The Economist is running a cover article on the next great battle of the computing age, and one that may be even more far-reaching than the PC war: the truly personal computer, the so-called smart phone.

The first release after 18 months, Fresco, previously known as Berlin, released M1 or Milestone 1. The release notes here, screenshots here . The original "press release" follows:

This document details the configuration, hardening, monitoring and vulnerability assessment of the Solaris OE. It can also be used as a configuration standard, providing a baseline to audit against.

"With all the hoopla surrounding Linux lately I wanted to give it a try. Several people told me that for a newbie Mandrake was the way to go. As luck would have it MandrakeSoft was about to release their newest version, 9.0. I requested a copy to review from them and it was here in less than a week. A big thank you to the team at MandrakeSoft for the CD's and for their help." Read the review at TweakHound.

"For this preview, I had originally written a long-winded backgrounder about the history of Longhorn, and the ways in which this project has changed over time. I'll save the lengthy exposition for a future review, however, and get right to the point: Longhorn is now considered a major Windows release by Microsoft, and early alpha builds are now testing at the company's Redmond campus. Last month, some of those builds leaked to the Internet, causing a stir in the Windows enthusiast community. I take a look at one of those builds here." Read the preview and view screenshots at WinSuperSite.

Apple released Security Update 2002-11-21 for MacOSX 10.2 Jaguar (via the Software Update utility). It fixes potential vulnerabilities introduced in BIND, the domain server and client library software package from ISC, that is shipped with OS X and OSX Server. BIND version 8.3.4 addresses the recently-discovered potential vulnerabilities where an unauthorized person may disrupt the normal operation of the DNS name service. BIND is not activated by default on OSX.

miray Software introduces the new version 0.95 of the operating system µnOS with numerous new features today: µnOS is now based on a completely new realtime microkernel, has a graphics server with a software graphic engine and full true color support (VESA) and a window server with a complete GUI component framework and support for arbitrary freeform windows. You can easily try the OS as it fits on a floppy disk (didn't run on my VMWare 3.x though).

Eight new preview AmigaOS4 screenshots have been released, demonstrating some of the default GUI customizability. However should be noted, none of these new screenshots yet show the default AmigaOS 4.0 appearance. However "In the end, it is you that will decide what your AmigaOS 4.0 looks like...". Consumer AmigaOne boards will be delivered before Christmas, with the AmigaOne version of AmigaOS4 following shortly after them. The official mainstream launch of these new AmigaOS4/AmigaOne computers will be at CeBit in Germany, to be held March 2003.

"Microsoft is playing wait-and-see with AMD's 64-bit Opteron processor. The company has no definite commitment to ship a version of its .Net Server operating system for the new processor, though both will be available at the same time, around April of 2003. The stance was laid out at Microsoft's IT Forum event in Copenhagen on Thursday by Microsoft's Windows supremo." Read the report at ZDNet.UK. AMD does have samples of Windows 64bit for their new processors though.

"For years, Microsoft has argued that servers containing only a handful of processors are good enough for most of the world. But now, with the advent of huge Intel machines and the approaching release of a new version of Windows that will run on them, the company is changing its tune. For heavyweight business computing jobs such as housing a large company's sales transaction database, Microsoft's preferred philosophy has been to share the load among lower-end servers grouped into a "cluster". It's been a tough sell, however, with large corporations sticking with mainframes or Unix servers." Read the report at News.com.

Seen the interesting article linked from Deadly.org: "Why would one install his own personal gateway to the Internet? Because it is quite easy to do. And also because it simply is the most reliable, safest way to connect machines to a dedicated xDSL modem. Moreover, we can stash a whole bunch of useful features in such a little box."

This release fixes a critical bug in GTK+ 2.0.8, which caused recent metacity versions to crash. It is source and binary compatible with previous releases in the GTK+ 2.0 series.

Robert Szeleney will never cease to amaze us. After developing a software OpenGL stack and porting Quake 1&2 on top, this time around he has a preliminary JavaVM core running simple Java programs for his OS, SkyOS. Indeed, SkyOS has gone where no other hobby OS has ever gone before with these new features (not even AtheOS ever had such goodies).

One of the great things about using tools and databases such as Borland Delphi 7 Studio and IBM DB2 Universal Database is that moving between platforms is only a matter of a few changes and a recompile. This article shows how to move a functional application from a Delphi 7 application running on Microsoft Windows to a Linux application using Borland Kylix 3. This article also goes over DB2 on Linux and minor source code changes.