It could be a pivotal week for Microsoft Office - or not. A new move by Google and a pending announcement from Microsoft are generating widespread speculation about the future of the Redmond company's flagship productivity software and its competition.

"Comparing AmigaOS and RISC OS is an interesting exercise, especially when it provides inspiration for things like scripting languages, friendly internationalisation configuration, and transparent file format handling. However it also shows areas where RISC OS is grossly under-selling features we take for granted every day, but are seen as almost revolutionary elsewhere: For instance, being efficient on a sub-1GHz RISC CPU, anti-aliased fonts, supporting virtual disc labels, using a RAM-based temporary disc, and providing an iconbar."

"On 10-31-2001, we got the user-level prototype working. On 10-31-2002, we got the first in-kernel mount. And today, 10-31-2005, we integrated into Solaris. ZFS will hit the street in a couple of weeks via Solaris Express."

"If Linux is 85% of the way to being a viable alternative to Windows/Office, it'll get the rest of the way soon. Very soon. The Mark Shuttleworths and Scott McNealys of the world will make sure of that. And unless Microsoft has a real rabbit in their hats - like, say, a mind-reading operating system - I cannot imagine how they're going to keep me and all the Windows users I know paying for something I can now - almost - get for free."

Slackware users can now run their favourite distribution on Reiser4 partitions without having to re-format other partitions first. With the new Slackware 10.2 Reiser4 Installer one can install this distribution on Reiser4 almost as easy as with the more traditional filesystems (see the screenshot). The installer is distributed as a 20MB .iso image and should to be used with the original Slackware CD set (manual included).

"I was thinking about all the cool stuff Google has done when I realized that none of it was original. The folks at Microsoft, long known for being copycats, must be furious, since nobody has ever accused Google of the same thing. Everything Google has done has been derivative. The search engine was taken from the AltaVista idea of huge computer farms. Gmail is a clone of Hotmail. The Google Chat is nothing special. Orkut is a copy of Friendster. Even the invention of ads targeted to search requests is derivative of the old GoTo.com search engine.

High Performance Computing (HPC) has become easier, and two reasons are the adoption of open source software concepts and the refinement of clustering technology. This second of two articles discusses parallel programming using MPI, gives an overview of cluster management and benchmarking, and Linux clustering using OSCAR. Part 1 of this series, Clustering fundamentals, discusses the types and uses of clusters.

The U.K.-based Alfresco kicked off the Open Source Business Conference by unveiling the first production release of its open source content management software. Company CEO John Powell is hoping that an all-encompassing approach to content management, along with the low cost of open source software, will be enough to help his company gain market share in the face of stiff proprietary competition.

The US Supreme Court has rejected an appeal from Microsoft, refusing to hear the software company's request that its liability in a patent-infringement case be limited to domestic sales of its web browser.

"The Debian Weekly News for October 25th, 2005 discusses the upcoming graphical frontend to the debian-installer as part of the most recent minutes of the monthly Debian Installer team meeting. It appears that after all of these years the text based Debian installation is finally getting the boot." Screenshots here.

It took more than two and a half years, but the SCO Group finally has disclosed a list of areas it believes IBM violated its Unix contract, allegedly by moving proprietary Unix technology into open-source Linux.

The newest version of MySQL AB's flagship open source database product includes new pluggable storage engines -- swappable components that offer the ability to add or remove storage engines from a live MySQL server. In this interview, MySQL expert Mike Hillyer gives a deeper explanation of this new feature and explains how it can benefit DBAs.

Apple has released Mac OS 10.4.3. This update weighs around 100MB and includes fixes for AFP/SMB/CIFS/FTP, AirPort/BlueTooth, Core Graphics/Audio/Image, Spotlight, Address Book, AppleScript, Automator, Safari (it now passes the Acid2 test), and much, much more. The update is available via Software Update, or as stand-alone packages (delta|combo).

"In Vista/Longhorn server, the file system (NTFS) will start supporting a new filesystem object (examples of existing filesystem objects are files, folders etc.). This new object is a symbolic link. Think of a symbolic link as a pointer to another file system object (it can be a file, folder, shortcut or another symbolic link)." More news out of Redmond: "Microsoft will add a 'Save As' function in its upcoming Microsoft Office 12 for publishing the developer's own electronic document format, XPS, another move in a competitive campaign against Adobe."