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anasonic Mobile Communications Co. is ending development of second-generation (2G) cell phones in the face of "severe global competition" to concentrate on development of third-generation (3G) Linux-based handsets, it said Friday.

The move makes Panasonic the first major cell phone maker to discontinue 2G handset operations. Sales of 3G handsets are climbing fast and becoming an increasingly important part of each handset maker's global sales. However, for many companies 2G sales still dominate. Panasonic, like many Japanese companies, was late to the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) market and so such sales are less important.

Finding free software at your office is like finding a Republican in San Francisco

According to a report on Heise Online (currently German language only), the city of Berlin, capital of Germany, is very likely to switch to Linux as currently does Munich. 58.000 desktop PCs and and an unknown amount of servers could be affected

ECMA International has approved the creation of a technical committee to standardize Microsoft's Office Open XML document formats, according to a representative at IBM, which is an ECMA member. IBM voted against the creation of the committee and Hewlett Packard abstained, the IBM spokesperson said.

The first meeting of the technical committee is expected to take place on December 15. In late November, Microsoft announced it plan to standardize the XML-based document formats of Office through ECMA, and then ISO, in part to ensure that customers, notably governments, can have long-term access to documents.

Mozilla claimed that first Firefox 1.5 security vulnerability was not as critical as initially perceived, but a patch will be available to fix it early next year.

Mike Schroepfer, vice president of engineering for Mozilla said that the company planned to repair the hole in the latest version of thebrowser when it releases its next regularly scheduled stability build of Firefox in late January or early February.

U.S. computer software and services firm Red Hat says it had gained full control of its Indian venture after buying out the remaining 40 percent from its local partner for an undisclosed sum.

PHP has historically been a simple scripting language used for quickly developing small web sites with dynamic content. But newer features have given the language the structure and libraries for building larger applications. One such library is Smarty, a templating and presentation engine. Smarty helps developers build applications in modules by separating the presentation layer from the application code. This article covers some of the basic features of Smarty for developers.

Does anybody really believe this nonsense? Let me turn it into English. Microsoft wants to earn more money from you. It intends to do this by releasing products even earlier with loads more defects because the faith it puts in methodologies like Extreme Programming (ie “Extreme” as in taking risks), and Scrum, whatever that is, is touching but entirely unsupported by any experiment. The only thing that is supported by experiment is that if you rush complex applications to the marketplace, they will be full of bugs. The only reason Microsoft lengthened its development schedules in the first place was because of the extraordinary reliability of Linux.

Pervasive Software Inc., a global value leader in data infrastructure software, announced it plans to contribute source code for DTrace probes to the PostgreSQL community. DTrace probes provide a superior interface for monitoring the PostgreSQL engine and allow for more effective tuning. Pervasive also formally welcomed Sun Microsystems to the PostgreSQL community and applauded new support of PostgreSQL through the Solaris 10 Operating System. In January 2005, Pervasive introduced the first integrated set of open source support and services for the PostgreSQL database from an established database company.

The company claims 200 million deployments of Berkeley DB, a “massive user base”, which as Mike Olsen, Sleepycat Software’s CEO, modestly notes, “continues to help us advance the state of the art in database technology. Our latest release of Berkeley DB includes new features based on customer requests and delivers significant improvements in performance and flexibility for developers."

Japanese storage device vendor Buffalo has brought out a "Home Server" version of its NAS server aimed at home users. The "HS" models of its Linux-based TeraServers now include multimedia file management and serving software developed using a Linux SDK from tools and middleware vendor Mediabolic.

3D has taken over video gaming. When will it take over mundane computing areas such as file managers, word processors, and desktop environments? Maybe soon, if Hideya Kawahara and the Project Looking Glass team have their way. John Littler explores the ideas, implementations, and possibilities of 3D interfaces in this interview.

This week advisories were released for gdk-pixbuf, horde2, helix-player, Inkscape, horde2, Perl, Webmin, eagle-usb, spamassassin, mailman, xpdf, libc-client, and imap. The distributors include Debian, Gentoo, Mandriva, and Red Hat.

Credit Union Experiences Improved Network Reliability, Enterprise-level Network
SecurityBURLINGTON, Mass. – December 8, 2005 – Astaro Corporation today announced that Families And Schools Together Federal Credit Union (FAST FCU) has selected Astaro Security Gateway appliances to improve the reliability of their remote offices and to enjoy enterprise network security capabilities as a small and growing business.

The Melbourne member office of international accountancy and business advice provider HLB International is mid-way through the process of replacing its Microsoft Office-based desktop suite with the OpenOffice.org open source alternative.

Microsoft and Google have engaged in a bit of role reversal when it comes to making it possible to search print books online. This time around, Microsoft and an open technology community are fighting against Google, a rival seen as aggressive, arrogant, and set on doing its own thing for the sake of its cause.

Shared-Memory Computer with 1,280 Processors, Advanced Visualization and One Petabyte of Storage to be Used for Next-Generation Fluid Integration Research

Sebastian Kügler has written a new PyQt tutorial. Python is the perfect language to start learning programming with and this tutorial takes you through making a basic Qt based program.

Features enhanced by the developer community include workflow management, campaign management, and the ability to convert E-mails into leads.

Index Venture Partners, backer of blowout-success Skype, added an open-source company to its stable Thursday with a $5-million investment in business-intelligence software maker Pentaho.

This isn’t the first open-source startup in the European venture firm’s portfolio. It is a backer of MySQL, a Red Herring 100 Europe company. The database startup has gained significant traction internationally, with some $20 million in sales in 2004 (see RH-100 Europe: The Ikea of Databases).