There have been several reports that HP has closed the door on Itanium. Officially, HP will no longer contribute to designs of the CPU and Intel will purchase HP's development team to end the joint project.

Apple has released OS X 10.3.7 via Software Update. Improvements include improved AFP support for saving documents with long file names, improved OpenGL technology and updated ATI and NVIDIA graphics drivers, improved FireWire device compatibility, updated Preview application, improved compatibility for third party applications, and previous standalone security updates. Read more here.

Netbeans IDE version 4 is now out. If you are looking for an advanced framework for building your Java client application, look no further. Amongst other things, Netbeans now supports Java 1.5 (Tiger), refactoring, advanced debugging, and a new project system based on Apache Ant.

It has been a while since Redhat announced the merger with Fedora.us and the formation of a community oriented and supported Fedora project. The process of opening up CVS access to the community is one of the major steps towards that and that has finally happened, according to Red Hat. The build infrastructure internally used by Redhat should open up soon and formation of fedora extras and policies would complete the process.

Though Microsoft is the behemoth that everyone loves to hate, the computing world actually owes a lot to Bill Gates and co. And though it's possible that someone else would have blazed the trail to "a PC on every desktop," in our world, it was Microsoft that did it. Update: Now with page breaks! (My fault -- David)

IT Enquirer has a short preview of Mac OS X 10.4 Server, including screenshots of the new Firewall rules and Stealth Mode and advanced rules.

The OpenBSD project will soon release OpenCVS, a GNU CVS compatible, BSD licensed alternative. "The OpenCVS project was started after discussions regarding the latest GNU CVS vulnerabilities that came out. Although CVS is widely used, its development has been mostly stagnant in the last years and many security issues have popped up, both in the implementation and in the mechanisms."

Sun has put its TestingComatiblityKit (TCK) for Java under a "Read-Only-License". This means that you are allowed to look at the source-code but you are not allowed to modify or compile it. For more information, a couple of Sun people's blogs address the subject here and here. For a perspective from outside Sun, see here and here. Read the license here. And retrieve the source code of the TCK here.

We all understand the need to comprehensively document our class libraries and to keep it up to date with the code base. And still, documentation is an ongoing pain for all of us. The Visual Studio .NET IDE takes a first big step in easing that pain. It allows to document your code in a way that the compiler can create an XML document describing your classes, methods, properties, etc. This article explains how to use this feature and then create a basic help file out of it.

Standford University research team has found that Linux has fewer bugs than the competition using Coverity, a static source code analysis tool. Andrew Morton, one of the core developers says that the major bugs detected using this tool have already been fixed. It might be of interest that Linus Trovalds has developed a similar tool called sparse specifically for the Linux kernel which has proved itself to be pretty useful.

XLiveCD is an X Server that runs off of a Live CD for Windows. Put the CD in the drive and the X server and an Xterm both autostart, allowing you to ssh into a machine and run X-forwarded applications. This is great for use in public labs where you may want to run those remote Linux apps and don't have an X server installed. Built with Cygwin and a few other packages. See the home page for downloads, or just grab the torrent here.

Since the decision to demote ULE in favor of the 4BSD scheduler as the default for FreeBSD's 5.3-Release, many improvements to both schedulers have been committed. At the time it was marked broken, ULE was especially needy in light of the status of its maintainership, performance issues, and its unreliable nature in conjunction with threading and kernel preemption. Having resolved these problems, Jeff Roberson announces to -current that the ULE code is now in working order, kerneltrap reports.

Federal and state police now have the power to use computer spyware to gather evidence in a broad range of investigations after legal changes last week. The Surveillance Devices Act allows police to obtain a warrant to use software surveillance technologies, including systems that track and log keystrokes on a computer keyboard. The law applies to the Australian Federal Police and to state police investigating Commonwealth offences. Read More ("smhguy/pass" to access)

Sun Microsystems' new Sun Ray Server 3.0 might actually bring thin clients into the ready for prime-time category. The big breakthrough is the bandwidth management software that allows these clients to run across standard high speed internet connections. Though they're still targeting large organizations, this new version opens up the home market, via internet providers. A company like AOL could market a totally managed thin client with a monthly service fee.