Microsoft is tightening the noose for those people running illegal or pirated copies of its Windows XP/2000 software on their systems. Starting Tuesday, it will be mandatory for users of this Windows software to certify that their software is a genuine and legal copy before they will be able to receive any updates except security patches.

Apple has updated the iBook/Mini product lines, increasing standard RAM to 512MB on all models. Contrary to many rumors, the new iBooks do not sport widescreen. All iBooks and two of the now three Mac Minis contain AirPort Extreme and Bluetooth. My take: Not a word on better harddrives in the Mini Macs, which is something I personally hoped for.

This recent article on Epiphany has garnered many comments, both on FootNotes and OSNews. This followup article addresses some concerns that have been raised about Epiphany.

The first release of BSD divert sockets for Linux 2.6 kernels has been completed and may be downloaded here.

A Microsoft customer was so eager to get a beta of Longhorn that he FedEx'ed two pounds of inscribed chocolate to one of Microsoft's test managers. Yes, he did get the invitation and the chocolate was sent to the Longhorn shiproom for everyone to enjoy.

Dave Solomon of Sysinternals was experimenting about how many services are necessary for at least basic funtionality of Windows. What he discovered, however is that Windows can be perfectly used for almost all basic use, such as web browsing or running aplications, without any services running. In his article he explains how to achieve this. Apparently even Microsoft's own vice president of the Core Operating Systems Division was surprised about this.

Konfabulator, the application whose concept was "borrowed" for the Mac OS X Tiger Dashboard system (and yes, we know that Konfabulator itself was inspired by many other apps, including Apple's Desktop Accessories), has been acquired by Yahoo and is now available for free. Download it from their website.

Network stack developer Andre Opperman appeals to the FreeBSD community to support three months of full time work. The primary focus will be to optimize the IP network stack and estimates a potential perfomance increase of 40-50%.

Have you considered setting up a PHP 5 on your Linux server, but not had the time to learn how? This article will help guide you through the installation of a PHP 5 environment using the industry's first integrated PHP environment that includes the IBMCloudscape database server. Installation and configuration is greatly simplified using Zend Core for IBM compared to setting up a complete development and deployment environment from scratch.

IBMs Eclipse based Agent Building and Learning Environment (ABLE) enables developers to build intelligent Java agents on Linux using machine reasoning and implement their own AbleBeans and AbleAgents and plug them into ABLE’s Agent Editor. Version 2.3 includes a new Eclipse plug-in administration console for distributed agent platform, an updated Eclipse rule and agent editors, a new PetriNet agent, and an updated example project.

Yesterday, the Open Sword Group released a beta of Pixen v3. "Pixen is the best program for the pixel artist using Mac OS X. Pixen is specifically for small-scale or pixel art; it shines better there than any other application. Not only that, but Pixen carries no price tag: it's open source under the MIT license and absolutely free." As far as I know, this is the only application of it's kind, with no equivelant on either Mac, Windows or Linux.

"I invite everyone interested to join the Utnubu Team. Utnubu stands for doing what Ubuntu does, just the other way around: We want to take the things Ubuntu does and that are missing in Debian, and - where appliciable - put them in Debian."

Microsoft's decision to call the next version of its OS Vista might have a raised a few smiles last week but one Redmond resident is less than impressed. The boss of Vista, a software and services company for small businesses is considering taking legal action against the software giant.

Yahoo has acquired software "widget" engine Konfabulator in a move to spur third-party developers to devise new applications for the Internet giant's services. Yahoo plans to run the widgets via XML feeds.