"Today Borland announced plans to seek a buyer for our IDE product lines that include Delphi, C++Builder, C#Builder, JBuilder (and Peloton), InterBase, JDataStore, nDataStore, Kylix, and our older Borland and Turbo language products and tools. The goal is to create a standalone business focused on advancing individual developer productivity using the people inside Borland who are focused on the success of these award winning products."

"Serenity Systems International is pleased to announce the publicly available beta of eComStation 1.2R German. The eComStation 1.2 Media Refresh resolves known issues and provides the latest codebase. This version does not significantly change functionality. This release includes fixes to many reported problems, as well as significant enhancements migration and installation."

"Assuming that 'because it's a Mac, it's safe' is no longer wise" is probably one of this book's most important themes. It has been my experience that too many Mac users "know" that OS X is secure and therefore they have nothing to worry about. This book shows just how wrong that attitude is.

"Linus Torvalds doesn't want to change the Linux kernel's software license, and he said so again last week. For good measure this time, he threw in some inflammatory remarks. "I literally feel," wrote Torvalds, "that we do not, as software developers, have the moral right to enforce our rules on hardware manufacturers. We are not crusaders, trying to force people to bow to our superior God." Since the crusades were a foreign adventure responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands, that's not the most diplomatic response, and FSF counsel Eben Moglen refused to be drawn into retaliation when we contacted him for comment."

Microsoft plans to ship a new security product in June, charging $49.95 a year to shield up to three PCs against viruses, spyware and other cyberthreats, the company said on Tuesday. Called Windows OneCare Live, the product marks Microsoft's long-anticipated entry into the consumer antivirus market, which has been the domain of specialized vendors, led by Symantec and McAfee. Microsoft announced its intent to offer antivirus products in June 2003 when it bought Romanian antivirus software developer GeCad Software.

LowEndMac has an in-depth article on the origins of one of Apple's most elusive products: the Newton. "Sakoman's end goal for Newton was to create a tablet computer priced about the same as a desktop computer. It would be the size of a folded A4 sheet of paper and would have cursive handwriting recognition and a special user interface. To run the enormously demanding handwriting recognition software, the tablet would have three AT&T Hobbit processors." By the way, as most BeOS fans like myself know, AT&T's Hobbit processor has been part of another elusive product.

Chip firm Intel presented a 65 nanometre dual core multithreaded Xeon with a shared 16MB on die level three cache at the Solid State Conference. The Xeon has 1.328 billion transistors, a 1MB unified L2 cache per core, and has a die size of 435mm2. It delivers 3.4GHz at 1.25 volts and 150 watts TDP, and comes with a 667 and 800MT/s three load front side bus interface. This chip is compatible with existing chipset designs and Intel claims it has the largest cache and device count for an X86 processor.

"A firm is showing off a full colour active matrix OLED display prototype at a show today. Universal Display Corporation, which has had part funding from the US Department of Defence, will talk at the Fifth Annual Flexible Displays and Microelectronics conference in Phoenix today. The firm will show off a four inch diagonal display and demo it running full motion video. The display is .1mm thick, and weighs only six grams, compared to a glass LCD which would weigh about 20-30 grams. The firm said that using a metal foil helps thermal and mechanical durability."

"If you are about to take the plunge into converting from Solaris to Linux, or just want to see how easy it is to make the change, then take a look at this well written Solaris-To-Linux Migration technical roadmap. It gives you everything you need to get the job done the right way, the first time, and will eliminate all the quirks and gotch-yas that come with operating system migrations."

Intel and AMD once again are angling for leadership in virtualization, technology that increases a computer's efficiency by letting it run multiple operating systems simultaneously. Intel is expected to declare this week that its Virtualization Technology is mature enough for testing and about three months away from prime time. But AMD, whose rival "Pacifica" technology won't debut in processors until midway through this year, is trying to set its own technology as a standard for virtualization of computer communications, an element not present in Intel's VT.

The Mozilla team has set February 10th as the release date of the next major Firefox version. Some of the more notable features to be included in Firefox 2 are in-line spell checking, some sort of anti-phishing functionality, and improvements to tabbed browsing. Elsewhere, Asa Dotzler made a posting about his thoughts on the preview of IE 7 Beta 2.

Motorola first announced its intention to migrate its mobile "smart" phones to embedded Linux in 2003. The first such phone to reach the market was the A760 in the fourth quarter of that year. Today there are a dozen or so models (differing product numbers in different markets and minor hardware variations lead to different counts), but there are still no significant ecosystems for third-party applications or developers. Is Motorola's switch to Linux a hit for the company but a miss for end users?

"I've always assumed that ifup and ifdown were conditional commands that performed their assigned duties only if the interface device in question was up or down, as the command might be. I was dead wrong. I blame my mistake on being a programmer, rather than being stupid, but it's simply too close to call. The if in ifup, ifdown, and ifstatus is not a programmer's if - it's an abbreviation for interface. On the off chance that I'm not the only one who has misunderstood these commands because of their rather iffy names, here's what they really do and how they are used."

"New real-time Linux enhancements open a whole new world of possibilities for Linux, ranging across the latest 3G technologies and as near as the mobile handset in your pocket. The purpose of modifying the Linux kernel with real-time functionality: to dramatically reduce interrupt and task preemption latency, thus enabling the 2.6 kernel for use in high-performance multimedia applications and those requiring extremely fast, task level reliable control functions. Real-time Linux has come a long way - where is it now and where is it heading?"