Passwords will soon be a thing of the past, replaced by biometric and smart-card technology, Bill Gates reiterated on Tuesday. He also detailed his company's plan for computer management software and announced a long-awaited Windows update tool.

It was revealed that recent lack of updates of Slackware -Current has been caused by Patrick Volkerding's serious dicease. Read more at here. Pat asks for help.

After 2 years of development, there is now a BSD-licensed web services technology that competes with the allegedly overcomplex Microsoft SOAP technology: XINS. XINS is heavily based on Java and XML. Main design goals include simplicity, scalability and testability. Features include transaction logging, log documentation, and automatic generation of HTML docs, test forms, client-side and server-side code. A comprehensive user guide is available.

While Suse 9.2 Pro was announced close to a month ago, it was only made available for purchase recently. I was originally going to compare Suse 9.2 to something like RedHat WS 3.0. However, both Novell/Suse and RedHat seem to now be offering a corporate desktop solution and a "desktop for the masses" solution.

Anyone who registers with Sun will be able to use Solaris for free on servers with x86 processors, said John Loiacono, executive vice president of Sun's software business. It's not a totally free lunch, though: Sun will provide security updates in the free version but will charge an annual subscription fee for bug fixes and support.

Microsoft made a minority investment on Monday in Unix/Linux management vendor Vintela on Monday. Neither Microsoft nor Lindon, City, Utah-based Vintela would comment on the size of the investment. But sources said the amount was under $10 million. Vintela has acted a key participant in Microsoft's Unix/Linux interoperability strategy. Nonetheless, Vintela is an unlikely Microsoft partner. Update: I hope to interview someone from Vintela this week, and ask them about their relationship with SCO (other than having the same investor). If you have any other burning questions, please suggest them in the comments.

Last year IBM introduced a cut-down POWER4 CPU called the PowerPC 970 and Apple promptly put it into their PowerMac line. IBM are not standing still; the POWER5 is out and rumours have long hinted at a successor to the 970 being in development. What should we expect?

Gartner Dataquest’s preliminary worldwide server shipment estimates for the third quarter of 2004 reveal that the market achieved its seventh consecutive quarter of double-digit year-over-year growth. Apple continued to re-establish itself in the server market, according to the analyst. After having above-average growth in the second quarter of 2004, Apple grew shipments 119 percent year over year.

Linuxtimes has a fairly detailed review of the Xandros Desktop Management Server up at this link.

The SCO Group's legal actions against Linux have shed light on the inner workings of the open-source programming project and on the operations of a company desperate to survive. They've also created a cottage industry for conspiracy theorists over Microsoft's role in the affair.

Open Firmware is software that is used after powering a machine to bring the operating system online (most visibly on PowerPC and SPARC systems), all modern Macintosh systems use it. This article looks at the Open Firmware spec, traces its history as a standard, examines how it works and some of its components, and discusses the benefits it offers. The best way to learn more about OF is to practice, to get a Mac, hold down command-option-O-F when you turn it on, and just start typing.

From CP/M to OpenVMS, one of the best things to do with a Linux box is to run programs for other operating systems on it. It can simplify your life considerably. Emulations of a wide variety of operating systems are available for Linux. More than mere academic exercises, these "hosted OSes" are practical investments for many server rooms. Also see Cameron Laird’s notes on emulators.

This guide will show you how to secure Windows XP. While it covers the basics it also goes beyond them without going into "paranoid" mode...This guide is for home users in a stand-alone or workgroup environment. It is intended as a step-by-step guide and we highly suggest you read through the entire article before taking any action. We welcome suggestions and feedback.

GNU Classpath includes all native methods and core classes necessary for a completely functional Java runtime. This release features X.509 certificate path checking, signed JAR file support, full java.awt.color implementation, java.beans 1.4 updates, an improved build process, better AWT focus management, much faster and better fonts support, AWT Choice fixes, HTTP POST fixes, better collection documentation, Calendar bugfixes, lookahead support for regular expressions, fixes for jtree, and improved Eclipse 3 support.