The KDE community is happy to announce KDE 3.5 release candidate 1. More info here.

Alan Ritter, Western Washington Univ. senior and computer science major, received recognition on Oct. 16 for his successful participation in Google's Summer of Code. He spent the summer working on a code which makes Windows network drivers adaptable to the NetBSD operating system.

"Oscar Wilde said that the only thing worse than people talking about you is people NOT talking about you, and it must have been with this in mind that Microsoft recently "leaked" two company-wide memos concerning the Redmond's new strategic direction -- its so-called Live strategy that I wrote about last week" says Cringely.

Silicon Graphics will start showing off the Altix 4000 Monday, the second generation of the company's technical computing machines based on the Linux operating system and Itanium processors.

On their blogspot site, Bill Buck and Raquel Velasco, owners of Genesi (which manufactures Pegasos PowerPC-CPU based motherboards) revealed that they could soon release all designs, layouts, HAL and Open Firmware of their platforms under GPL licence.

"As you already know, if I have to sit down in front of a computer, I want it to be running the Gnome desktop on Linux. I've watched it mature from a downright ugly, needlessly complex playground for geeks, to an attractive, simple interface that holds its own against commercial alternatives. And yet, every day I still encounter rough edges that make me think there aren't nearly enough folks out there hacking away at this stuff. I'd like to watch." Read more at PCWorld. Warning: While some of the author's gripes can be fixed by installing third party applications or plugins, or by tweaking Alsa etc, the point remains that his default distribution and/or Gnome did not come with these conveniences by default. Most people don't like tweaking stuff, they want things that "just work".

Linus Torvalds has threatened that if developers add 'last-minute things' to the next version of the Linux kernel he will 'refuse to merge, and laugh in their faces derisively'.

The number of useful desktop applications for Linux is growing every day, but there are many would-be users who still have one or more "must have" Windows applications. For those users, running Windows under Linux is a suitable alternative to having to maintain two systems, or a dual-boot system with Linux and Windows. One of the options for running Windows under Linux is Win4Lin, Inc.'s Win4Lin Pro, which was released earlier this year.

In the simplest terms, DWR is an engine that exposes methods of server-side Java objects to JavaScript code. Effectively, with DWR, you can eliminate all of the machinery of the Ajax request-response cycle from your application code. This article shows you how to use Direct Web Remoting (DWR) to expose JavaBeans methods directly to your JavaScript code and automate the heavy-lifting of Ajax.

Virus writers are exploiting Sony's controversial anti-piracy software to hide their malicious creations. In late October Sony was found to be using stealth techniques to hide software that stopped some of its CDs being illegally copied. Now three virus variants have been found that use the Sony software to evade detection by anti-virus programs. The rootkit is also installed on Mac OS X systems.

With the build 59 of Mustang (Java 6), Sun's Java Hotspot Client virtual machine gained substantial performance. According to some numeric intensive tests, the new register allocator mechanism provide the Client virtual machine with an average of %58 higher performance.

Apache httpd is full of features and abilities, but sometimes it's too heavy for simple sites or static pages. In some cases, a simpler, lighter web server is a good alternative (or addition). Julio M. Merino Vidal demonstrates how to install and configure the simple, fast, and powerful thttpd to serve simple static and generated content very quickly.

Over a year ago we reported on the promising gaim-vv which was supposed to bring MSN/Y! webcam and voice support to Gaim, a feature sorely missed by many IM users today when running Linux. The lead developer of the gaim-vv project now says that the Gaim project leader (now employed by Google) has killed off most of his pending CVS patches and has instead replaced them with voice-only patches, patches coming from Google which are only to be used with the Google IM protocol, leaving all other voice and all video protocols in dissarray. Update: The other side has spoken explaining the situation, but unfortunately it says nothing about webcam support for now or in the future, but only about voice.

Sources at the company told Paul Thurrott this week that Microsoft will soon delay the release of Windows Vista Beta 2 from December 7, 2005 to sometime in January or February 2006. However, because the Vista development schedule is extremely time constrained, the company will try and make up lost time by eliminating one of the planned release candidate (RC) milestones that were planned for later in the process.