Microsoft Wednesday edged one step closer to its vision of offering a complete home digital entertainment system through PCs running Windows XP Media Center Edition OS. The company revealed a deal with a cable television consortium that will allow PC vendors to offer digital-cable-ready Windows Media Center PCs by next December.

"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."

The Microsoft doubters are at it again. Skeptics are questioning Microsoft's ability to deliver on the "Windows Live" strategy outlined recently by Bill Gates and Microsoft CTO Ray Ozzie. If history is a lesson, however, it's a mistake to underestimate Microsoft, a company that has repeatedly shown an ability to catch up to competitors when it falls behind, as it often does.

"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.

"Sun Studio 11 software is the latest release of optimizing compilers and tools for the C, C++ and Fortran developer. This release delivers the highest optimizations and the best performance in the development of scalable 32-bit and 64-bit applications on Sun's newest hardware platforms including the latest multi-core UltraSPARC, x64 and x86 platforms. And Sun Studio 11 software now removes the price barrier and is available for free."

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.

"An operating system without an office suite is limited in its mass market appeal, making this a fairly serious issue. When yellowTAB decided to update ZETA's compiler, much thought was given to this problem in particular, and finally an answer made itself clear."

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.

"If Microsoft offers a superior product to Linux then why would they need a 'Get the Facts' campaign? Just about any time a major publication runs a story about Linux, Microsoft gets them to place a 'Get the Facts' advertisement nearby and often right in the middle of the story. That seems pretty suspect to me. Do you ever wonder if publications run Linux stories just to garner Microsoft's ad money? Or have you considered that desperate times call for desperate measures? It makes me wonder."

"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."

Sun today released its next generation filesystem, ZFS a few minutes ago by pushing out the "community" (i.e. testing) build 27 of OpenSolaris in source and binary form. You can take a look at the homepage, documentation, source code tour, and a "getting started" screencast demo.

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.

Oracle selects the Solaris 10 Operating System as its preferred Open Source 64-bit development and deployment environment.

ExtremeTech is featuring a How-To on building an OSx86 MacIntel machine that boots both OS X and Windows. On the same hardware, OS X booted almost three times faster than Windows, yet was a disappointment when playing certain games. Update: One more article about it.