Beginning this month, Microsoft will start to publish details about upcoming security updates in a newsletter available to the general public. Previously this information had been available, but only to those who knew about it and would sign a confidentiality agreement, which ended up being a handful of its largest customers.

Microsoft has agreed to a $536 million settlement with Novell stemming from long-standing anti-trust complaints. Of course, Microsoft admits no wrongdoing, as is the case with such settlements. This settlement does not cover some outstanding WordPerfect patent claims. Novell, who formerly owned WordPerfect, still intend to take Microsoft to court over that issue.

Novell is announcing a new Linux desktop today, called "Novell Linux Desktop 9: Powered by SUSE Linux." More info at Newsforge and News.com.

The latest generation of gamblers in Las Vegas don't like the high-profit-margin slot and video poker machines as much as the older crowd, so casinos are changing with the times. They're developing video game-like slot machines, and even machines that simulate table games with a virtual dealer. A Star Wars-based slot machine allows players to bet on a light saber duel between Vader and Obi-Wan.

CrayCore is a CRAY YMP-EL Emulator. Currently, CrayCore executes instructions one at a time, through a command line interface. Future plans are to slowly add features until CrayCore is fully able to run Unicos. CrayCore version .3 has been released, in two packages, a source.zip, and a win32 binary. New features include light memory support, vector support, and many more opcodes. Be sure to check OpcodesTwo.txt, included with both packages for status on which instructions are implemented, and how to use them.

The author of the hobby OS Blueillusion writes:

FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE is now officially available. This release marks a milestone in the FreeBSD 5.x series and the beginning of the 5-STABLE branch of releases. New features from 4.x include massively upgraded SMP scalability including the new KSE M:N threading implementation, and the new ULE constant time scheduler (currently switched off per default). All in all these features bring scalability of kernel features on SMP systems (at least small to midrange systems) more or less on par with the Linux 2.6 kernel series with the NPTL threads library.

"Nobody knows when we'll start the shift to Cobalt, OS 6, or on which devices. For now, we're saying that we've built the functionality we need into the Treo and the Tungsten T5 and there's no need to confuse developers by switching. I'm not even prepared to commit us to a change next year, or the year after, at this stage", said PalmONE president Ed Colligan. It is interesting to see how companies afraid to switch to new programming frameworks in fear that they will allienate their third party developers who are used to the "old way". Nobody likes big changes, it seems.

Although it is not an official build, PearPC .4pre has been released on Richard Goodwin's site. You can pick it up here.

The GNU Compiler Collection is a suite of compilers that compile C, C++, Objective C, Fortran, Java, and CHILL for a wide variety of architectures. Version 3.4.3 was released recently.

The latest Syllable Development Newsletter is available, covering work in October. Highlights include driver updates, kernel improvements and a Quake 2 port. Elsewhere, after almost a month of daily work, Mozilla Firefox has been successfully ported to SkyOS (still in beta). This native port will bring a much-needed professional web browser to SkyOS.

J2SE 5.0 sources are now available under the Java Research License.This is a much more relaxed licence than previous SCSL license.

Castle today released a slight update to its RISC OS 5 for Iyonix machines, version 5.08. This is a bug fix release, addressing issues seen by a few users.

I think it's not needed to introduce Richard Stallman, however: Richard Matthew Stallman, or just RMS, is the GNU project founder. It's a little difficult to interview someone like Stallman. I tried to make him talk about some technical issues, but he's extremely concerned about the ideology behind free software. Freedom is his slogan and he defends it as he defends his life." Read Interview.