"Microsoft dropped a bomb on ODF with its Ecma announcement. Today, it just bombed with the release of its promised 'covenant not to sue,' which it publicly posted just a few minutes ago. I was able to get an advance copy and do a line-by-line legal analysis, as well as a direct comparison to the covenant Sun gave to OASIS in support of ODF. There's no comparison."

"The release of Firefox 1.5 is almost certain to drive adoption rates even higher. PCMag.com recently reviewed the new version, and found that the most noticeable improvement is the ability to reorder tabs via drag-and-drop. Navigation is significantly faster, as Mozilla has implemented 'intelligent caching' on the forward and back buttons. The final, gold-code release of Firefox 1.5 should arrive before the end of November." UPDATE: One more review.

"Does Microsoft's monopoly power extend to government and media? That seems like a rhetorical question given their little power play in Massachusetts. Is now the time to share our experience with the rest of the world?"

The Inq pays attention to Advantage Six' upcoming A9 Home machine. "AdvantageSix's new machine is a tiny blue fanless aluminium box about the size of a couple of floppy drives - 168x103x53mm. The A9 Home is a sealed unit - it comes with 128MB RAM and a notebook-size 40GB hard disk - which you can't upgrade, not that you'd want to; this is masses for RISC OS. There is a small external power supply brick which puts out a stonking 20W. It has to be that much to power a few USB peripherals - the machine itself draws about 3W under load. "That's actually quite a lot. We haven't enabled most of the power management yet."

SchilliX 0.3 has been released. The announcement was made on #opensolaris (and the 'real' announcement is here), and it stated that SchilliX is close to having a self-hosted platform now; one that is not Sun-supplied. Schillix 0.3 features build 27a with ZFS support of the OpenSolaris kernel. Download here. Elsewhere, here are some first impressions on the just-released Nexenta OS alpha 1.

"Yesterday, Microsoft let the other shoe drop in a two-pronged attack on the support that has been building for the OpenDocument OASIS Format. It's still far too early to say that the dust has settled, but I'll attempt to pull together here the most significant pieces of information that I've located since last night's post, and what it all means."

Here is an 8 minute documentary about the recently unveiled 100$ laptop. It shows the laptop in action, and also discusses its aspects with one of the team members, such as the screen, the cheap keyboard, and much more. The video is in Quicktime, and this mirror gives better performance. My take: I am very, very, very impressed. The thought put into the details is just stunning. Every aspect of this machine has a function. Just astonishing.

While programs in the Java language are theoretically immune from memory leaks, there are situations in which objects are not garbage collected even though they are no longer part of the program's logical state. This article explores a common cause of unintentional object retention and shows how to plug the leak with weak references.

Microsoft intends to submit file formats for its new Office 12 applications to the European standards body ECMA International. The company hopes this will allay concern about its level of control over document formats. Update by AS: For the curious, here's a sample Office 12 file and a sample XPS file. (Note: Right click > Save As..., we're not configured to serve these files just yet.)

After a long gap, the latest edition of the Syllable Development Newsletter is now available. This covers progress in the last eight months, including the 0.5.7 release, Whisper updates, SDL and games ports, along with much more.

Here is a (very) brief interview with Andrew Morton, the maintainer of the Linux kernel 2.6 tree. Andrew discusses the debates behind revision control systems, new kernel features and his own -mm tree.

Sources indicate that OSx86 10.4.3 - which contains increased hardware restrictions - has now been cracked in the same fashion as 10.4.1. It was initially thought that these restrictions would slow the progress of hackers, but it appears that it has done little to deter those tackling the challenge. It appears that "Maxxuss" has outdone Apple yet again.

"Even on a 2 GB RAM workstation (as mine) VMware virtual machines can run slowly. Too slowly sometimes. This can depend on a large amount of factors but we can reduce the number to 4 critical issues."

"In case you lose your iPod (or any other external drive for that matter) or it gets stolen your data is in danger. I'm one of those people that constantly carries data on their iPod between two locations and I want to keep it safe. What follows is a brief tutorial aimed at those that want their data protected without investing in commercial software. In case you didn't know, you can increase your privacy pretty easily with features embedded directly into Mac OS X."