"Coming home after a hard day at work after staring at the monitor continuously for hours on end, the last thing I want to do many days is sit in front of the computer again. At times though, I have this urge to grab a book and do some light reading but often the strain on my eyes dissuades me in pursuing this thought any further. This is where this very nice utility called Festival comes into the picture. Festival is a text-to-speech synthesiser developed by the Centre for Speech Technology Research at the University of Edinburgh. It is shipped with most Linux distributions and has been released under an X11-type licence allowing unrestricted commercial and non-commercial use alike."

Serenity Systems has released a German version of their eComStation live-CD. This is the third language supported; a Dutch and English version already were released. In addition, an update to their beta program for eCs 2.0 has also been released, just a day after they announced the opening of the beta program.

"DRM is a lie. When an agenda driven DRM infection peddler gets on a soapbox and blathers about how it is necessary to protect the BMW payments of a producer who leeches off the talented, rest assured, they are lying to you. DRM has absolutely nothing to do with protecting content, it is about protecting the wallets of major corporations. The funny thing is they aren't protecting it from you, they are protecting it from each other."

"Within the next few weeks, Microsoft will be releasing beta 2 of Windows Vista. The actual ship date of Vista hasn't been announced, but Microsoft's new OS is likely to ship sometime this Fall. Since Windows Vista was announced, some of the bleeding-edge features have been scaled back. For example, WinFS, a file system built using relational database concepts, won't be included in the final release. But it's likely that the Windows Vista's feature list is now stable enough that we can predict what kind of system you'll need to build today to accommodate the new OS."

Following news that Google refused to comply with a subpoena requiring the company to turn over search records from its database, much speculation swirled about the response from rivals MSN and Yahoo. MSN has broken its silence and now acknowledges that it did share search data, but no personal information. The subpoena was handed down by the US Department of Justice last summer, and was reportedly issued to gather data to support a child protection law that was struck down two years ago by the Supreme Court. Under that law, the government could punish pornography sites that made content easily accessible to minors.

"To the outside observer, improvements in PC architecture are evolutionary but logical. Processors advance inevitably in speed and performance, in happy accordance with Moore's Law. For Nebojsa Novakovic, a consultant in high-end computing systems, that's hardly the case. The demise of the DEC Alpha processor is a case in point. A performance leader was killed off by corporate whim."

Hewlett-Packard executives are mulling plans to improve over the next 18 months the technology the company uses to manage its direct sales, while it continues with commercial printing efforts and acquisitions of software companies. Two weeks ago, HP CEO Mark Hurd, the company's board of directors and senior executives gathered at the computer giant's annual management retreat to discuss long-term strategies.

"What is it with old languages? I only have to mention REXX while talking about Mumps and someone (the sort of person who remembers that the original, circa 1970-80, MUMPS was actually an O/S, language and integrated DBMS all in one - I can relate to that, perhaps why I like iSeries too) jumps up to say how much they liked it. I liked REXX partly because (like many other much-loved languages), it actually had a personality attached to it - Mike Cowlishaw."

"With the traditional Microsoft news media turning their collective ear to the rest of the industry, you have to suspect a changing of the guard. But Linux companies don't seem to guage their efforts by what the industry says about Microsoft. Linux just keeps chugging along. So what does the Industry have to say about Microsoft? They say that though many people will swear by the invincibility of Microsoft's ship, it hasn't maneuvered all the icebergs. Collectively, the competition has started ringing up wins. With alternatives in Linux, FireFox, OpenOffice.org and Apple the Microsoft floating casino has begun to list and sway. Here's how and some of it might surprise you."

"FreeNAS is a free NAS server, supporting: CIFS (samba), FTP, NFS protocols, Software RAID (0,1,5) with a Full WEB configuration interface. FreeNAS takes less than 16MB once installed on Ccompact flash, hard drive or USB key. The minimal FreeBSD distribution, Web interface, PHP scripts and documentation are based on M0n0wall."

A new version of the GPE PDA environment was released, version 2.7. It now includes a new web browser, a sync module, a Gaim and GkDial port and more. Screenshots here.

There are a lot of options in the Free UNIX market at the moment. Everyone's favorite buzzword is Linux, and Sun is in the process of releasing Solaris under a Free Software license. One family, however, receives less attention than it is due. Berkley Software Distribution (BSD) has grown into almost a complete replacement for UNIX, with numerous enhancements. David Chisnall explains why the BSD family has found its way into a large number of systems and what these systems can do for you.

If you've been coding in Java for awhile, you know how to write a method to test equality. Why write tests for something you can code in your sleep? Because, as Jeff Langr points out, you've probably made plenty of dumb mistakes in your career, either while asleep or while wide awake. It's simpler and safer to just think of tests as specifications that you always have to code.

"It was during the opening weeks of 1986 that the first PC virus, called Brain, was discovered in the wild. Though it achieved fame because it was the first of its type, the virus was not widespread as it could only travel by hitching a ride on floppy disks swapped between users. Now 20 years after they first appeared there are more than 150000 malicious programs in existence."