"The European Parliament published its report into the Echelon spying system last week in which it concluded it did exist, was against the law and that the UK had a lot of explaining to do. We've sifted through about 100 of the 194 pages and decided that since no one had yet to officially admit its existence, you may be interested in how the European Parliament decided it was definitely out there." Read the rest of the scoop at TheRegister.

NetBSD, the BSD distribution which targets multiple platforms (NetBSD supports currently 21 architectures), released a new version, v1.5.2, a patch release improving stability, fixing bugs in, and adding some features to NetBSD 1.5.1. More information is available in the 1.5.2 release announcement. Many of the FTP mirrors are now carrying the NetBSD 1.5.2

Two more Linux companies are taking drastic measures to cope with financial problems. Lineo is ridding itself of more than half of its work force, and Ebiz Enterprises has filed for bankruptcy protection. Get the rest of the scoop at C|Net's News.com.

GNUstep provides an Object-Oriented application development framework and tool set for use on a wide variety of computer platforms. GNUstep is based on the original OpenStep specification provided by NeXT, Inc. (now owned by Apple and incorporated into MacOSX). We are hosting today an interview with Adam Fedor, of the GNUstep project.

"Databases were once the forgotten stepchild of the open-source family. Companies like Red Hat Inc. included database software with their Linux distribution disks, but the main focus was on the operating system, the kernel and the graphical interface. A database was just another add-on, like a Minesweeper clone. But now, companies and users are scrambling to realize the value locked up in quality, open-source database software," ComputerWorld writes. Following the discussion we had recently on mySQL and PostgreSQL, the article seems to agree that professional closed-source database systems still have the lead on the open source counterparts.

Trumpet Software is mostly known for their Internet communications software package, Trumpet Winsock, which has been adopted by the Internet world back in 1995, at the times where Windows 3.1 and Win95 did not come as standard with full internet connetion capabilities. But the main product these days for Trumpet Software is PetrOS, a 32-bit Operating System, which has the goal to be compatible by all means with Microsoft Windows. We are interviewing the main architect behind the project, Peter Tattam, who talks in depth about PetrOS, and also we feature a world exclusive first screenshot of the PetrOS GUI, a GUI which is still under heavy development.

For a good weekend reading, amateur and pro programmers can go to Joel On Software where Joel Spolsky gives a big number of extremely valuable hints about the process of engineering software. Joel Spolsky is one of the initiators of VBA, and led its implementation in Excel. He has recently founded his own company, Fog Creek Software. Anyone who wants to become a really good software engineer should pay a lot of attention to his essays, probably starting with The Joel Test.

Amiga.org is organizing the first ever AmigaDE demo competition. Demos may be written in any language of preference, but the end result must be either compiled down to Virtual Processor code or must be Java Bytecode. The demos will be shown at the World of Amiga South East Show, which is being held in the UK on the 3rd of November 2001. Read more for more information regarding the Amiga Digital Environment and Amiga demos. Mike Bouma has the details.

Slashdot features an interesting interview with the AtheOS creator, Kurt Skauen. Kurt talks about filesystem attributes, why XFree is not a choice for AtheOS, the GPL and lots of other things. OSNews also hosted an interview with Kurt just ten days ago, where Kurt talked in length about binary compatibility, Gcc 3, mulithreading etc

"Some oppose a preemptible kernel because of throughput concerns. Others oppose preemptibility because of concerns about growing complexity in the kernel. This argument is specious, because the preemption approach takes advantage of already required and in place SMP locking. No additional complexity is created. All Linux kernel engineering must already take into account SMP requirements. Some oppose continued refinement of SMP locking to achieve better SMP scaling (on higher way SMP systems); such refinement has the beneficial side effect of also reducing preemption off periods in a preemptible kernel." Read the rest of the editorial at LinuxDevices by Kevin Morgan who is the Vice President, Engineering at MontaVista Software.

The cable industry is almost ready to certify DOCSIS 2.0 (Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification). The new specification, which uses A-TDMA and S-CDMA technology, promises to increase cable modem bandwidth by as much as 300%, particularly upstream bandwidth. Unfortunately, the hardware to support it is a year away.

On the heels of its stunning acquisition announcement, HP announced the release of new Jornada handhelds. They're the first to sport Intel's new StrongARM 206 MHz processor, and the first machines to run PocketPC 2002. One would suppose that the Jornada and the iPaq lines are going to go head to head internally to see which one has a future. If this announcement is any indication, the Jornada team isn't ready to roll over and concede to the more-popular iPaq now that they're in the same company. Read Internet.com's coverage.

The U.S. Justice Department announced today that it will not seek to break Microsoft Corp. in two during the next phase of the software maker's landmark antitrust case. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in late June had overturned a lower court's order by U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson that Microsoft be broken into two companies as a remedy for anticompetitive practices. At the same time, it upheld the lower court's conclusion that Microsoft has a monopoly in the market for computer operating systems and maintains that monopoly power by anticompetitive means in violation of U.S. antitrust laws.

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates demonstrated today technologies for transcribing spoken Chinese, making handheld computers aware of when they're being touched and moved, and adding emotion to computer slide shows. At an event recognizing the 10th anniversary of Microsoft Research, Gates indulged his fondness for technology, raising hopes for a world where computers will become more useful. At the event, among the things it was showed was a handheld computer that understands which way is up and where it's being touched, technology that lets it reorient the display according to how it's held or understand when a person is holding it like a cell phone to give dictation. The "Mulan" software project for reading Chinese writing out loud or transcribing speech into characters. With about 60,000 characters in Chinese, it's difficult to use keyboards. Automated bug detection that helped make Windows 2000 less crash-prone is being used in all other Microsoft product lines. Video compression technology that's less error-prone than the prevailing MPEG4 standard. Software that's designed not to sap people's emotion when creating narrated slide shows so sharing photos online is more like the storytelling that accompanies the viewing of traditional photo albums. Software that can reconstruct three-dimensional images from a few still photos.