Although Microsoft recommends that consumers turn on Automatic Update to get the latest version of Windows, the company is offering to let companies temporarily block such upgrades.

For the third interview in the DOT's series previewing aKademy they approached Waldo Bastian, whose most recent major project has been the Kiosk framework. They talked to him about Kiosk, the new Kiosk Admin Tool, Linux on the corporate desktop and what we can expect from his talk at aKademy.

Absoft Corporation has announced immediate availability of its new high performance Pro Fortran tool kit version 9.0 for Macintosh OS X. Absoft’s Pro Fortran Compiler Suite is the most complete Macintosh Fortran tool kit available from any vendor and includes: Fortran 95 and C/C++ compilers, a powerful Integrated Development Environment, the market-leading Fx2™ Debugger, and free graphics libraries.

Trolltech released Qt 3.3.3, a bug fix release. Announcement, changelog.

Some of the less publicized features of Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" are beginning to emerge as developer sources compile notes from Apple's recent World Wide Developer Conference and preliminary tests of the next-generation operating system. Although the majority of the features are based on additions to less apparent and underlying technologies, the advances will aid developers in producing more feature rich and streamlined applications in shorter periods of time, sources said.

The Windows XP Tablet PC Edition Development Kit facilitates building ink-enabled applications for Tablet PC. The combination of software and hardware in a Tablet PC enables these methods of user interaction and allows for a rich, interactive, and productive computing experience for users.

Linus Torvalds has been called on to help Australia's peak Linux association in a battle to stop local companies from trying to trademark the word "Linux."

Perl is one of the most popular languages out there, and is used for everything from mission-critical projects to Web applications to "glue." It is not, however, often used for GUI programming and prototyping. The author thinks it should be, and you probably will too -- after this look at some of the more complex widgets available for Perl/Tk.

The X.Org Foundation announced today that it has begun tagging pre-release builds for the X11R6.8 release of the Xorg server & X Window System and asked for volunteers to start building and testing them. The Release Plan and Status web page lists the new features and changes included in this release, and updates on bugs found in testing so far.

Microsoft's Small Business Server is a remarkable hit, said a research firm Monday as it released the results of a survey that claimed an astounding 86 percent of small- and mid-sized businesses either use the server bundle or are planning to deploy it.

UnDeadly notes that the CVS' log message now reads: "move to 3.6-beta".

Mono Project is an Open Source implementation of the various ECMA and .NET framework technologies for Unix, MacOS X, and Windows. This version, 1.0.1, is a bugfix release.

OpenGL 2.0 was formally launched today and with it the completion of the graphics API's Shading Language specification for vertex- and pixel-shader programming. OpenGL Shading Language was approved by the OpenGL Architecture Review Board (ARB) in June 2003 as an extension to OpenGL 1.4, which has since been updated to version 1.5.

UnixWare 7.1.4 is the latest in a long line of Unix releases from The SCO Group. It is a stable and mature Unix, with a variety of basic servers included, such as the Apache Web server and Squid, and is available in both single-user desktop-oriented versions and server versions. It has reasonable support for hardware, good documentation, and a nice integrated management utility that offers unified administration of the OS, hardware, and servers. Performance as a server platform is good, supporting a number of TCP sessions and Web server users, and file transfer performance is competitive with Linux and Windows platforms.