The Slovakian company Thinstuff recently released Touch Rdpserver, a Linux-based Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) terminal server solution for RDP 5.0, 5.1, 5.2, Windows CE and rdesktop clients. Thinstuff claims that the product provides virtual X servers for highly optimized X11 to RDP translation, a server management framework for operating large-scale terminal server clusters and low-bandwidth consumption. Thinstuff offers a free, downloadable demo on its Web site.

www.thinstuff.com

Airchitex's Cuckoo is a network appliance for those who want the peace of mind that comes with having one's own SNTP time server. Cuckoo is designed to supply accurate and precise time to every machine in your network, sans loud bird. The device receives its time information from global positioning system (GPS) satellites, making it accurate to +/– 1 millisecond. Network protocols include NTP, TIME and DAYTIME; autosets for time zones and daylight-savings time work in the US. Airchitex claims that Cuckoo avoids common time errors stemming from PC clock drift and Internet routing latency, among other issues.

www.airchitex.com

If your mission is to code in different operating systems, SlickEdit v11 might be your editor. This latest update, from its eponymous mother company, adds a range of new features, such as code templates, comment wrapping, comment autogeneration for Javadoc and XMLdoc, regex evaluator, Xft font support, Vim emulation, universal binary support for Macintosh and more. These build on legacy features such as the Context Tagging engine and the DIFFzilla tool for comparing files and directories. SlickEdit supports more than 40 languages on seven platforms, including Linux kernel 2.4 and later. A free trial edition is available for download on the company's Web site.

www.slickedit.com

Grudgingly or not, many of us use Microsoft's Active Directory for user authentication and system access. Against this backdrop, we are gleefully adding desktops of various flavors. The detriment to this variety comes in the form of cross-platform identity and access management issues. Centrify's DirectControl Suite attempts to eliminate these issues by delivering secure access control and centralized identity management by seamlessly integrating UNIX, Linux, Mac OS, J2EE and Web platforms with Microsoft Active Directory. Admins can control who has access to what systems and applications while centrally managing a consistent, global security policy. End users can access all systems with a single password and can get access in minutes rather than days.

www.centrify.com