Magnussoft has published an update concerning Zeta. They announced SAMBA has reached beta status, while also announcing a (much needed) multi-protocol instant messaging application, which supports GoogleTalk, Jabber, AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, and MSN.

"Security is an important issue in computing. Unfortunately, many computers allow a cracker to gain access to them and retrieve sensitive information, or just make life hard. This article will review the basics in general security and explain how to apply it to two Linux distributions - Ubuntu and Kubuntu."

"OrangeCrate is pleased to announce an interview with Justin Steinman, Director of Marketing for Novell. Novell has announced a major deal with Microsoft in the last few weeks that has caused some in the community to question the validity of the deal announced, and has already been characterized by Microsoft as somehow verifying that Linux violates Microsoft's intellectual property. While I disagree with that statement from Steve Ballmer, I do understand that it is only fitting to offer Novell the chance to speak directly to the questions we all want addressed."

"Having been raised on DOS and the early generations of Windows, I rediscovered that sense of excitement in a pure computing experience when I first tried other Linux versions over the years. However, they required a steep learning curve and caused too much frustration with setup and obscure command-line options. Not so with Ubuntu Linux."

Azul unwrapped its newest chip the 48-core Vega2 today. It is the successor to last year's Vega1. This Java processor triples performance from the year-old part and has an attractive feature set. Let's start out with the systems. Azul does not sell chips, only complete machines. There is a two-chip, 96 core, 48GB model 3210 and a four-chip, 96-192GB model 3220. Both are 5U machines, with the 3210 pulling about 580W max and the 3220 pulling about 1000W. There will be eight and 16 socket machines coming in 2007.

There are two drawbacks to being a company that has a virtual monopoly in its biggest markets. For starters: where do you find growth? And there is always the nagging worry that someone out there is working on a rival product that just might blow you out of the water. As Andrew Grove, one of the founders of computer chip giant Intel, once put it: "Only the paranoid survive!" Software giant Microsoft is working hard to address both problems.

Quickly becoming a de facto standard C++ library, the Boost library includes a powerful graph data structure that's also easy to use. Jeff Cogswell discusses some interesting theory behind graphs, and explains the Boost library's graph structures.

Yesterday morning on the openSUSE-announce list, Andreas Jaeger declared openSUSE beta5 the gold master for openSUSE 10.2. In his words "CD production is starting now and I hope to see some shiny green openSUSE 10.2 boxes on the shelves before Christmas."

In an upcoming version of WordPerfect due in 2007, Corel announced this week, users will have the options of reading and writing in both Microsoft Office Open XML format (introduced in Office 2007) and OpenDocument Format. Will WordPerfect become the ODF word processor of record? Corel's answer was surprising.

"It's quite a challenge really: how does the Number 1 search engine on the web rewrite its search algorithm and test its effectiveness without hurting its current results and user-experience during the testing process? Sergey Brin and Larry Page seem to have figured it out: create a new search engine, and do your testing there! SearchMash.com is the evolution of Google, and should things go right, what Google will (soon enough) become. It tests a range of new features and methods of bringing information to the users' fingertips in more ways than immediately obvious to the eyes."

Parallels has released a new beta of its virtualisation product for Mac OS X. This new release includes one major new feature, something Parallels calls Coherency: "Shows Windows applications as if they were Mac ones. Try it and enjoy best of both worlds truly at the same time. No more switching between Windows to Mac OS." Screenshot.

The Iyonix-only version 2 of the RISC OS Firefox port was released this weekend. Developer Peter Naulls made the open source web browser available for free download after generous punters donated a grand in cash to the project in little over a fortnight. A second release could be posted online in time for Christmas day if Peter secures more funding. Version 2 has no RISC OS-style menus, the iconbar icon has been removed, and the while browser does support secure 'https' websites, users will have to manually verify the identity of certain sites. Peter also hopes to use the NetSurf Unicode engine in a future release to display non-Latin characters.

"Over the last few weeks, I have had a few people ask me why Sun didn't choose GPL v3 for Freeing the Java platform. 'Does this mean you're siding with Linus?' they have asked me. they have said, 'because you chose GPL v2 only rather than GPLv2 or any later version as the license for the Java platform, preventing automatic use of GPL v3. You must be critical of it.' Those conclusions are not true at all. The answers are actually pretty straightforward, and when I discussed this matter with Richard Stallman he actually agreed we were making an acceptable choice here. I'll explain."

"Today welcomes Vista to market, at least to the businesses that have early access to Vista. While Vista brings promises for better security – IPv6 kernel, whole disk encryption and more – it only marks the client phase for Microsoft Network Access Protection. Network Access Protection requires support for both client and server which means enterprises will have to write until the end of 2007 when Windows Longhorn Server is available to fully deploy NAP. Many companies need NAC now and can't wait another year, as evidenced by a recent Infonetics Research study that suggests 60 percent of North American large enterprises will have NAC deployed by the end of 2008."