To celebrate the 1000th article of the magazine Obligement, Carl Sassenrath returns through this long interview on its origins at Amiga Inc. in the 1980's (Manager of AmigaOS and Amiga CDTV system development, among others), the bankruptcy of Commodore, its passages at Apple Computer and Viscorp, Amiga NG, or on its new revolutionary language REBOL. A classic name in the Silicon Valley!

Remember the 'Minority Report' scenes in which Tom Cruise and others used their hands to manipulate data on giant computer screens? One man is on a mission to make that gestural interface technology commonplace on every desktop.

"OpenBSD 4.1 has just been released. Federico Biancuzzi interviewed several developers to discuss some of the new features for networking, active porting efforts (landisk and UltraSPARC III), work on SMP, and the improvements in spam fighting." More here.

"The news that Dell will begin making the fast-growing Ubuntu flavor of Linux available on some of its machines should be welcomed by consumers everywhere." Read the rest of the review here.

"In Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, 15 services in system space had confined SELinux domains defined. In Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, over 200 processes are confined by SELinux. The improved SELinux policy is much more precise in how it governs the operation of these services. It's far less likely that a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 system space process will be compromised or encounter an error caused by an SELinux policy not handling the specific requirements (e.g., file or directory access) of a service."

"Pidgin 2.0, the latest version of the popular open-source instant messaging client formerly known as Gaim, is now available for download. After months of development and numerous beta releases, Pidgin 2.0 is finally ready. A significant improvement over the current 1.5.x series, Pidgin 2.0 includes several compelling features and usability enhancements. Last year, we looked at the second beta release and concluded that much work still needed to be done. Many of the problems we discovered in the early Gaim 2.0 betas have since been resolved. The official Pidgin 2.0 release, available for download from the Pidgin web site, provides an impressive level of quality and reliability."

E16 version 0.16.8.7 and epplets version 0.10 are now available for download. "Add option to show windows on all desks in focus list. The CM now renders to the composite overlay window. Fix various updates when external background changes." Many more fixes are in the changelog.

"Colleagues at my former outlet, PC World magazine, have told me that Editor-in-Chief Harry McCracken quit abruptly today because the company’s new CEO, Colin Crawford, tried to kill a story about Apple and Steve Jobs. The piece, a whimsical article titled 'Ten Things We Hate About Apple', was still in draft form when Crawford killed it. McCracken said no way and walked after Crawford refused to compromise. Apparently Crawford also told editors that product reviews in the magazine were too critical of vendors, especially ones who advertise in the magazine, and that they had to start being nicer to advertisers."

"When you're designing and developing new software systems, it is often hard to see how all the pieces are suppose to fit together. Unified Modeling Language is one tool that allow developers and architects to ease the process and create a big picture before committing to a particular technology."

ACK Controls, the company behind the newly announced Amiga hardware, has held an IRC session where they answered questions and provided more details concerning the upcoming hardware. According to ACK, the promised hardware will arrive with OS4 despite the legal battle going on between Amiga Inc. and Hyperion. On the high-spec machine (USD 1500), they said: "It's faster than anything Apple ever produced on the PowerPC side of things." Which is interesting, to say the least. The transcript containts many more details, and the Amiga community is discussing the matter as well.

It's the original UMPC: Epson's HX-20, announced in 1981 - 25 years before Intel and Microsoft formally launched the ultra-mobile PC category, in April 2006. Epson's machine wasn't the first portable computer - that honour goes to the Osborne 1. But while the Osborne was a beast of a machine, designed more as a desktop you could take from place to place, the HX-20 was a truly a system for computing on the move. So while the HX-20 combined not only a full QWERTY keyboard, a display, storage and even a printer into its 28.4 x 21.3 x 4.4cm casing, but also a rechargeable Ni-Cad battery.

"Red Hat today released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.5, featuring a 2.6.9-55.EL kernel paravirtualized for i686 and x86_64 machines. RHEL 4.5 also provides NFS performance metrics and updated kernel support for Infiniband connectivity, according to the release announcement."

eComStation has gotten a new VESA video driver and full ACPI support. The developers are working on user interface improvement as well. "In the beginning of the spring we updated: ACPI subsystem, eComStation kernel, USB Tools homepage, Hardware database, General Network Utilities, PMDownloader, eSchemes gallery, Panorama video drivers, Piano Launchpad and Imagination, Calculator for millionaire, Firewall ports setup, LANGE library." Screenshots can be found here.

The Windows Debugging guru and reverse-engineer Skywing has posted an article on Vista's new Integrity Level system to put a limited form of MAC security on the system. Read the article to find out how Vista restricts IE from accessing your files even though it is running under your account.