Recent news has covered the release of many new smart phones. We have the new Treo650, the new Sony P910, the new Audiovox PPC 6000, the new Blackberry 7100, and the new Nokia 6670. Recently, I've been speaking via email almost daily with my AT&T (now Cingular) rep. For some reason, the conversation always steers towards his wanting to push the latest from Nokia, Blackberry, etc.

The next version of Mandrakesoft's Linux distribution comes with Wi-Fi roaming capabilities, Bluetooth support and improved power management for laptop users.

Unicode, or the Universal Character Set (UCS), was developed to end once and for all the problems associated with the abundance of character sets used for writing text in different languages. It is a single character set whose goal is to be a superset of all others used before, and to contain every character used in writing any language (including many dead languages) as well as other symbols used in mathematics and engineering. Any charset can be losslessly converted to Unicode, as we'll see.

Get a comparison of the strengths of the two most common .NET data providers for Oracle, and be prepared to select the right one for your next development project. Elsewhere, Dino Esposito builds an ASP.NET 1.x custom control that mimics the behavior and the programming interface of the ASP.NET 2.0 DetailsView control.

When it comes to digital gadgets, Europeans are not impressed by do-it-all devices that play songs and films, keep track of appointments and play video games, a new survey on Monday said. In a survey of 5,000 consumers from Britain, Germany, France, Sweden, Spain and Italy, Jupiter Research found that 27 percent of respondents expressed a preference for a gadget that plays music only while just five percent are interested in buying a device that plays both music and video.

Earlier this year Microsoft released a major security update for Windows XP, which was designed to strengthen the operating system’s defences against attack from viruses and hackers. One major part of the update was an improved version of its firewall software. Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at antivirus firm Sophos, said the latest Bagle variants are designed to attack and disable Microsoft’s new firewall application.

Apple decided to disable full dual head video in the new iMac in firmware, but intrepid hackers will not be daunted. The leading German language computer magazine c't has put an OpenFirmware hack into an Applescript for easy use.

A couple of weeks ago, Microsoft unveiled the latest version of its Media Center OS, which turns a PC into a Tivo-like device and digital jukebox. While the last version only came pre-installed on rather expensive hardware, there are already vendors lined up with some less expensive (and pretty cool) hardware this time around. Read more in this Mercury News article.

Techworld just released an updated version of their Report on Windows vs. Linux. This report tries to separate myth from reality... In particular, we have looked at new technological developments since the last survey. We offer no blanket conclusion that Linux is better than Windows, or vice versa, but point out the technological areas where one scores highly and the other less well.

According to Distrowatch an evaluation edition of the Lycoris Desktop/LX 1.4 has been released. The edition only contains GPL components and the license prevents its use after the initial 45-day evaluation period. Get more information via their press release here and their sneak peak page. Update: 100 Lycoris screenshots.

BeOS/Zeta user group JPBE.net recently exhibited at the Kansai Open Source 2004 show held in Osaka, Japan, inviting yellowTAB Senior Development Engineer Bruno G. Albuquerque to host a seminar on OpenBFS, and to demo the latest version of Zeta OS. News site www.iscomputeron.com now carries a report of Kansai Open Source 2004, while videos of the OpenBFS session and an on stage Zeta demo are also available from JPBE.net. Also, C# for BeOS.

Release announcement of the FreeBSD 5.3-RC2 release available here.

The second beta of the upcoming XFce 4.2 is now available for testing.

According this article Solaris 10 beta7 aka. build 69 available for download from Sun Microsystems.