PalmOne released today a sequel for its popular Tungsten E. The Tungsten E2, looks essentially identical to its predecessor, but offers Bluetooth wireless networking, and a more powerful battery. Like the original, the E2 has a 320-by-320-pixel display. This is 30% brighter and has 40% better color saturation. This handheld has 32 MB of NVFS memory, with 26 MB available to the user. NVFS memory holds information without a charge or power. It runs at 200 Mhz, it has a headphones-in jack, but it lacks a microphone. It uses PalmOS Garnet 5.4.7 and sells for $249. Reviews here, here and here.

The phrase "de facto standard" can denote anything from proprietary tyranny to a healthy, vibrant, market. What makes a standard viable without the formal blessing of a standards organization? Should you use such informal standards, or ignore them?

At university, I didn't lift weights to keep in shape. I carried my textbooks in one arm and lugged a 12-pound laptop in the other. That heavy beast never lived up to its promise of freedom but my T20 running Debian Linux has. A modern notebook is compact and portable, runs its quiet fan only when necessary, uses less power than a desktop, and offers instant access to running applications by opening the lid.

Over the past several weeks, Tom Lane has been working on replacing our old Cache Management Alorithm (ARC) with a new, patent free one (2Q). In order to reduce the number of 8.x deployments out there that are using the old manager, they have just released 8.0.2, and encourage adminstrators to upgrade at their earliest convience.

XGI has released some source code of their Linux driver hoping for some help from the community.

One of the major advantages Linux has to offer is cross-platform functionality. Far from being a PC operating system that has been extended for other uses, it runs on cell phones, mainframes and everything in between. This offers IT departments the possibility of using Linux to consolidate resources into a single skill set, or at least a single OS. The danger, however, is that since developers are free to conduct extensive customization, it may fork into a number of incompatible versions, says EarthWeb.