Indonesia's Ministry of Research and Technology Thurday said it will implement a Java Desktop System on Linux as a national-standard desktop, customed-designed for its own culture. This desktop software will be a major component of the new Indonesia Goes Open Source (IGOS) program that aims to help eliminate the "digital divide in the world's largest archipelago," the ministry and Sun Microsystems said in a joint announcement.

Windows Server 2003 Compute Cluster Solution brings together the power of commodity x64 (64-bit x86) computers, the ease-of-use and security of Active Directory, and the Windows operating system to provide a secure and affordable high performance computing (HPC) solution.

In a move that shows just how far Microsoft has come, and how pervasive open-source software is in certain areas, the software powerhouse is, for the first time, including open-source technology in one of its shipping products. Microsoft plans to include the Message Passing Interface in its Windows Server 2003 Compute Cluster Edition, which went to public beta this week at the Microsoft Developers Conference here and is on track to ship in the first half of next year.

The pressure is growing on Novell Inc's management to make major strategic changes after a regulatory filing revealed a Novell shareholder has joined Credit Suisse First Boston in calling for change at the identity management and Linux vendor. The steps proposed by the investment firm include cutting costs by targeting Novell's two corporate jets, its "overstaffed" R&D department, legacy products, and its 400 NetWare engineers, as well as selling non-core businesses to enable funds to be redeployed.

"VIA is beginning to ramp up production on the successors to their C3 part, the C7 and C7-M CPU's. Keith Kowal, marketing manager for VIA's chipset platform group, took some time on his promotional tour to talk with us about the new platform."

Why didn’t Jobs, ever the maverick, opt for the scrappy challenger, Advanced Micro Devices, instead of the old-money establishment, Intel? The reason, industry analysts say, is that Jobs has a clear goal in mind: innovative designs. And such designs require the lowest-voltage chips, which IBM and Freescale were not going to make with the PowerPC chip core - and which AMD has not yet perfected.

Again, more news from the PDC. Microsoft senior vice president Steven Sinofsky took the stage Wednesday to discuss Office 12, which he said would hit Beta 1 within a "couple months." Betas of the Open Office XML format schemes are available starting today. Also, more screenshots of Vista build 5219 can be found here, shots of IE7 here. MS also announced a developer's toolbar for IE 6 and 7. The toolbar would allow the developer to see how pages would look in various screen resolutions, validate HTML and CSS code, and perform numerous other functions that Web designers would find useful. You can read transcripts of the various keynotes here.

The Mozilla Foundation plans to "shortly" release new versions of its Firefox and Mozilla Web browsers to address a recently disclosed serious security bug as well as several additional flaws, a representative said Wednesday.

In PDC related news: "Windows Workflow Foundation is the programming model, engine and tools for quickly building workflow enabled applications on Windows. It consists of a WinFX namespace, an in-process workflow engine, and designers for Visual Studio 2005. Windows Workflow Foundation is available (currently in beta) for both client and server versions of Windows."

In his latest column,, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols argues that Microsoft Vista is going to be so expensive that it's going to make users think hard about switching to Linux instead. "Desktop Linux is never going to have a better chance than it will in the next eighteen months," he says. My take: He forgets two important factors: Vista can run with all the flashy graphics turned off, and seven editions of Vista? How many Linux distributions are there to choose from?

With Breezy Badger on its way its time for the announcement of what the next +1 release will be called, and the Ubuntu team has decided that the next +1 release (6.04) will be called The Dapper Drake. This release of Ubuntu will be supported for 3 years after release, and the Ubuntu developers are going to work as hard and as long as possible on Dapper Drake, as it's what they're going to release in response to MS's release of Windows Vista.

The latest release of Slackware, 10.2, was just released to the mirrors.

"As nice as Open Office Excel is for a free application, it doesn't even come close to the performance and usability of Microsoft Office Excel. There is no shame in losing to a commercially funded application, but no one should make false statements that Microsoft Office is bloated and inferior. The only remaining question for businesses and homes is whether Excel is worth the money and most have apparently decided yes." Update: OOo 1.1.5 has been released.

Microsoft issued an update to its final Update Rollup for Windows 2000 on Tuesday, correcting issues with the initial release. While there seems to be yet more glitches still not fixed, the company says those will be addressed in individual patches.