Sources close to the joint efforts between Google and Sun say rampant speculation about hosted desktop productivity offerings and common operating systems is way off base. Insiders with knowledge of the joint plans to promote and enhance the OpenOffice.org desktop productivity suite say it is far more likely that Sun and Google will find ways to promote both OpenOffice.org and Google Toolbar, including having Toolbar included as part of OpenOffice.org, StarOffice, and even OpenSolaris and Sun's branded Solaris products.

The notion of "business intelligence," or easy access to critical company data, is one of the key areas for improvement that the company has identified for the next version of its flagship desktop software. On Monday, Microsoft shared some of its plans in that area, including the outlines of a new server-based system for managing Excel spreadsheets.

"MySQL 5.0.15, a new version of the popular Open Source Database Management System, has been released. The Community Edition is now available in source and binary form for a number of platforms from our download pages."

"Despite its recent announcement of servers based on AMD64 CPUs, Sun Microsystems is still gung-ho about its 64-bit UltraSPARC computers. The newest addition to Sun's workstation array is the portable Ultra 3 Mobile Workstation. At first glance you might think it's a fancy-looking notebook system, but on closer inspection you'll discover that it's got all the power of a Sun Blade workstation in a fraction of the size."

"Once my original Mini-ITX project was completed I finally had a chance to sit back and use the computer. Knowing how simple my needs were, the Mini-ITX project computer was orginally designed to be as basic and quiet as possible. This meant no hard drive, no extra accessories- just a stripped down system. While this suited my needs well at the time, its lack of versatility soon became an issue. This meant it was back to the drawing board for a retooling of the Mini-ITX project computer."

Today, Andy Tanenbaum has officially announced the release of MINIX 3.0, the third stable version of this rather legendary operating system. The launch of v3 has been accompanied by a new website and a new logo. From the new website: "MINIX 3 is a new open-source operating system designed to be highly reliable and secure. It is based somewhat on previous versions of MINIX, but is fundamentally different in many key ways. MINIX 1 and 2 were intended as teaching tools; MINIX 3 adds the new goal of being usable as a serious system on resource-limited and embedded computers and for applications requiring high reliability." Read on for more information.

"I've updated the Firewalling with PF manuscript, mainly for the tutorial I gave at the AUUG2005 conference. New sections: Info on bruteforce protection; Wireless net setup; authpf with wireless net. Updates to the spamd section and traceroute section."

"Are you ready to take a look at a fairly new technology that promises you to save bandwidth? Maybe you're even more interested when the promises range from a 50% to a 80% amount of savings? Jump in, and take the ride to see if it works out as well as you were promised. I'm going to take a walk down Apache 2 server lane and benchmark mod_deflate in a real life situation instead of a synthetic setup."

"This is a true gem for developers. SkyOS got a lot of under-the-hood work, the Integrated Streaming System and the networking stack have been reworked, the API has been standardised, missing libraries and functions have been added and a lot of bugs have been resolved. I think what we're seeing is a quasi-feature freeze. This actually serves its purpose, SkyOS is now much more stable, reliable and responsive than before."

Tiger is the latest and greatest version of the Mac OS X operating system. But even though it's the latest and greatest, it's still Mac OS X. In this chapter, you'll become familiar with Mac basics as author Robin Williams shows you how to use the Finder, Dock, contextual menus, and keyboard shortcuts.

Testing time/date-specific functions can be complicated. Unfortunately, because of this, many companies don't bother testing these functions. This chapter will help you understand why testing these functions is critical, and how you can go about getting it done.

Coming into Apple's Cocoa programming from the Java world has been a huge eye-opener for Marcus Zarra. Whenever he speaks with other developers who have worked with Cocoa, he hears praises about Apple's development tools. See if you agree with his conclusions about Apple's Interface Builder from a Java developer's point of view.

"I have started to port the linux ACPI subsystem because ACPI is becoming more important now and slowly replaces subsystems like the pci routing table, multi-processor table and apm. The Linux ACPI code is based on the os independent intel reference implementation and so the port has been very easy (and fast to do) so far. Currently the ACPI busmanager contains the basic acpi code (about 90% of the code)."

"PC-BSD 0.8.3 was released today. This version offers some new visuals, new languages, as well as important bugfixes with systems that have had trouble booting after the install. The complete changelog is available here. Users running 0.8.2 may update to this version using the Online Update utility within the PC-BSD Config menu." Download here, release notes here.