Although OpenOffice.org had planned to release the final 2.0 version of its open-source office suite on Oct. 13 - the fifth anniversary of the founding of the organization - the company has decided to hold off due to a "show-stopping" problem with the software, community members said Wednesday.

This tutorial shows how to develop sockets-based networking applications (free reg. req.) using the Ruby language. You learn Ruby basics as well as the most important classes for sockets programming, and then look at a working chat application that illustrates these fundamentals. The tutorial finishes by exploring the higher-level classes that make it easy to build dynamic Web servers, mail servers and clients, and other application-layer protocols.

The eComStation demo CD is available for download. Now everyone is invited to download it and experience this OS, which is a continuation of IBM's os/2. The focus of eCS is to provide an organization with a set of world class business applications and an application engine which can support multiple API sets. eCS is REXX enabled and comes with support for Java, Windows 3.x (limited 32 bit Windows), OS/2 and DOS applications.

The DragonFly project has been making progress of late adding features desired for their upcoming release. In addition to the ongoing work to prepare the system to run free of the MP lock, a number of smaller, but important subprojects are nearing completion.

IBM officials said the company will donate a subset of the IBM Rational Unified Process to the open-source community. RUP is a development methodology that comes out of IBM Software Group's Rational business unit. Grady Booch, an IBM fellow and Rational's chief scientist, said RUP is a vast collection of methods and best practices for promoting quality and efficiency throughout software development projects.

Enterprise Linux software maker Red Hat Tuesday announced that it has appointed Brian Stevens as its new chief technology officer and vice president of engineering.

Microsoft is about to give Media Center PCs a new point of view. The software giant is expected to unveil on Friday an update for its Windows XP Media Center Edition operating system that will boost the computers' abilities to tap online entertainment such as movies, access e-mail and even let users go shopping via the special user interface, designed to allow easy access to multimedia.

Apple reported fiscal fourth-quarter earnings of $430 million (E358 million), or 50 cents (E0.42) per share, on revenue of $3.68 billion (E3.06 billion). That compares with earnings of $106 million (E88 miillon), or 13 cents (E0.11) per share, on revenue of $2.35 billion (E1.96 billion) for the same period a year earlier. The most recent quarter's earnings included a benefit from tax-related issues. Excluding that benefit, Apple would have had earnings of 38 cents (E0.32) per share. Sales were somewhat less than some analysts were projecting, and investors sent shares down more than 10 percent in after-hours trading. Apple said it sold 1.24 million Macs and 6.45 million iPods during the past quarter.

Peter Naulls has released the fifth Firefox beta for RISC OS. The new version feels more like a conventional RISC OS application thanks to the icon bar icon and pop up menus. The browser also responds to URI requests from other applications.

"Quartz is the heart and soul of Mac OS X's graphics layer, which directly supports the defining features of the Aqua desktop experience. Quartz is largely based upon Adobe's PDF specification, but it has roots tracing all the way back to PostScript. The two defining components of Quartz are Quartz Compositor and Quartz 2D. Tiger introduced Quartz 2D Extreme and Quartz Composer, an alternative way to explore the power of Quartz through a powerful visual programming environment."

Microsoft and Yahoo have agreed to make their two instant-messaging programs work together, a partnership that could threaten market leader America Online, people familiar with the situation said.

Slimline Open Firmware provides a largely machine-independent BIOS, illustrating what is needed to initialize and boot Linux. Three of the original SLOF developers discuss the development and usage of SLOF, initialization/boot source code for the PowerPC based on the Open Firmware standard.

"The KDE Project today announced the release of KOffice 1.4.2 for Linux and Unix operating systems. Support for the OpenDocument format, recently adopted by Massachusetts state in the USA, has been greatly improved, especially in KWord, KSpread and KPresenter. Karbon, a vector-based drawing program, has also seen a lot of development lately, and many fixes have gone into it."

As promised, Microsoft on Tuesday issued nine separate security patches, fixing vulnerabilities in DirectX, Exchange, Internet Explorer, and Windows itself. Three of the fixes were deemed "critical," four "important," and two "moderate".