Today, we are proud to announce a new section of our website. After a story was posted on our website last month, readers let us know that they would welcome a job-related area of our website. So today, we are announcing jobs.osnews.com. Read on for details.

The first fruit of the recently announced Novell/Microsoft interoperability agreement arrived on Dec. 4, with Novell's announcement that its version of the OpenOffice productivity suite will now support the Microsoft Office Open XML format. The release candidate of Novell's modified version of OpenOffice.org 2.02 is now available for Windows for free download by registered Novell users.

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.