soon as January 1st, 2007. Other countries are on their way to do the same. Also, OpenDocument recently got submitted to become an ISO standard.

The Bush administration and its critics at a UN summit have inked a broad agreement on global Internet management that will preclude any dramatic showdown this week. By signing the statement (.pdf), the Bush administration formally endorsed the creation of an 'Internet Governance Forum' that will meet for the first time in 2006 under the auspices of the UN. The forum is meant to be a central point for global discussions of everything from computer security and online crime to spam and other 'misuses of the Internet.' What the agreement does not do is require the US to relinquish its unique influence over the Internet's operations.

Microsoft Virtual Server Release 2 has begun shipping to manufacturers and is due for general release in the first week of December with a new pricing model and a number of new features, most notably formal support for Linux. "Technically, Linux already worked on Virtual Server, but with R2 we have formalised support, and we will continue to support Linux in the future," said Bob Muglia, who recently took over as senior vice-president of Microsoft's server and tools division.

A database containing more than 500 software patents and backed by big-name vendors has been posted online to foster development of litigation-free open source. Open Source Development Labs has launched its Patent Commons Project with backing from IBM - the industry's largest holder of technology patents - Computer Associates International, Novell, Red Hat, Intel and Sun Microsystems.

"At Supercomputing 2005, AMD and Sun today announced that the Tokyo Institute of Technology is creating Japan's largest supercomputer on a foundation of Sun. The system is based on Sun Fire x64 (x86, 64-bit) servers with 10,480 AMD Opteron processor cores (totaling more than 50 trillion floating point operations per second (teraFLOPS)), Sun and NEC storage technologies and NEC's integration expertise as well as ClearSpeed's Advance accelerator boards."

Oxygen is the new icon theme being created for KDE4. Everything started in March 2005 when a bunch of KDE contributors met in Berlin to form the Appeal Project with the goal to promote KDE related projects and to push the open source desktop to another level. Oxygen aims to bring a modern, cool and very usable and consistent icon theme, in SVG format.

Java 2 Platform Standard Edition (J2SE) 5.0 Release 3 includes version 1.5.0_05 and improves functionality of J2SE 5.0 on Mac OS X v 10.4 Tiger 10.4.2 and later. This release does not replace the existing installation of J2SE 1.4.2. You can change the preferred Java version for applications and applets by using the new Java Preferences utility.

Microsoft announces that the next version of Exchange, its upcoming Windows Server "Longhorn" SBS and its Centro infrastructure solution for midsize businesses will only be released as 64-bit.