At Seybold Expo Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced that MacOSX 10.1 would be available on September 29th. Retail price is $129, having an upgrade CD shipped to you from Apple is $19.99, and it will be available in all Apple Retail stores (and official resellers' stores) for free. Update: Saturday. A visit to our local neighborhood Apple Store (Tyson's Corner, VA) yielded no free CD. Apparently over 1000 people lined up at 6 am this morning to get theirs.

Some OS/2 fans are circulating a petition asking IBM to open the OS/2 source code. You can sign it here. Though IBM has become a good neighbor in the open source community, there are sometime tricky issues involved in open sourcing commercial software. For instance, IBM's one-time collaborator in OS/2, Microsoft, may still own some of the OS/2 technology, and may not want to see it open sourced. Nevertheless, make your voice heard. It can't hurt.

MandrakeSoft announced today Mandrake Linux 8.1 as the newest alternative to Microsoft Windows and Macintosh operating systems. The new version features Kernel 2.4.8, KDE 2.2.1, Nautilus 1.04 and other latest versions of well known Linux packages as well as choices of installing ReiserFS, XFS and even JFS in place of the EXT2 file system.

Pedro Eloy sent us a note to notify us about the availability (and there is even a free evaluation downloadable version) of the SavageXE operating system for handhelds or IAs, written mainly in Java. More information about the OS here.

Sun Microsystems has released a new version of Java 2 Enterprise Edition, 1.3, which includes a new specification for Enterprise JavaBeans, increased XML integration and a Java Message Service API. A ZDNet article has more details.

A PC World article says that all indications point to Apple releasing OS X 10.1 this month, as promised. The article covers some of the shortcomings that users dealt with in the 10.0 release, and how they've been addressed with 10.1. The article also mentions that Microsoft Office for OS X is expected in November. Update: A news.com article has more details, and reports that current Mac OS X users will be able to obtain the upgrade CD at no cost from Apple dealers and Apple retail stores. Apple had originally said it would charge $20 for the upgrade.

While high technology has had a major effect on the U.S. military arsenal, strategists warn that high tech weapons may not be enough to achieve importatnt aims in the U.S. war on terrorism. Capturing Osama bin Laden, for example, will likely be achieved only through local help and the old fasioned art of making friends with locals in the know. An Associated Press story outlines some of the major high tech tools to be used by the U.S. military in its search for bin Laden, and their recent track record.

A SiliconValley.com article discusses the latest high tech security devices available today and in the near future. Vendors have been quick to capitalize on the world's paranoia, offering gadgets that range from face recognition systems to microwave powered incapacitation rays to full-body x-ray machines.

With the U.S. government in turmoil over the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, congress will likely be forgetting several pending bills that stood to affect the technology sphere. An ISP News article covers the legislation that's likely to be swept away, like the E-government Act and the National Digital School Districts Act. Alas, other legislation, like broad new wiretapping rules, restriction of encrption technology, and other electronic surveillence-oriented bills have either already been passed or are likely to come to vote in the near future, in order to facilitate intelligence gathering and spycraft in America's new war on terrorism.

Mozilla 0.94 has been released and here you can read the Release Notes. New features, among others, include better IMAP, LDAP and MIME support. The Mozilla team writes: "The Windows-only Quick Launch feature (-turbo) is enabled by default in this release for installer builds, although you can turn it off in the installer or in Advanced Preferences. We are hoping community members will test this feature for us. The performance increase is not as great as it used to be; however, Quick Launch now works with multiple profiles."

"Trolltech is releasing version 1.4 of Qt Palmtop, a complete mobile computing platform for advanced embedded Linux devices. This release provides numerous improvements to the existing Qt Palmtop, including bug fixes, enhanced functionality, and a new user interface. Qt Palmtop provides device manufacturers and hobbyists a stunning set of productivity applications, games, multimedia software, and a Personal Information Management (PIM) suite for cutting-edge mobile computing devices. Qt Palmtop is built with Trolltech's Qt/Embedded, the embedded Linux port of the popular cross-platform application framework, Qt." The rest of the announcement can be found at TrollTech's web site.

"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.

This commentary on ZDNews talks about the need of the Linux development community to build something new and revolutionary, something that Microsoft has not offered to its customers, instead of trying to recreate Ms Office as the main "killer application" that Linux needs in order to go mainstream. One day after the above commentary went live, there is already an answer to it made by the C|Net News.com editorial stuff here. Both editorials are a good read. Our Take: I wrote a similar editorial once, called "The Killer Application Concept", about what BeOS needs to make it through and become mainstream, and I still stand in this opinion and I believe it applies for the Linux situation as well. To summarize: The OS doors are closed, except you do create a real (r)evolution.

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.