Castle Technology has provided Iyonix owners with a new version of RISC OS 5. Version 5.06 promises better USB, NVidia and mouse-wheel support and a working copy of !Edit which had been broken in the previous release.

The ballyhooed "slate" version of the Tablet PC platform pioneered by Microsoft looks to be a victim of a desire to fold "electronic ink" technologies into ordinary notebook PCs.

This article argues that next-generation programming systems will accomplish this by combining three specific technologies: compilers, linkers, debuggers, and other tools will be plugin frameworks, rather than monolithic applications; programmers will be able to extend the syntax of programming languages; and programs will be stored as XML documents, so that programmers can represent and process data and meta-data uniformly.

MandrakeSoft recently emerged from the bankruptcy protection it sought last year. To find out what happened and why MandrakeSoft is enjoying success, Joe Bolin caught up with MandrakeSoft CEO François Bancilhon, and Mandrakelinux co-founders Jacques Le Marois and Gaël Duval.

Novell today announced its Connector for Microsoft Exchange Server will be integrated into Evolution 2.0 and made available as open source, beginning today with the current Connector 1.4. Evolution is Novell's award-winning e-mail and workgroup client for Unix and is the most widely used collaboration suite on Linux. Elsewhere, the CrossOver Office 3.0 plugin was also released.

Steve Jobs is delivering on the digital dream however he has never understood the use of computing in large companies. The minute he or Apple mentions "enterprise," run in the other direction." Read the editorial here by George Colony, chairman and chief executive officer of Forrester Research. Update: On other Mac news, Apple Computer has won a patent for the interface of its iTunes music software, underscoring the growing importance of the multimedia business for the company.

One day while doing my daily browsing through the web, I came across a message board post that was in response to a Linux zealot's rant. It went a little something like this, "If Linux had the market share of Windows, and Windows was the underdog you would be saying how great, and easy to use Windows is, and how it just works." My first reaction was of anger and dismissal, "Linux is open source Linux uses protected memory..." But the more I thought about it the more it disturbed me because I knew it was true. What do you do when you think an opinion you have may be in jeopardy of being wrong? You compare the facts and sort out the myths.

This is the first release of a Live CD for Syllable (30 MB), created by BurningShadow, based on Syllable 0.5.3 while it includes Arno's dock Alpha 1. This first version of the Live CD is far from perfect, as there are some random crashes to the fact that it is running off a read-only filesystem, we were told.

Day 2 of the KMDI Open Source conference started with Robert F. Young, cofounder of Red Hat, Inc. presenting a positive view about open source business models. At the end of a conference day lasting nearly 13 hours, Young returned to deliver the conference's keynote address.

Xandros today announced that the Xandros Desktop operating system serves as the core framework for the new line of ION laptops from Element Computer. Element customized the Xandros Desktop OS with their ION Parchment icon theme, the new Mozilla Firefox browser, and "Unbreakable Upgrade" support to bring an Apple-like customer experience and Windows compatibility to mobile Linux computing.

In this article, six widely used algorithms in graphics rendering of indoor and outdoor environments are discussed, namely: quad-based static terrain, Roettger's approach to continuous levels-of-detail in terrain, real-time optimally adapting meshes, portals, BSPs and PVSs. In each case the algorithm is discussed and some aspects of implementation are considered, as well as analyize each algorithm for its application in modern graphics systems. More graphics articles here.

The Cambridge University mathematician laid the foundation for the invention of software. As part of its anniversary celebration, BusinessWeek is presenting a series of weekly profiles for the greatest innovators of the past 75 years. Some made their mark in science or technology; others in management, finance, marketing, or government. In late September, 2004, BusinessWeek will publish a special commemorative issue on Innovation. Elsewhere, there is also a special article for Turing.

Kerneltrap covers recent progress with the Kqueue code in FreeBSD-current. Kqueue testing is a major focus area for the release of 5.3 and it looks like freebsd dev is making steady progress in knocking out major showstoppers. The code would also benefit from testing.

Patch management could easily be called the bane of every administrator's existence, the pain in the rear of system management, or that never ceasing headache that pounds at CIOs everywhere. Here are three articles on the topic, Part 1, 2 and 3.