Linuxlookup.com is reporting on famous Norwegian hacker "DVD-Jon" wants to turn the mobile phone world upside down. In an article in Norwegian daily "Dagens Næringsliv" Jon's father Per Johan Johansen says "It's simply a new way to use the net. With the new software we have developed, your mobile phone will be able to do all new things. Telenor and Netcom will hate this. They will panic, as this will give a whole new pricing system on services."

This is a report on the second day of USENIX 2005. You might want to start with my report on day one. Day two started off a bit slowly. Oh wait, actually I started off a bit slowly. That could have been from the margaritas last night at La Casa Garcia, a Mexican restaurant a few blocks down the street from the Anaheim Marriott. Good Mexican food is one of the things I miss the most since I moved from California to New York two years ago. Luckily, the food at La Casa Garcia was excellent.

Microsoft is expected to provide the first public details of the embedded operating system to developers in May at its Microsoft Mobility and Embedded DevCon in Las Vegas.

A detente between longtime rivals Microsoft and Sun Microsystems has resulted in more money changing hands and soon will produce more details on the companies' cooperative work. Elsewhere, SCO gives Sun blessings to open-source Solaris. Despite all that, Sun misses revenue, profit targets.

Channel 9 has Dave Probert (who used to be a UNIX head but is now an architect for Windows) giving a four part video presentation of the Windows NT kernel. He does a very good job of comparing the Windows kernel to UNIX-style kernels and how they tackle the same problems differently.Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4

I just want to show you a great add-on for DOS, called DESKWORK. It's an operating system build upon DOS, just like older Windows versions were build upon DOS. It has been written by Konstantin Koll for several years now, who founded a small company called Mystic Bytes to produce DESKWORK.

Inotify is a file system event-monitoring mechanism slated for inclusion in upcoming Linux™ kernels that is designed to serve as an effective replacement for dnotify, which was the de facto file-monitoring mechanism supported in older kernels. Inotify is a powerful, fine-grained, asynchronous mechanism ideally suited for a variety of file-monitoring needs including, but not limited to, security and performance.

Many users and IT administrators had a lot to say about Microsoft's removal of the "blocker" mechanism this week, which had temporarily disabled the delivery of WinXP SP2. THG contacted members of the IT community and spoke with often-cited security experts, who discussed their concerns about the damage SP2 may cause and some cases where the download might really be necessary.

After many years of trying, Branden Robinson has finally won the Debian Project Leader election. Linux Magazine has an in depth interview with Robinson about his plans as DPL, the problems that face Debian, and what it's like to finally win the election.

There's been quite a lot of buzz around so-called 'search' tools lately, from the on/off WinFS, to Beagle and Apple's Spotlight. Tenor is KDE's proposed 'framework' for taking this even further. Kurt Pfeifle, along with insights from Scott Wheeler (one of Tenor's authors and primary designers), sat down to talk about the current problems, Tenor itself, how the thinking is different and how KDE's flexible technology provides a solid basis for making it happen.

One fundamental difference guarantees that Windows will continue to dominate says Tom Yager.

Spurred by another quarter of strong Mac and iPod sales, Apple Computer reported on Wednesday earnings that surged past Wall Street estimates.

This is supposed to be the "smartphone for the masses" selling at around $400 without a contract in US (the phone hasn't been released officially in US yet so it's rare to find). Here's a comprehensive review of the unit at GSMArena with plenty of pictures. The device comes with a recent build of Symbian OS v7. Pros: GPRS class 10, EDGE class 5, 1.3 MP camera, Bluetooth, includes a 32 MB MMC card, FM radio, image/video editor, Real player, 176x208 hi-res screen, email, XHTML browser. Drawbacks: It seems to be using a rare kind of MMC (about $55 for 256 MB), only 6 MBs of internal memory, earphones only deliver mono sound for mp3 playback and they don't seem reliable with FM either.

The Linux based Compound XML Document Editor (CXDE) from IBM’s software group uses Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) to provide a more customized editing experience for developers. CXDE offers a standards-based, model-driven editor for mixed-namespace XML documents such as: XHTML, XForms, XML-Events, SMIL, SVG, VoiceXML, XUL, and MathML. Another good Java-based XML free alternative is Vex.