"In such a scenario, Microsoft is investing money in software development, and even though the final product is great (and I use that term loosely) by itself, it is not so significant a change that people will upgrade immediately. I expect a lot of people to stick with their current office suite even when Office 12 becomes a retail reality; same could be the case with Windows Vista. Having said that, it's also a given that there is no way software development can come to a halt. What option does that leave the software industry with?"

SUSE Linux 10.1 alpha 3 has been released. Changes include: "Update to KDE 3.5 RC1; update of GCC to the current 4.1 development version; removal of linuxthreads support; NetworkManager will be the new way of managing changing network interfaces, Kinternet is now in maintenance mode; update to Linux kernel 2.6.14.2; /dev on tmpfs is mandatory, a static device directory is not supported any more; udev is now the sole program for handling hotplug events, superseding the old hotplug package."

"So who blinked in Tunis - the US or everybody else? After two years of bickering, it looks like it was everybody else, and that the US will still control the root directory of the Internet. Of course, that depends on who's doing the spinning."

"If you shop around, you can actually get a functional computer for $500 (EUR 425,-). But as we become more budget conscious, $500 seems to be a bit much for a standard machine, so what's our next target? Why, it's an over ambitious $100 (EUR 85,-) notebook. How companies accomplish this is their business; what we are interested in is what they ship out for a product when all is said and done. As of now, however, there is one thing that interests me even more, and that is, why would they want to sell me a $100 notebook in the first place?"

Teo Wan Ping, IBM Singapore's brand manager for information management, said that IBM could "potentially offer" a free starter edition of DB2, as part of the company's strategy to gain mindshare for its database product. IBM currently does not have a free version of its DB2 product, unlike free competing products like Microsoft's SQL Server 2005 Express Edition and Oracle's Database XE released recently.

Dr. Dobb's Journal has published the first articles in a series on the popular Google Summer of Code. These articles cover the following four projects: 'Apache Axis2 JMX Front', 'CL-GODB: a Common Lisp GO Database Manipulation Library', 'Wide Character Support in NetBSD Curses Library' and 'gjournal: FreeBSD GEOM Journaling Layer'.

The same sources that correctly predicted the Mac Mini and the photo iPod, have now confirmed that Apple will release an Intel-based iBook in January 2006, 6 months ahead of schedule. These new iBooks will most likely use Intel's forthcoming Yonah processors, and will be priced as much as $200,- (E170,-) lower than current offerings.

"When Office 12 arrives sometime in the second half of 2006, you may stop hating Microsoft Office. We looked at an early, private beta version of the suite and found a lot of improvements. Although the interface is radically changed, a lot of the underlying features and commands remain the same. We won't promise using Office 12 will be trouble-free, but so far it looks like a big step forward." Another look at beta 1 can be found here.

"We just released Mono 1.1.10, our best release so far. The major feature missing from this release to call it Mono 1.2 is the completion of our Windows.Forms implementation. In this document I only present the direction of development of the Mono team at Novell; a more comprehensive view of other Mono developments by the Mono community is something that am working on and will post at a later date. I also present how our team's priorities are shifting in response to Novell's own internal use of Mono and external factors like the final release of .NET 2.0."

"One day, while the boss was away, I shoved a spare hard-drive into my computer and installed Ubuntu 5.04. I managed to work for a month and a half before the Boss noticed I was using Linux - and that was only because he happened to glance at my screen. Half a year later, I am still using Ubuntu (now version 5.10) at work and I am more productive than ever."

"Mac GNU Privacy Guard is the Mac OS X port of the popular security utility. I have been using GnuPG for more than 5 years now and it is the best available open source solution for various encryption purposes. This article guides the reader through Mac GNU Privacy Guard installation, as well as its basic functions."

Microsoft's SQL Server development team learned a hard lesson from its work on SQL Server 2005: customers do not want to wait five years for an upgrade. From now on, a new development regime called the Software Reengineering Initiative will ensure that releases ship every two years whether new features are ready or not, said Mark Souza, who heads the SRI team.

"While the move to ODF seems to offer clear benefits to the Massachusetts government and citizens in general, a move to ODF and a change in office application has significant accessibility implications for people with disabilities. Today people with disabilities are predominantly on the Microsoft Windows desktop. The proportion on Windows increases further when you look at employees of the Executive Branch of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. When it comes to the move to ODF for people with disabilities, there are two basic questions to ask." UPDATE: ODF turned into nothing but a forgotton political football in the Massachusetts Senate today when Senator William Morrissey pulled his own amendment to S 2256 and replaced it with something even worse.

GNOME 2.13.2 has been released. Odd-numbered versions of GNOME represent developmental branches, hence this is the second development release on the road towards GNOME 2.14 in March 2006. You can compile this new test release using these jhbuild modulesets. Now, can you hear the new Zipdisk Mount Error Dialog HIG-compliant console beep?