One of the world's largest computer and consumer electronics manufacturers will ship a completely open, Linux-based, GPS-equipped, quad-band GSM/GPRS phone direct, worldwide, for USD 350 or less, in Q1, 2007. The Neo1973 is the first phone based on the open-source 'OpenMoKo' platform.

EnabledPeople, the company that is working on the Linux XP distribution, has screenshots of their newest product for integrating GNOME with Active Directory. There is an overview article 'Linux Integration Service for Active Directory' and another article 'Why Windows 2003 Is the Best Server for Linux', describing how it works. Meanwhile, Novell has gotten Evolution 2.8 working with Exchange Server 2003.

We are on the brink of a very exciting time. The buzzword-friendly "Web 2.0" is here, and it's most punctuated by three terms: social networking, AJAX, and RSS. Nothing about these things is inherently new - AJAX existed as an ActiveX control present in Microsoft's Outlook Web Access long ago, social networking has existed for some time via sites like Friendster, and RSS is just a style of XML, which has been floating around in mainstream tech circles for about 10 years. But Web 2.0 is here, like it or not. The question is, as use of these technologies begins to become more widespread, how are we going to shape these technologies, and who is going to make those decisions?

"OS.X Macarena poses no viable threat as currently conceived. Although we don't have our hands on the virus source code, according to Symantec (who initially publicized the virus last week) OSX.Macarena can infect neither PowerPC-exclusive binaries, nor Universal binaries. It can only affect binaries that are Intel-specific. That would include various system files, but since OSX.Macarena can only infect files in its own directory and has no means of gaining the privileges necessary to escalate into directories where most system files are stored, the the threat level is mitigated."

As the final runup to Vista RTM continues, Microsoft has announced that the .NET Framework 3.0 (formerly WinFX) has RTMed and is available on Microsoft Downloads. This is a significant milestone for the Developer Division, and delivers on some of the promises of Windows Vista programmability on earlier platforms.

Lots of Haiku and Zeta news this weekend. Firstly, the latest Haiku image is now making use of the new, improved Deskbar and Tracker with support for scalable vector graphics. Also Stephan Assmus' award winning icon set, Stippi, has been included. Secondly, better support for Japanese is now available on Zeta. Thirdly, there is now a driver for Intel Extreme chipsets for both Zeta and Haiku. Lastly, BeOSNews.com has a guide on using Aspell on BeOS.

"The Debian project is pleased to announce the fourth update of its stable distribution Debian GNU/Linux 3.1. This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the stable release, along with a few adjustment to serious problems. Those who frequently update from security.debian.org won't have to update many packages and most updates from security.debian.org are included in this update."

If there's one machine that shaped the future of the computer business more than any other, it is almost certainly the Apple I. And what do you get when you bring together four of the team - including Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak - behind that groundbreaking computer? A lovefest .

Microsoft said Monday it has finalized the code for Office 2007, marking the completion of the first of two key projects for the software giant. Both Windows Vista and Office are slated for release to big businesses on Nov. 30. Microsoft has issued near-final test releases of Vista, but has not yet completed the final, or 'gold', code for the new operating system.

"Someone just asked me whether, now that Novell's become buddies with Microsoft, I'll be turning away from Novell/SUSE as one of my favorite Linux distributions. My answer is no. I'm sticking with SUSE Linux on both my desktops and servers. Here's why."

On BBRV's blog: "The PegasosPPC will be on sale this week for $399. Neither the board nor an upgrade card will be produced again by Genesi or bplan. It is the end of an era for us. It has been a great experience."

In this article there is an introductionary look into the vDSP and vecLib libraries which are part of the Accelerate framework on Mac OS X. By using properly aligned arrays and manually vectorized code you can increase the performance (5-10 times) of your hot loops by large amounts.

Get inside the Solaris FS by looking at physical I/O, latency, top end activity, caches, and statistics.

David Chisnall takes a look behind the scenes at Apple's upcoming revamp of the Objective-C language. As with any new language, some things are good, some are ugly, and some are both.