Hi-Mobile.net sent us over one of the highest-end phones ever released, the Nokia N82. A rich smartphone, running the latest version of Symbian OS and S60 3.1 is sure to raise some eyebrowses as the model resembles in feature-set (of its time) and overall looks of the very successful 6680 that was first released in early 2005. In fact, the more I look at this model, the more I get the feeling that a product manager walked in at an engineering meeting one Monday morning and proclaimed: "Gentlemen, we need to resurrect the 6680".

"LV2 is a simple but extensible successor of LADSPA, intended to address the limitations of LADSPA which many applications have outgrown. By creating LV2 'extensions' (which can be done independently), virtually any feature is possible for LV2 plugins and hosts."

A new version of E16 has been released. "Fix rendering issues when using pseudo-transparency; fix translucent moves of non-shaped windows; fix border right click (winops menu) in many themes; fix incorrect tracking of pointer motion when dragging window; fix potential trouble while exiting/restarting; various minor bug fixes and enhancements, see ChangeLog for details." Get it here.

The source code to the original SimCity game has been released under the GPL, with all references to the SimCity name removed due to copyright trademark issues; it is now called Micropolis. You can download the source code, or read a bit more about it. SimCity is one of the most critically acclaimed games in history.

"Toshiba didn't make much of a fuss about its UMPC, claiming the smooth-cornered handheld PC was intended to demo technologies the company develops to potential manufacturer customers. One such technology: fuel cells."

PC vendor Lenovo has promised ThinkPads with pre-installed Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 for some time now. Lenovo will deliver the goods the week of Jan. 14. Lenovo will release pre-installed SLED 10 on its Intel Centrino processor-powered ThinkPad T61 and R61 14-inch-wide notebooks. In February, Lenovo's pre-integrated Novell Linux offering will expand to include some Penryn-based ThinkPads.

The second pre-release of Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring is here. This pre-release brings a near-final snapshot of KDE 4.0 (final 4.0 packages are currently being uploaded to the Cooker repositories), new NVIDIA and ATI drivers, the chance to test the experimental Nouveau open source driver for NVIDIA cards, kernel 2.6.24rc7, and more. See here for download information.

Noel Dellofano, who is part of the ZFS dev team at Apple, has a post on Mac OS Forge announcing a late Christmas gift: she is making available binaries and source code (plus instructions) of the ZFS filesystem for Mac OS X. "ZFS is a new kind of filesystem that provides simple administration, transactional semantics, end-to-end data integrity, and immense scalability. ZFS is not an incremental improvement to existing technology; it is a fundamentally new approach to data management. We've blown away 20 years of obsolete assumptions, eliminated complexity at the source, and created a storage system that's actually a pleasure to use."

"Earlier this week Apple released updated Mac Pros that use Intel's new Penryn processors. Also new is the fact that the standard Mac Pro configuration now comes with eight (instead of four) cores. Of course, what I've been wondering (as I sit here and think about getting a new Mac Pro) is how does the new standard eight-core Mac Pro perform compared to the old high-end Mac Pro? I've gathered Geekbench 2 results for both Mac Pros to find out."

"The Ubuntu developers are moving very quickly to bring you the absolute latest and greatest software the Open Source Community has to offer. Hardy Heron Alpha 3 is the third alpha release of Ubuntu 8.04, and with this new alpha release comes a whole host of excellent new features."

Is Microsoft working on building a laptop for the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) program? Yes, but the intended machine will run Windows XP only, rather than both Windows XP and Linux, Microsoft officials said today, refuting an earlier report that made the waves on Slashdot and OSNews.

Gizmodo has been running an interesting series of videos (part I | part II | part III) where they interview Bill Gates. They chopped the interview up into smaller pieces (as in, 2 minutes a pop), but the fourth installment only lasts 16 seconds. Bill Gates does say something very honest and open, though. After Gizmodo asked him what product of the last five years he would've wanted polished a little more, Gates answers: "Ask me after we ship the next version of Windows. Then I'll be more open to give you a blunt answer."

"Open source code, much like its commercial counterpart, tends to contain one security exposure for every 1000 lines of code, according to a program launched by the Department of Homeland Security to review and tighten up open source code's security. Popular open source projects, such as Samba, the PHP, Perl, and Tcl dynamic languages used to bind together elements of Web sites, and Amanda, the popular open source backup and recovery software running on half a million servers, were all found to have dozens or hundreds of security exposures and quality defects. A total of 7826 open source project defects have been fixed through the Homeland Security review, or one every two hours since it was launched in 2006, according to David Maxwell, open source strategist for Coverity, maker of the source code checking system, the Prevent Software Quality System, that's being used in the review." Note: I just want to state for the record that the headline has not been written by me. I do like the total kicking-in-open-doors air surrounding it, though.

The newest version of the popular RPM package manager is now out with improved performance and functionality. But there's a bit of a catch with RPM version 5.0. Linux vendor Red Hat officially considers RPM 5.0 a project fork. "RPM5 is a fork of RPM, and is not related to RPM.org," Daniel Riek, Product Manager Red Hat Enterprise Linux told InternetNews.com. "Neither Red Hat or Fedora are involved in RPM5, and have no current plans to use it. Red Hat remains committed to the main RPM.org releases and development."