During a telephone conference with reporters yesterday, outgoing Microsoft co-president Jim Allchin, while touting the new security features of Windows Vista, which was released to manufacturing yesterday, told a reporter that the system's new lockdown features are so capable and thorough that he was comfortable with his own seven-year-old son using Vista without antivirus software installed. Elsewhere, bigg boss Bill Gates says that antitrust authorities did not make Microsoft remove any features from Vista, but he expressed anger with competitors who embarked on noisy public campaigns to 'castrate' the operating system.

Back in May at JavaOne, Sun's President Jonathan Schwartz and Canonical Founder and President Mark Shuttleworth - creator of the Ubuntu distribution of GNU/Linux - promised to do a lot of business in the coming months. Their promise is holding quite true six months later. Sun and Canonical revealed Nov. 8 that the open-source Java Enterprise Edition 5 application server (specifically, the GlassFish Community reference implementation) is now certified and available to run on Ubuntu Server Edition, which was released on June 1.

Paul Thurrott takes a long look at Vista. "It's hard to put Windows Vista in perspective. On the one hand, the product has been in development for over five years, which means that Vista had one of the longest development cycles in the 20+ year history of Windows. Paradoxically, Windows Vista is both revolutionary and evolutionary. While it includes modern OS features, such as a new hardware-based graphical user interface, Vista will also feel like familiar territory, for the most part, to anyone that's already familiar with Windows XP. And Mac advocates can claim, truthfully, that many of Vista's best features appeared first on Mac OS X, sometimes years ago."

Set up a Kerberized environment to work with Solaris 10 and learn how to configure a Key Distribution Center on AIX Version 5.3. You'll also run through a series of steps for configuring a Kerberos client on Solaris 10 to authenticate users for Telnet, remote shell, and Secure Shell using AIX 5.3 as your KDC.

"Yesterday, I read what I consider to be a provoking piece at ZDNet. It pointed out that while there is no question that Macs are not the malware targets that Windows machines are, they're most certainly not immune to an attack of the right variety. It went on to backup its point with a real world scenario in which a University of New South Wales Mac server had been hit by malware. Disturbingly, the server had apparently been running the latest updates from Apple and still managed to get hit. It mentioned that, in the author's opinion, Apple was 'misleading people' into believing that their OS was more secure than it really is. Whether or not that is true is frankly immaterial to me. It should be noted that no OS is 100 percent bulletproof, and I believe this is what it was driving home at. Unfortunately, some people within the Mac community felt differently."

Mac OS Forge has been reopened after being redesigned. The Apple's team guided by Kevin Van Vechten has also announced the immediate availability of Darwin 8.8.1 (corresponding to Mac OS X 10.4.8) which represents the first full release supporting both architectures.

Mozilla has released updates for its Firefox browser, Thunderbird e-mail application and the SeaMonkey application suite to fix 'critical' security vulnerabilities. The vulnerabilities affect 1.5 versions of Firefox and Thunderbird as well as version 1 of the SeaMonkey suite, Mozilla said in its security advisories. The bugs do not affect Firefox 2.0, the latest version of the browser released late last month.

"In the software world's version of survival of the fittest, Red Hat, the champion of the open source Linux operating system, seems to have found itself on the endangered species watch list. But don't let recent developments fool you. This company isn't on its way to extinction."

The Xalan XSLT processor can invoke almost any method in almost any Java class in the classpath. Doing so can improve performance, provide features like trigonometric functions that aren't available in XSLT, perform file I/O, talk to databases and network servers, or implement algorithms that are easy to write in the Java language but hard to write in XSLT. Learn the basics of invoking Java code from Xalan.

The Syllable team has just released Syllable 0.6.2. Highlights: "A new audio framework for the media server, with new and improved audio drivers and support for multichannel and digital audio; a new look, with new fonts, icons and wallpapers; a huge number of translated applications for non-English users; upgrades to important system components and a switch to GCC 4.1.1, which has yielded noticable performance improvements, and much more."

After 5 years of development, Windows Vista is finally finished. Jim Allchin, the co-president of Microsoft's Platforms & Services Division has put together a video about the announcement where he announces the General Availability date of 30 January 2007 for Vista.

"Novell is not SCO. Novell is not the great anti-GPL. Get over it. I'm getting a little tired of the constant Novell-bashing. Do I think that Novell made a smart long term move by partnering up with Microsoft? No, I don't. For the record, the only software company that I can think of that has ever partnered with Microsoft and done well is Citix Systems. And, they did it by acting as if they were a branch of Microsoft. That is not, I repeat not, the case with Novell. What Novell is doing is a smart, short-term move. Novell makes a great Linux, but it's not been making great gains to go with it."

The theory behind open-source software is that it avoids many of the pitfalls - including cost - of closed alternatives. But Steven Buckley, who runs Christian Aid's common knowledge programme, prefers to buy software from the likes of Microsoft. Is this not odd for a charity? "Open-source doesn't mean free," he told BBC World Service's Digital Planet programme. "Quite often, if you install open-source software within an organisation, you have a support contract that goes with it - it's an essential part of operating that software. Over time, that can actually cost more than having Windows on an enterprise machine."

Each day, members of the Windows team gather inside the 'shiproom' to go over the bugs that remain, and to debate which of these can still be fixed in the days left until Vista is declared finished, a milestone that is expected any time now. The intense 'end game', as these final weeks are known, is a well-worn tradition inside the shiproom, which is on the third floor of the Windows development building. The small room, with its dated, dark wood conference table has been the war room for every Windows release since Windows 2000. In the meantime, Ars takes a look at running Vista on older hardware.