HTC's eagerly anticipated entry into the ultra-mobile PC market has made an early, unscheduled appearance on the web, adding weight to the company's own admission that it could release a UMPC-like product as early as 2007. Mobile-Review has more photos of the device. Don't tell me you don't (secretly) want one.

Java can provide a simple way to submit z/OS batch jobs to run -- but that is just the beginning. You can also use Java, from any platform, to check on the status of your z/OS batch jobs. This article showes you how to use Java to access z/OS JES Sysout files. In addition, extending the Commons Net Library allows the specific JES file attributes to be encapsulated in Java objects.

GNOME 2.17.4 has been released. "This is our second development release on our road towards GNOME 2.18.0, which will be released in March 2007. New features are coming in at a nice rate, and that's great. A lot of bug fixes too. And some crashers are appearing here and there: that's the fun of unstable releases!"

In 2002, both KDE and GNOME released their last major revisions; KDE released KDE 3.0 on 3rd April, while GNOME followed shortly after with GNOME 2.0 on 27th June. For the Linux desktop, therefore, 2002 was an important year. Since then, we have continiously been fed point releases which added bits of functionaility and speed improvements, but no major revision has yet seen the light of day. What's going on?

"Irish Free Software developers Brian Brazil and Paul O'Malley have developed a new distribution, appropriately named gNewSense. Made with the philosophy of Debian and the structure of Ubuntu, it aims to be the freest distribution out there. It's so 'free', that it earned an official endorsement from the Free Software Foundation. Linux Online is grateful to Messrs. Brazil and O'Malley for taking time out of their busy schedules to answer a few questions about their project."

eSATA, an external version of the technology that's used to connect hard drives inside the PC chassis. Unlike USB and FireWire, eSATA (external Serial ATA) lets external drives communicate at the same speed as internal drives. Great for storing photos, video and music.

Project Looking Glass has hit the magical 1.0 mark: "This release is the culmination of 3 years of work, starting with Hideya san who originally conceived of a bold, new type of window system, through the initial shake down of the proof-of-concept demo by an internal Sun community, followed by the open sourcing of the technology, which generated such enormous interest that it brought down the java.net servers several times. From that point on many people from around the globe have contributed to the project; contributing to the core, contributing applications, performing testing, writing and translating documentation, etc. The project owners (Hideya, Paul, Krishna and myself) are very grateful for all of the great contributions we have received from you, the LG community."

"On November 30, Sophos issued its monthly report on the top ten threats reported to them in November of 2006. As a part of this, Sophos also studied Vista's vulnerability to these malware threats. I found the information and press discussion confusing, so I thought I would clarify what this really means for customers. In order to understand what was really going on here, I asked the team to go look at the technical facts behind the story, and that started in the lab. We began by observing first-hand how these various forms of malware affect a Vista system using a machine that was configured with the default settings and without any additional security software. What we found was that if you are using only the software in Vista (e.g., Windows Mail and no add-on security software), then you are immune to all ten of the malware threats that Sophos cited."

The Mozilla Foundation has issued 'critical' security updates tovulnerabilities discovered in the Firefox browser, Thunderbird e-mailclient and SeaMonkey application suite. Flaws were found in versions of theopen-source software prior to both Firefox 2.0.0.1 and Firefox 1.5.0.9, aswell as prior to Thunderbird 1.5.0.9 and SeaMonkey 1.0.7, Mozilla saidTuesday.

Citrix Systems on Dec. 20 will put another piece of its Dynamic DesktopInitiative into place when it announces its plannedacquisition of Ardence. Ardence, a privately held company that marketsembedded real-time operating system software and a software streamingplatform for Windows and Linux, brings to the table real-time provisioningmanagement for operating systems.

Not too long ago Apple released a new build of Mac OS X 10.5, Leopard, to select testers. AeroXP now has some screenshots of this new build. They report, for one thing, that even though it is available, ZFS is not actually working in this build. Update: ThinkSecret has more screenshots and an overview.

"Solaris Cluster provides high availability and global disaster recovery to suit the evolving needs of virtually any datacenter in any industry: across local distances, campuses or metropolitan areas, and across the world, ensuring business continuity without compromise. With out-of-the box support for the largest number of commercial and open-source applications, open and flexible configurations for both horizontal and vertical scaling, integration with the Solaris kernel and support on both SPARC and x64 platforms, Solaris Cluster provides industrial-strength high availability to your applications." There's documentation too.

Lazy programming is a general concept of delaying the processing of a function or request until the results are needed. This concept has numerous applications, from the obvious to the obscure. Thinking in terms of lazy programming can help you rid your code of unneeded computation and restructure programs to be more problem-oriented.

Apple's Mac OS X has been successfully used to boot up an Asus R2H ultra-mobile PC, which runs the operating system slowly but surely. To minimise claims that all the still photography is faked, the start-up process has been captured on video.