If you don't like the mandatory antipiracy checks that Microsoft now enforces for Windows, brace yourself. The Microsoft Office productivity and collaboration suite is about to get a similar program. The company's Office Genuine Advantage program will require mandatory validation of Office software starting October 27, the software vendor quietly disclosed today.

Setuptools framework, a side project of PEAK, provides easier package management and distribution than distutils. Setuptools lets you package your libraries in a single-file archive called an 'egg', similar to Java JAR file, but for Python. Like the Perl CPAN and Ruby Gems tools, the ez_setup tool bootstraps the rest of setuptools. The ez_install tool that comes with it does the same thing in conjunction with 'Cheeseshop' (PyPI).

"Fedora Core 6 was released on the 24th, not the 24th of December, but the 24th of October. I can't remember who said that on the Fedora IRC channel, but for him a new Fedora release was a bit like Christmas." More here.

"On October 18th, OpenBSD celebrated its 11th birthday and ten years of punctual biannual releases. Now it's time for OpenBSD version 4.0, which includes tons of new drivers for wireless, network, and storage chips. Discover what's new and what battles developers must face daily to access documentation and support new hardware."

The high street bank today apologised to NetSurf users for locking them out of their web bank accounts, and re-enabled their access. HSBC said it now recognises NetSurf and RISC OS, adding: "We welcome all standards compliant browsers and platforms." The move was welcomed by punters, who were amazed that a global corporation had responded positively to the needs of a niche platform.

"On Monday I posted Geekbench results for my Sun Ultra 20 M2 running Solaris and Windows. Afterwards, I received a number of requests asking how Linux performed on the same hardware. Now that I've finally managed to download Fedora Core 6, here are the Geekbench results for Fedora Core 6 (and Solaris, as a comparison) on a Sun Ultra 20 M2."

SciTech Software recently released a public beta of SciTech SNAP Graphics for QNX Neutrino. It includes a driver for the Photon GUI environment, as well as support for running SciTech MGL and SNAP graphical console applications. Some pre-built demos are available, as well an updated release of the SNAP Graphics SDK for developers who wish to create their own applications.

Alan Cox, one of the most respected figures in the UK open source community, has warned of complacency over the security of open source projects. Speaking to delegates at London's LinuxWorld conference on Wednesday, he emphasised that considerable sums of money were being spent to try and hack into open source systems. And he cautioned that many open source projects were far from secure. "Things appear in the media like open source software is more secure, more reliable and there are less bugs. Those are very dangerous statements," Cox said. My take: Agree wholeheartedly. Security complacency, often seen in OSNews' comments sections, is very, very dangerous.

Wouldn't it be great to just get a PC with Linux already installed and ready to go? Novell thinks that's a grand idea too, and on Oct. 25 announced agreements with four white-box PC manufacturers who will globally distribute PCs preloaded with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10. Novell's new PC vendors are European manufacturers ETegro Technologies, MAXDATA and Transtec, along with the U.S. PC OEM R Cubed Technologies. Each will sell notebooks and/or desktop PCs preloaded with SLED 10.

Microsoft is about to release the Windows Vista operating system, its biggest software upgrade in years. The commercial versions will be out in November and the consumer version will be ready in January. Steve Ballmer, chief executive of Microsoft, sat down to talk with Mercury News Staff Writer Dean Takahashi about the Vista launch.

Geek Patrol has benchmarked the new (Core 2 Duo) MacBook Pro against the old (Core Duo) model. "Moving from the Core Duo to the Core 2 Duo means 32-bit MacBook Pro performance is up 10% without an increase in processor clock speed. That’s impressive! Even more impressive is the Core 2 Duo is 20% faster (when executing 64-bit code) than the Core Duo (when executing 32-bit code)."

History tends to leave behind mostly two kinds of information - the irrelevant and the biased. Archaeologists are either digging up people's thrown away junk, or reading some emperor's pompous account of his great deeds. The archaeology of the future will involve carefully extracting random 1s and 0s off of media and theorising what it all could mean. In the reckless and fast moving digital world, many stumbling blocks have been created that would drastically inhibit future generations learning about our ancient digital existence.

The Ubuntu team announced the release of Ubuntu 6.10, codenamed 'Edgy Eft'. Highlights for the desktop include GNOME 2.16, Firefox 2.0, OpenOffice.org 2.0.4, Gaim 2.0 and two new applications, F-Spot and Tomboy. This release also features a pre-release of the upcoming LTSP-5, as well as the usual updates of the base system, with GCC 4.1.1, Glibc 2.4 and Linux 2.6.17. There's a screenshot tour already, while Mark Shuttleworth commented on the news concerning Oracle and Linux. Update: The first review in what will probably become a long list. Update II: Kubuntu 6.10 is released as well.

"With all of the BSD variants available for download, it's easy to incorrectly assume all of them are pure, incompatible forks from each other. Actually, there are more shades of BSD out in the world than just separate forks. One in particular made the news a couple of weeks ago when it was commercially acquired. The BSD in question is PC-BSD. The company that bought it is iXsystems, a systems deployment and integrator firm out of San Jose that has pretty strong experience implementing *BSD, Unix and Linux systems for its customer base. So, why did the company up and buy PC-BSD?"