Ever since networking came out, one important issue, to a various extent over the time, has been how to give the legitimate users the right access - authentication, which is one of the three basic elements in security: authentication, authorization and access control.

The first in a new series of development builds of GNOME has been released. You can compile GNOME 2.13.1 by using these jhbuild modulesets. Planned features can be found here.

Corel apparantly did an impressive handbrake turn yesterday, because it confirmed it will support ODF-- an obvious shift in position seeing it only a week ago said it wouldn't. But that is not all on the ODF front today. Microsoft yesterday also opened the door to supporting ODF just a bit more. "Microsoft is working with a French company on translators to determine the scope of the problem in exporting Office documents to ODF. It sounds to me that support for "Save As" ODF in Office is a when, not an if." Andy Updegrove, who recently critized Corel heavily for not supporting ODF, replies.

A controversy surrounding Lycoris (which got acquired by Mandriva) is brewing. Apparently, Rus Bayne, ex-vice president of sales at Lycoris, is trying to start up a new distribution-- but allegedly "ripping off" Lycoris along the way. Read the thread on Lycoris' community site and judge for yourself.

Sun has big plans for its Java Desktop System and on Tuesday announced a new program that will allow its desktop Linux variant to run on all major Linux distributions. While Sun remains fully committed to the JDS on both the Solaris and Sun Ray environments, it seeks to address the Linux space going forward and offer customers choice in this regard. In addition, Sun on Wednesday is expected to announce that its Java Enterprise System server software now supports Microsoft's Windows and Hewlett-Packard's UX operating systems.

"Slackware is old-school Linux. Back in the day - before Red Hat seized the throne - Pat Volkerding's Linux distribution was the undisputed king of the hill. Many still use it today. By the time I started playing with Linux in 1995, or running my Web server with it in 1996, Slackware's slump in market share had already begun. I've tried a lot of different Linux distributions during the years since then, but until recently I had never tried Slackware. Here's what I've learned about Slackware while installing and using the recently released Slackware 10.2."

Some newsbits from the world of processors. First, IBM detailed power-saving techniques in the new PowerPC 907MP (the dual-core G5). Secondly, "Fujitsu's Sparc64 VI+ processor, code-named Jupiter and due for release in 2008, is a four-core processor with clock speeds of at least 2.7GHz, the company said Tuesday." And to complement today's batch of processor news, IBM unveiled the Xbox 360 processor.

"This is the continuation from our previous article on the latest build, which significantly depicts itself as Beta 2. We'll cover everything we missed in our first installment of the 5231 coverage, but before you continue, we recommend you read the first part of the article to get a better grasp on the new features and changes Microsoft has made in 5231."

"Scientists at UC Irvine have completed the world's highest-resolution grid-based display for visualizing and manipulating massive data sets. The Highly Interactive Parallelized Display Wall (HIPerWall) is a room-sized display that measures nearly 23x9ft (7x2.7m). The HIPerWall system, consisting of 50 flat-panel tiles, provides a total resolution of 200 million pixels (2x that of the 2nd best), bringing to life terabyte-sized data sets. Each panel, with a resolution of 2560x1600 pixels, is powered by a dual-processor 2.7GHz G5 node, with nVIDIA 6800 Ultra DDL graphics, that has access to an initial storage capacity of 10 terabytes."

Many of you will remember the fanfare and bravado surrounding Sun Microsystems' Sep. 2004 announcement of a $1 per hour per processor utility computing plan. What you won't remember is Sun revealing a single customer using the service. That's because it hasn't. More than one year since it first started hyping the "pay-for-use grid computing services" Sun is still weeks away from presenting a customer to the public. The program has proved much tougher to sell that Sun ever imagined.

As scheduled, Wine has officially entered the beta stage today. "This is release 0.9 of Wine, a free implementation of Windows on Unix. After 12 years of development, this release marks the beginning of the beta testing phase." In related news, CrossOver Office 5 has been released, with support for Office 2003 and 'bottles' (multiple Windows environments).

"A file system is something which computer users hear about all the time, but many do not know very much about. This article is going to be a short guide, which goes over the basics of file systems so you will at least know enough to get by. This is a subject which can get as complicated as you want to make it, but a little knowledge can go a long way."

"Bounty Source is a progressive step in project management for Free Open Source Software communities. In addition to the standard tools needed for managing an active community, we allow people to "put their money where their mouth" is by offering monetary rewards (bounties) toward the development of solutions to bug reports and feature requests. The end result of the bounty system is the creation of a catalyst that will increase development activity throughout all projects that choose to take advantage of Bounty Source."

Writing programs that generate other programs may seem esoteric, but once you learn why metaprogramming is so powerful, it's a skill you'll want to cultivate. This article explains why you might consider metaprogramming and looks at some of the components of this art.