Sony Corp. is calling an end to its Clié line of PDAs (personal digital assistants) in Japan, the company said Tuesday. The move comes eight months after the company said it would no longer sell new models of PDAs overseas and puts the cap on a product line first announced by the Tokyo company in mid-2000. Elsewhere, here's a review of the Fujitsu Siemens Pocket Loox 420.

GNOME 2.8.3 has been released: This is the third and last maintenance release of the stable 2.8.x series of GNOME and it contains a huge amount of bugfixes and other improvements since the last release. Elsewhere, a user is discussing the things that annoy him about Gnome.

Here's a very interesting article dealing with his findings on .NET after many years of working with it. It isn't pretty. It goes into detail as to what his perception of its problems, weaknesses are. In addition to his opinion that Microsoft let marketing take over what developers should have done.

There's an article up with a quote from Steve Wozniak, where he publicly chastises Apple for their lawsuits against the canadian student being sued by Apple Computer for leaking a build of 10.4, and will be donating money to the student's defense. It doesn't just stop there. Some of the biggest names in the Mac world are also listed with quotes, and the general consensus is "He made a mistake, but Apple is going too far".

Impersonation is one of the most useful mechanisms in Windows security. It's also fragile and easy to misuse. Careful use of impersonation can lead to a secure, easy-to-administer application. Misuse can open gaping security holes. This sample chapter will help you to use impersonation properly and effectively.

This chapter will assist you in tuning the performance of WebSphere V5 on your z/OS system with a general focus on z/OS-specific items.

Sure, everyone knows Tomboy, F-spot, Beagle, MonoDevelop, Muine, Blam! or Monodoc. But there are a lot of other interesting Mono/GTK# applications out there that need your attention. Join us for a quick listing of the not-so-well-known GTK# apps and you will witness yourself that the platform is flourishing.

Novell's Ben Maurer has been reducing memory usage for Mono 1.1.x recently and he now asks for the same extend of optimizations to be done for GTK+ itself. Read more on his blog and the wiki.

With the recent (or not so recent, I am a very slow writer) interest in database file systems, I've been thinking about what a typical user really wants from such a system. What would they use it for? What would we need to do to help them get the most from it? Are there any precedents that show how useful a database file system could be? If not, could we invent one? This lead me to some "gedanken solutions" (like gedanken experiments, just with software) that I thought I'd distract you with.

At Fosdem 2005 the GNU Classpath, Kaffe and GCJ hackers will cooperate and give demos of what will be possible with Kaffe 1.1.5 and GCC 4.0. The main theme of the official program is building bridges with other communities and contains talks about IKVM .net integration, cooperations with Apache Jakarta, rapid desktop development with java-gnome. And demonstrations of Free AWT and Swing plus lightning fast native eclipse and jonas.

Microsoft should be concentrating on securing Windows instead of trying to challenge security software companies, according to research firm Gartner.

"Now, without spending a lot of money you to can build an authenticated gateway solution to verify your WIFI users. First and foremost you need to get your hands on the coolest free BSD system for firewalls and security devices. In this example I will be using OpenBSD3.6 stock standard as a build and a base system." Read the rest here.

Sun this week at LinuxWorld revealed its Java Desktop 3.0 enterprise Linux desktop environment. Sun has not yet given a laundry list of features, but has indicated that device support and productivity are the foremost attributes of the upgrade.

Here's a recently written review of the new Hoary Array-5 LiveCD, with some background of the Ubuntu project and a bunch of screenshots.