The following is a review of a technical breakout session from the HP Technology Forum in Orlando, FL (Oct. 17-20, 2005). Doug Lora, Senior Product Manager for HPC from Microsoft, and Doug de Werd, HPC Technical Marketing from Hewlett-Packard, presented "Introducing Microsoft Windows Compute Cluster Server."

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.

There is no compelling reason to rush into upgrading to the next version of Windows, says Gartner.

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'.

Microsoft has stunned some in the British reseller community by allowing a discount dealer to sell secondhand volume licenses, opening the floodgates for a used-software market in the U.K.

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.

The 5.0.59 version of Linspire was released in March of 2005. A new version 5.0.347 is now available for immediate download. This version does not add any new major functionality, as this is mainly a bug fix release that resolves some problems with the previous release. The Insiders are still beta testing new versions of Linspire that contain new drivers, new features, etc.

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.

Apple on Thursday released an update to its developer tools bringing the Xcode package up to version 2.2. There are many changes in the recent release that affect the compilers, distributed builds, debugging and other functions.

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.

The first release candidate for PC-BSD has been released. It is based on FreeBSD 6.0, includes an improved installer and new Network Manager. This release also sees the upgrade of KDE to 3.4.3, and Linux-compatibility layer is installed by default allowing Linux PBI's to be run without having to install the compatibility layer first. Read the changelog here and the release notes here, then go here to download. Update by AS: Screenshots courtesy OSDir.

As part of a larger article about C++'s evolution, DevSource reports on a minor war in the C++ standards community. Don't get excited: the fighting is already over. At issue is whether Microsoft's compiler can say that std::copy is "deprecated" (which usually means "this feature will not be in the next version of the language") when they really mean "our compiler suggests you do not use it." Is this a silly semantic dispute or another sign that Microsoft is trying to hijaack the language?

Heise.de reports (English translation) that after talking with its customers, Novell decided that both KDE and GNOME will be equally supported in all its products, even though GNOME will be the default for the enterprise/server line. Opensuse instead will feature KDE (English translation) as the primary desktop. Both will be however developed further in the future.

"One of the often cited reasons for not switching away from MS Windows is it's breadth of commodity hardware support. The argument often goes something like this: 'Since Windows supports all the hardware I have why would I want to risk it not working under Linux? It's better to continue to use what I know will work.' While that may be true in and of itself, I'm finding this argument to involve a limited outlook."