Sun Microsystems officials rolled out Java Community Process (JCP) 2.6 Tuesday, along with a goal of more community participation in order to improve Java specifications. Although JCP 2.6 enhancements have been in the works for the past year, the timing of the release comes amid IBM's recent push for an open source implementation of Java.

Office XP Service Pack 3 (SP3) provides the latest updates to Microsoft Office XP. SP3 contains significant security enhancements, in addition to stability and performance improvements.

Following today's TV presentation, IsComputerOn published the video (99 MB) of yellowTab's CEO and CVO presenting Zeta (in German). The second video, which will focus on the recently announced ZintrO, will be posted later today. In the meantime, ZetaNews reports on the upcoming SP3 of Zeta 1.0.

You, the reader, are hereby invited to participate in a celebration of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) on August 28th this year. On that day we will stage public events to inform the general public about the virtues of FOSS. We invite you to form local teams and set up tables in town centers, shopping malls, or wherever there are likely to be lots of people on a Saturday.

Newsforge & GrokLaw report that "Although the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) never officially makes public when it investigates an organization, an SEC staff member told NewsForge that complaints and tips about suspected under-the-table funding, stock-kiting, illegal insider trading, and money-laundering involving Microsoft or Microsoft-connected individuals to the financially struggling SCO Group have been coming into the agency with regularity since last August.

Among the various things, the latest months have seen AROS improving under many aspects, ranging from HW support, thanks to the new PCI subsystem, to GUI enhancements. Read the full status report and don't forget to take a look at the new screenshots.

This essay describes the surprising results of a brief trial with a group of new computer users about the relative ease of the command line interface versus the GUIs now omnipresent in computer interfaces. It comes from practical experience I have of teaching computing to complete beginners or newbies as computer power-users often term them.

What's so great about BSD? Plenty. The old daemon might even teach the penguin a thing or two: "BSD has become a quiet success. MacOS X is the ultimate Unix-style desktop" says Linux-Magazine.

Sayamindu Dasgupta put up a preview (mirror) of the upcoming Gnome 2.5.

ROCK is a Distribution Build Kit. You can configure your personal build of ROCK and easily build your own distribution. Features of ROCK Linux v2.0 are build dependency auto-detection, a new binary package format, "smart optimizations", the ability to be build on a cluster and many more. ROCK Linux comes along with over 1000 package descriptions ready for compilation. Currently supported platforms include x86, AMD64, PowerPC, MIPS, Alpha, SPARC as well as SPARC64.

SwingWT uses Eclipse's SWT to offer native host-widgets for Java applications. Screenshot.

This article introduces the Runtime Spy, one of Core Tools available from Eclipse.org. The Runtime Spy is a perspective and set of views specifically designed to help you find and diagnose plug-in startup performance problems. It's considered one of best tools for understanding and diagnosing startup performance problems related to plug-in activation.

The new Linux kernel includes support for and improvements in many areas of networking: from tunneling and better file security to encryption and privacy protection. This article covers how these improvements affect users even as they make Linux more secure and more enterprise-ready.

This guide is aimed at CVS users who want to know more about the new features in Subversion, but it is also useful for someone familiar with source control systems who wants to find out what Subversion offers. Mike Mason is talking about the philosophy and design behind Subversion, how it improves upon CVS, and how to get started using it.