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."

Samba 3.0.20b and CUPS 1.1.23 have been ported to Syllable. Work has now begun to integrate the two into Syllable. Michael Saunders has also been active on the porting front and has ported a number of games and emulators to Syllable.

"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."

"TheOpenCD team is pleased to announce the release of TheOpenCD 3.1. Core applications including OpenOffice, Firefox and Gaim have been upgraded to major new versions. The popular game Battle for Wesnoth has reached 1.0 and a range familiar programs appear in minor version updates. The Live CD component is now based on Ubuntu 5.10. Blender has returned in version 2.37a and the MoinMoin Desktop Edition has been added."

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.

The Rosetta emulation platform in 10.4.3 build 8F1111A has been upgraded to feature full G4 support, including Altivec. This not only adds a new layer of compatibility to Rosetta, but also improved speed for Altivec-equipped applications. Also, new ATI drivers available in 10.4.3 seem to offer much greater support for PC ATI graphics chipsets.

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.

Nexenta OS celebrates its first alpha release today. Their first alpha, dubbed 'elatte', features OpenSolaris kernel build #27 (non-debug, with ZFS), Xorg 6.8.2-77, more network drivers, bug fixes, and more. Download it here.

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.

"Google Base is a place where you can add all types of information that we'll host and make searchable online. You can describe any item you post with attributes, which will help people find it when they search Google Base. In fact, based on the relevance of your items, they may also be included in the main Google search index and other Google products like Froogle and Google Local."

"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."

"While it's not my distribution of choice, Mandriva 2006 definitely has some serious allure to new and experienced desktop Linux users alike. It's dead easy to install, a breeze to use and configure, has enough applications included to keep even the most die-hards happy, and it's got overwhelming support from the company and community at large." Read more here.

Ultimate++ 511 was released. U++ is a C++ cross-platform rapid application development suite, where "rapid" is achieved by the 'smart and aggresive' use of C++ features. The main improvement of the new version is the Assist++ (code completion, browsing and transformation tool) in TheIDE. See an overview of the library.

"Apple can alter its business plan slightly and become the well-liked dominant force in the technology market. Everything Apple needs sits right in front of them for the taking. Users are simply waiting to restart global innovation and take the PC to the next step."