Sun has been testing AMD's Opteron for the past few months, and they seem fairly happy with it. No guarantee that they'll use it, but this story alone is good news and quite an endorsement for AMD.

Full story

It looks like the Trusted Computing Platform Alliance (TCPA) is no more, although that's not necessarily a good thing. The new Trusted Computing Group is basically composed of the same members of the TCPA, but now instead of focusing on the design and specifications of "trusted computing" (AKA Palladium), they're now focused on bringing it to market as soon as possible.

"TCG is a more formal group with licensing policy, a marketing budget, and a mission to push the trusted computing technology into a variety of devices."

Okay, now let's summerize:

• "formal licensing policy" => ream the end users
• "push the trusted computing technology" => force Microsoft's plan for total market dominance upon unwilling users
• "variety of devices" => there's no escaping it!

Crap.

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"The 802.16a standard, approved in January of this year, is a wireless metropolitan area network technology that will connect 802.11 hot spots to the Internet and provide a wireless extension to cable and DSL for last mile broadband access. It provides up to 50-kilometers of range and allows users to get broadband connectivity without needing a direct line of sight with the base station. The wireless broadband technology also provides shared data rates up to 70-Mbit/s"

Full story:
http://www.ebnonline.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=8600222

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Novell has finally seen the light and is probably going to move to Linux soon. Well... more likely they probably have no choice.. but this will be interesting. Personally I would be in favor more of Novell if they did that; believe me.. I have spent some time on some Netware boxes that probably made me lose some hair.

Jared gave me this great security focus article that talks about Linux's capabilities when it comes to logging into a Microsoft Active Directory Server...

Read the article

This desktoplinux article posted recently gives a pretty good overall look at how well linux distros work as a desktop... read this article

According to this osnews article, gobeProductive is going to be released under the gpl. gobeProductive is an office suite that is multiplatform... so here is another option for Linux and Windows users.

Read the article here

OpenOffice 1.1 Beta is now available for download.

For those unfamiliar with it, OpenOffice is a free, open-source, cross-platform (Linux, Windows, Solaris, and Mac OSX) office suite. I've been using it pretty exclusively for a while now, and it's quite capable. It does have a few rough spots (as of 1.0.2 - I haven't tried this new beta yet), but it can definitely replace other well-known expensive and proprietary office suites. Check it out.

Both of these have been posted to Slashdot already, but it's worth mentioning here as well.

First of all, Mozilla 1.4a has been released. See the Release Notes for more information.

Second, it seems the Mozilla organization is making a radical change of direction with their latest development roadmap update. The two major highlights:

• Mozilla is dropping the integrated Mozilla suite after 1.4, and instead releasing a componentized Mozilla based on the Phoenix web browser and the Minotaur mail client
• More focused development and refinement of the Gecko rendering engine

Guru Labs has posted a review of the Red Hat Linux 9 Technical Changes. Any Red Hat users should read this to see what the next version has in store for them.