"Opera Software today permanently removed the ad banner and licensing fee from its award-winning Web browser. The ad-free, full-featured Opera browser is now available for download, completely free of charge, here." This news got submitted a staggering 14 times, and as far as I know, that's a record.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs and the company's senior vice president of worldwide product marketing Phil Schiller have just ended a frank and open discussion with European media. Jobs said: "We don't know how having OS X available for PCs would affect Macs", and promised, "we will have technology in OS X for Intel so that it cannot be installed in other PCs". Jobs also confirmed Apple's switch to Intel processors remains on schedule, saying: "We said we'd be shipping by next June and we are on track to have that be a true statement".

An updated release of PC-BSD is out. From the changelog: "PC-BSD 0.8.1. Fixes many issues with boot-up after installation; fixed problems with Online Update Manager; updated UserManager; added Russian and Bulgarian support; activates hard disk swap space during installation for lower memory systems; slimmed down KDE 3.4.2 by removing games/graphics/PIM ports, which can be optionally installed via PBI." See also the release notes for further information. Download from here.

SCO, recently best known for its Linux litigation rather than its Unix operating systems, announced that it was releasing an advanced networking platform to provide feature-rich consumer and business digital services for smart phones and other intelligent mobile devices.

MadPenguin is reviewing and raving for Ubuntu in an article with screenshot goodness.

It's the autumn release season, and new devices running Windows Mobile 5.0 have begun to hit the market. BargainPDA brings you a hands-on, in-depth look at the next-generation OS. The n300 series of PPCs from Acer are among the first to run Windows Mobile 5.0, sporting VGA resolution displays, SDIO capable expansion slots, Bluetooth 1.2 and more. In the meantime, the Mitac Mio phone with GPS was officially announced today. Additionally, the Dell Axim x51v specs and pics leaked recently (review).

"Last week in Part I, we took a look at the AMD dual-core Athlon 64 X2 4800's performance on 64-bit Windows. As it turned out, Windows XP Pro X64 ran most 32-bit applications just fine on the X2 4800, and 64-bit code showed a few modest performance gains." This week, they focus on Intel.

In previous Windows releases, the entire audio stack ran in Kernel space. Vista will put an end to this. "The first (and biggest) change we made was to move the entire audio stack out of the kernel and into user mode. Pre-Vista, the audio stack lived in a bunch of different kernel mode device drivers, including sysaudio.sys, kmixer.sys, wdmaud.sys, redbook.sys, etc. In Vista and beyond, the only kernel mode drivers for audio are the actual audio drivers (and portcls.sys, the high level audio port driver)."

"I find Tiger to be a good release in terms of its stability and some of the new features that it offers but I don’t think it is as much of an upgrade as Panther was. Gaming performance under Tiger seems better, but not much, while other parts of the system seem more sluggish." Read the review here.

Last year HP embarked into the mobile media market with its iPaq rx3xxx line of PDAs, a product sold primarily to consumers who prefer an all-in-one PDA/video/audio device. They released two versions of the series, the rx3115 and the higher-end rx3715. Geeks.com sent us the rx3115 and we put it to test.

Build applications for Linux while maintaining cross-platform capabilities using .NET languages.

This article is for developers or testers interested in testing a database directly from their Rational Functional Tester scripts. The information is explained using examples and detailed instructions.

Over at BeBits there's some buzz as people download and try out a modded up version of Firefox titled QuickFox. "QuickFox is a 'mod' of mozilla/firefox bleeding edge. From order of importance: speed, useability, looks, reliability. It runs and loads in a RAM filesystem. It sports a fully automatic installation that will take care of everything for you. It includes auto setup on boot and shutdown to save your settings." Thanks to HaikuNews for pointing this out. As you are probably aware of by now, QuickFox is BeOS-only.

Microsoft' professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles last week was perhaps the company's most important event of the year, as officials try to sell developers on the value of creating new applications for the company's next generation of products. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer talked with eWeek Senior Editor Peter Galli at the show about these upcoming products.