"If you’re a Mozilla Firefox user, you will probably notice the close resemblance Flock has with Firefox. Though the browser is in fact based on Firefox, Bart Decrem, the team leader of the project, says Flock won't be forking the Firefox codebase. Still this Flock preview on the outside looks like Firefox but with a different theme. So would a Firefox user be missing anything by sticking with Firefox? Let’s explore some of the features that makes Flock different from the rest."

Access Co Ltd, a mobile browser and content delivery developer that recently acquired PalmSource, has acknowledged that the unit's Palm operating system has a limited future. Access instead appears ready to focus on Linux-based offerings, suggesting that Linux development opportunities were the reason behind its purchase of PalmSource after all. Update: Apparently the marketing/PR department of PalmSource got worked up at the CBR article. Maybe Access is too truthful for their taste?

For years, the goal of creating a truly responsive Web application was hampered by one simple fact of Web development: To change the information on part of a page, a user must reload the entire page. Not anymore. Thanks to asynchronous JavaScript and XML, we can now request new content from the server and change just part of a page. This tutorial explains how to use Ajax with PHP and introduces Sajax (Simple Ajax Toolkit), a tool written in PHP that lets you integrate PHP with JavaScript.

YellowTAB, makers of BeOS' successor ZETA, released a free live version of their operating system. You can download it for free here (click "zum download"). It's a *.cue file and the download is 175 MB. Note: I cannot ... not approved ... It has been confirmed.

Nearly half of European local government bodies are using open source software while nearly a third don't know that they are using open source at all. A Maastricht University survey of 12 counties has reportedly found 49 per cent using Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) while 70 per cent said they expect usage to increase.

According to sources, Apple will entirely re-design the Finder in its next major Mac OS X update. The new version of the Finder, code-named "Chardonnay" (like the wine), will be totally based on the Spotlight meta-search technology which was introduced earlier this year with Tiger. The aim behind this new Finder is to offer to the user the ability to browse his files just as he browses his music. Users will be able to browse files by different criteria (name, type, creator, creation date, modification date, etc.). Elsewhere, the first benchmarks of the new PowerMacs have arrived.

HP seems on its way out, or so claims Sun. Sun's Global information systems strategy office, Larry Singer, says Sun hears a consistent message from HP customers: "They have no idea where HP is going. If you chase the decision up the stack to the OS, you realise HP’s OS has had no major release since Fiorina took over," he says. "People only have three legitimate OSes: Windows, Red Hat or Solaris. As soon as HP talks to 9900 or Alpha customers they have to say HP does not have an OS."

"What would help the most is to eliminate both the dependency on expensive commercial software and also eliminate the company-owned computer. If, like master mechanics in machine shops, the employee owned his or her own tools, none of this would be an issue. That means the company would require its knowledge worker to purchase specific tools and he or she would then own them. A company store could sell these products and even buy them back at the end of an employment period."

Five years ago analysts were predicting that cellphones and PDAs will eventually merge. Many laughed at these predictions (especially PalmOS users of that time) but today we know that the future of PDAs already lies with smartphones. "Convergence" seems to be the key element of all new cellphones, even the ones that are not in the "smartphone" category: they all playback mp3 for example. It's obvious that convergence will move even further: music & video players and recorders will eventually give in much of their marketshare in favor of a one-device-does-it-all type of informational, entertainment & communication product. And Apple is definitely aware of this trend.

It's release time again for OpenBSD! The upcoming 3.8 will include some wonderful features for network gurus (trunking, tracking wireless roaming users, interface groups, a new ipsec configuration tool, and failover of ipsec links), a great rework of malloc() that will provide further security protections by default, and the first version of bioctl--a universal RAID management interface.

"Open source advocates are doing what was once unthinkable - giving the thumbs up to a Microsoft source code licensing program. The Free Software Foundation has said new licenses for Microsoft's pseudo open source program, the Shared Source Initiative, appears to satisfy the four requirements defining Free Software." So, what does it mean for you? Update: A description of the changes.

These days, engineers at Sun Microsystems have their counterparts at chipmaker AMD on speed dial. Sun, whose turnaround plan bets heavily AMD Opteron-based processor servers, has gained the ear of the chipmaker over the last two years and thus is helping shape the future of the Opteron, which charged on the scene in early 2003 as a competitor to Intel's Xeon.

This article describes features of a future version of Sun's HotSpot JVM implementation. It introduces some of the synchronization optimizations slated for Mustang, the Java 2 Standard Edition (J2SE), version 6.0, which has been on the "to-do" list for many JVMs for quite some time.

Achieve a level of high reliability in a microprocessor system by adding a second identical processor to a system to monitor and verify the system processor operation - also known as the lockstep processor technique. This tip demonstrates the integrated lockstep facility in the PowerPC 750GX processor.