Today Solaris Express 11/04 shipped. New in this release are the AMD64 kernel and userland (supporting Athlon64, Nocona and Opteron) and many other enhancements. A more complete listing is available here.

The MSDN Magazine Dec 2004 is released with articles of Windows developer interest. Articles include Operators in Basic, .NET Code tuning and profiling, Optimization for .NET apps on PocketPCs.

Have you partaken in the conspiracy theories about Microsoft's recent investment in Vintela, a Unix-Windows integration software company? Vintela's association with SCO, and Microsoft's apparent interest in keeping SCO's legal battle against IBM afloat in order to undermine Linux, certainly provide plenty of kindling to keep the home fires burning at conspiracy central. But let's try to get the story straight first. OSNews interviewed Vintela President Dave Wilson.

The python final release of Python 2.4 was just released. Python 2.4 is the result of almost 18 month's worth of work on top of Python 2.3. New features are, but not limited to, function decorators, generator expressions, a number of new module and more.

A quick look at the GeekBox Linux minimal disribution: 6 MB ISO to power your home-made dvd and divx player.

Datamation ran an article about databases running on OpenVMS that never die or quit. These databases have uptimes longer than the existance of Linux and definitely longer that Microsoft product lifetimes. Here's the article.

I have updated my guide for WinUAE at AmigaWorld. Check in for more info.

Charles Keenan provides specific tasks for setting up a Serviceguard high availability cluster on HP-UX/Linux, including example commands to help illustrate key points.

This sample book chapter details the ways in which C programs deal with data, and how you mess with text and numeric data.

The IT sector today is a complete mess. The end-users rarely understand this, but most insiders reach a point when they realize that things should be different. The problems are numerous but they all reduce to a basic principle. IT and consumer electronics companies are interested more about money than helping people solve their problems. Of course companies need to make a profit and nobody denies that. They should however make money by helping people and not by creating more problems for them.

Open source database vendor MySQL AB will release version 5.0 of its eponymous database management system in the first quarter of 2005, a year after it first went in to alpha testing. Also, after 4 weeks of work, involving a lot of bug fixes, and documentation improvements to the source tree, PostgreSQL.org have released the 5th Beta of 8.0.0.

Karl Fischer takes a walk through the latest version of Gnome, version 2.8 (screenshots), to illustrate a few of the best new features of this very popular desktop environment.

Want to try a real Java + Linux based desktop? JD4X and ZerahStar are joining efforts to produce a next generation desktop. It is still in very early stages of development but worth the try.

Web services and service-oriented architectures continue to move into the mainstream. With IBM Rational XDE Developer v2003 — .NET Edition and Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003 to support you, there really aren't any excuses left to avoid exploring Web services. Start using them quickly and effectively through hands-on exercises. You'll be happy to see how easy it is to model and generate .NET XML Web services.