"Leather, a material that calls to mind, at one extreme, Diana Rigg, tight thigh-length boots, the crack of the whip and, at the other, well-worn sofas, ancient libraries and the air of long-faded wealth. Somewhere in between sits Asus' latest leather-covered laptop, the W6Fp."

"For a computer that's been around for over a year now (to beta testers), the A9 has had relatively little detailed coverage in the RISC OS world. This makes it hard to judge whether or not to spend hard-earned cash on the little blighter. Having owned one for a few months, I've recorded my impressions of the A9home. It's not complete by any means (I've not got round to hooking it up to a printer, for example), but I hope it's helpful for anyone thinking of taking the plunge."

"While still far from perfect, Ubuntu 6.10 'Edgy Eft' is both an improvement over the so-called 'long-term support' release and a decent operating system in its own right. It's in a much better place than any other free-of-charge operating system has been before now, but I don't think it'll give any commercial operating systems a run for their money."

"Haskell is a valuable language for a lot of different reasons, but the most important one is that it changes the way that you think about programming. Haskell does things in a very different way from the imperative languages that most of us are familiar with. And it's an extremely well-designed language, so there isn't a ton of crap standing between you and the concepts that you can learn from it."

"If like me, you do most of your work from the command-line, using vim to edit files, mutt for e-mails, cd/ls/mv/find/etc instead of a file manager, then you may get annoyed by having to fire up a GUI calculator to make (what may sometimes be) a single calculation. This article shows how to quickly perform standard calculations on the command line."

"Apple researchers have built a full working prototype of a Mac tablet PC and three Companies in Taiwan are now costing a product for a potential launch in mid 2007. Sources in Taiwan have said that the focus has been more on the home and the education environment than the enterprise marketplace. Several months ago I was told that Apple was exploring a neat new device that is basically a touch screen that links to various source devices including a brand new media centre that Apple is planning to launch next year. The Mac tablet has been designed to handle third party applications such as home automation software that will allow users to control lighting, audio, entertainment devices and security feeds. It also acts as a full blown PC has wireless linking for a new generation of Wireless Hi Fi speakers that are currently being tested by Apple."

After much hard work, the PC-BSD team is pleased to announce that version 1.3 BETA2 is now available for download. This version adds support for installing in languages other than English, and addresses many numerous bugs found in BETA1. 1.3 BETA2 can be downloaded from the beta download page. You will also need to download 1.3 CD2 if you wish to install in languages other than English. Please report any and all unreported bugs on the BugsDB or the forums.

Calmira XP is no more. "After almost 15 years of Windows 3.1 and 5 years of Calmira XP this is the time to say goodbye to this great project. I had a great time developing this, and I hope you enjoyed using it. As a farewell-gift I made a last version which includes all the graphical enhancements of Calmira XP 4.0, but without the experimental LFN-support; so this is a stable version. Now it's time to search for a new, fresh project."

Mark Shuttleworth is trying to entice OpenSUSE developers to join Ubuntu. "Novell's decision to go to great lengths to circumvent the patent framework clearly articulated in the GPL has sent shockwaves through the community. If you are an OpenSUSE developer who is concerned about the long term consequences of this pact, you may be interested in some of the events happening next week as part of the Ubuntu Open Week."

CPU maker Intel is pressuring smaller rival Via Technologies to exit the CPU market, industry sources in Taiwan claim. In exchange, Intel will allow Via to continue making PC chipsets which use Intel's patented technology, say the sources at PC mainboard manufacturers, who do not wish to be named.

On Thursday, antivirus firm F-Secure published a brief analysis of a proof-of-concept adware program for the Mac OS X that could theoretically hook into any application to run attacker-specified code. The program, dubbed IAdware by F-Secure, could be silently installed in a user's account without requiring administrator rights. "We won't disclose the exact technique used here - it's a feature not a bug - but let's just say that installing a System Library shouldn't be allowed without prompting the user," stated F-Secure in the blog post. "Especially as it only requires copy permissions." My take: I'd say, hand over the code, then we'll talk.

"It's been a good week for Microsoft's documentation efforts as the company achieved important milestones with regulators on both sides of the Atlantic. US antitrust authorities signed off on Vista and IE7 and announced that Microsoft was making good progress in its efforts to document certain server protocols in Windows. In Europe, where Microsoft has encountered more problems and increased fines over the state of its documentation, the company got a rare bit of good news as the European Commission completed its initial review of the revised documents."

There is a new video of the 'Sugar' user interface for the USD 100 OLPC laptop. As you may know, the mission of this non-profit association is to develop a low-cost laptop, a technology that could revolutionise how we educate the world's children.

Microsoft is beating Oracle hands down with the security of its database, according to a new report. David Litchfield, a security researcher with NGS Software, published a whitepaper entitled Which database is more secure? Oracle vs. Microsoft on 21 November comparing the number of software vulnerabilities patched by both vendors in their respective products in the past six years.