Raquel Velasco and Bill Buck have announced that there will be a new developer program similar to the one with the Open Desktop Workstation for the Open Server Workstation (dual 970MP) and the EFIKA 5k2 board. If you are interested to apply please send an email directly to Genesi.

NEC has developed an ultra-thin, flexible, rechargeable battery capable of re-charging in just 30 seconds, the company said on Thursday. The new battery has been dubbed ORB, for Organic Redical Battery, by NEC, because it uses an organic radical polymer as its cathode.

"These machines are the ultimate in small form factor, trading power and performance for size, portability and convenience. The navigation of this tradeoff is of paramount concern: give up too much power, and the device is useless; too little, and it'll be inconveniently large. I've taken a look at how two products, The BlackDog Pocket Linux Server and the Waysmall 200BT, navigate these waters."

"We recently got in touch with a few Intel partners and learned that the much anticipated processor from Intel, codenamed Yonah, is expected to debut early next year on January 6th. Intel's Yonah is a dual-core chip based on the 65nm fabrication process. Yonah will also mark the first launch with Intel's new strategy in place - performance per watt."

International technology standards organization Ecma voted Thursday to approve the creation of a technical committee to begin looking into standardization of Microsoft Office's Open XML document format. The effort has been backed by Apple, Intel and Toshiba. The vote to create the committee would have been unanimous, however OpenDocument supporter IBM voted against the proposal while HP abstained. Critics outside of Ecma questioned the organization's move to standardize what they consider to be a proprietary format. Micorsoft submitted its new Office format to Ecma a few weeks ago.

The race is on to produce four-core processors for PCs. Intel, which is readying a bevy of dual-core chips for release in systems in the next month, is already plotting a move to quad cores, which some reports have said could come as soon as early 2007. AMD has already discussed a plan to begin offering a family of four-core chips in 2007, whereas Intel has only hinted about a four- core server chip thus far.

Hard drive vendor LaCie has teamed up with Mandriva on a bus-powered USB 2.0 hard drive preloaded with desktop Linux. The "GlobeTrotter" boots Mandriva Linux LE 2005, and is available in 40GB and 80GB models priced at $140 and $199 , respectively. The GlobeTrotter drives feature an industrial design by F.A. Porsche. The devices have rubber feet, a passively cooled case design, and a low-power drive that, unlike most USB drives, requires no separate power adapter, instead pulling power through the host PC's USB port.

'Dude, I can, like, totally do that way cheaper with Linux and stuff.' These were the words of a bearded geek running Linux on his digital watch. As he proceeded to cut and patch alpha code into the Linux kernel running on the production database system, the manager watched on in admiration. Six months later, long after the young hacker decided to move into a commune in the Santa Cruz hills, something broke. Was it really 'way' cheaper?"

A developer meeting strengthens a Linux desktop alliance that could lead to better leverage with hardware vendors and more cross-distribution efforts such as the newly created Portland Project.

If you thought Sun's chip division had already gone mad when they announced and built the Niagara (the UltraSPARC T1), you'll be happy to know that with the first Niagara servers out the door, they haven't exactly been resting on their laurels. Niagara II is on its way: like the T1, it has 8 cores, but now with 8 threads each instead of 4, adding up to a total of 64 threads (the T1 has 32, logically). And, instead of the much-critizised one floating point unit per processor, the Niagara II will feature one floating point unit per core. The chip is set to be released in 2007, at an initial speed of 1.4Ghz.

Microsoft postponed the introduction of the next test release of its Internet Explorer 7 Web browser until sometime in 2006, according to comments posted to the company's site for software developers. In a blog posting on the software giant's MSDN developer site, Dean Hachamovitch, product line manager for IE at Microsoft, said that the company will post an "updated pre-release build of IE 7 for Windows XP publicly" during the first calendar quarter of 2006. The IE team leader indicated that people interested in gaining access to the browser preview would not need to be members of the MSDN community. In related news, there's an exploit in Firefox 1.5 on Windows SP2.

"A first time poster to MacGeneration forums posted the contents of an email, which was originally sent to another website. The writer claims that Apple is reviving 'Yellow Box for Windows' - a development environment which promised Mac OS X developers the ability to develop and then deploy of both Mac OS X and Windows environments. The original plans for Yellow Box were promised during early developer sessions by Apple, but later killed. The letter claims that the project has been relaunched internally under the name 'Dharma'. Resultant applications will be true 'Universal Binaries', allowing developers to released their applications under the Windows environment also." Of course this is highly speculative, but interesting nonetheless. What is your opinion on this?

"The FreeBSD project has hundreds of active developers spread all over the world, and many of them have their own parts of the source-tree that they work on. However, there are always a lot of new interesting projects and ideas that needs to be investigated and evaluated, and this is where the FreeBSD project relies on heroic efforts from volunteers. The following list of possible projects is in no way complete, but it should serve as a nice starting point for volunteers who would like to become committers in the future."

"Starting in early 2006, Red Hat will offer three new stacks aimed at simplifying and standardizing key open source application stacks, so that developers can focus on their applications instead of configuring the underlying platform. Each stack will be certified and supported on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and delivered in a subscription model. These new certified stacks will help customers get to market faster with their development projects, while giving them the confidence to deploy, knowing that Red Hat's proven production support capability is behind them."