ZDNews is reporting the end of the (short-lived) SONY eVilla by September 13th. Sony executives blamed the demise on "stability and usability" problems with the $499 desktop IA, but did not offer specifics. "The product did not meet our expectations," Sony spokesman John Dolak said. "It did not operate as planned." There were a lot of user reports that the appliance was slow and not stable. Also, in the ZDNews article is clearly stated that Palm has no plans to continue development of the BeIA, endorsing even more David Nagel yesterday's answer that Palm bought Be for the engineering team and not for the technology. Our Take: eVilla was slow because of two things: because of the very slow CPU (266 Mhz Cyrix which has the power of Intel Pentium 166) and because the graphics chip (incorporated in the CPU) could not handle the high resolution of 800x1024 with enough speed, especially because the monitor is a normal SONY 15", but rotated (make sure you read this thread to understand why the rotation is an overkill). As for the stability issues (which they were indeed, I can personally verify that), it just seemed that there were some technical issues with BeIA, which we may not know about.

Here`s an interview with one of the members of Maturefurk, the winners of the largest demo-party ever! A record breaking figure of 5,000 people attended this year`s Assembly party and they voted the Lapsuus demo (DivX video) for the Amiga as the best of all. This is quite remarkable since they only used a 50 mhz 68k Amiga with an AGA chipset (released in 1992) for this demo. It`s a great demonstration of the 3D capabilities which existed on Amigas since a decade ago. Read more for more information regarding the origin of the Demo Scene and other relating info written by Mike Bouma, a long standing Amiga user.

The new AMD CPUs won't be specified by its clock speed anymore. Future Athlons will be specified by 'MODEL' numbers not by Mhz. For instance, a Palomino-Athlon that runs at 1.4 GHz will be MODEL 1600, because AMD considers Palomino 1.4 GHz to be at least as fast as a Pentium 4 1.6 GHz. The printing on the chip will be 'A1600 .....', even though its a 1400 MHz part only, Tom's Hardware is reporting.
An interesting interview with the Sun developers who are working on Gnome for Solaris 9, can be found here.
A new version of KDE's Office, KOffice ver 1.1, was made available for download yesterday.
And speaking about office suites, Gobe Software today announced Gobe Productive 3 for the Windows and Linux OSes, and that it will be available this fall. The app will be selling for $124.95 USD, while existing BeOS users will be able to upgrade for less than $40. Gobe will also be introducing the Family License scheme, allowing owners to install Gobe Productive on every computer in their home, as well on one computer where they work.
In the meantime, Apacabar emailed us with more information about their BeOS sellout: "This offer is exclusively available from the retailers called SoftLine in France for everybody interested in the world. As our webmaster is on holidays, the web site has not been updated with new prices. Meanwhile, we suggest you to order quickly by email, by contacting Mr Sylvain Todeschini who's in charge of International Sales".
An interesting clarification (Editor's note: and also an affirmation of my personal opinion as to why Palm purchased Be's IP) is now clear: Palm bought Be for the (brilliant indeed) engineering force and not so much for the BeOS/BeIA technology (some elements from the Be technology may appear in the new PalmOS though). The interview is with the David Nagel, the CEO of the new software subsidiary that Palm will be creating after the Be engineers join them (and where Steve Sakoman will be the CTO).
Also, a very interesting chat topic regarding multithreading being BeOS' sore spot (a result from BeOS messaging system) has popped up. If you are a BeOS developer, it is a must read.

The days of the plain filesystems like FAT32 and ext2 seem to have past. Newer operating systems are offering journal, 64-bit filesystems, with features like supporting terrabytes of filesizes or attaching attributed meta-data in them. Today we are interviewing (in a given set of questions) the main people behind IBM's JFS, NameSys' ReiserFS and SGI's XFS. Read on about the status of their filesystems, their abilities and what they are aiming for the future.

In his latest (and final) BeView column for Byte.com, Scot Hacker takes a harsh look at the way Microsoft's Windows Licensing Agreement has affected Be's business with Hitachi and other PC vendors, as well the entire OEM hardware landscape. While the Hitachi relationship was no secret, this is the first time Be has divulged way in which Microsoft's sinister bootloader license kept BeOS from shipping on dual-boot machines from Hitachi, Dell, Compaq, and Micron. Be, Inc. nearly had deals with other major OEMs, and this is the first time JLG has told the complete story of Be's involvement with the DOJ case against Microsoft. Hacker adds: "I had a final column farewell attached to the end of the piece, but Byte removed it for some reason. So, quickly: It's been a great ride with Byte, and I'd like to thank all of the readers who have supported the column over the past 2.5 years. There is still life beyond Windows!"

AtheOS is a modern, free (GPLed) Operating System written from scratch in C++. A big chunk of the OS is POSIX compliant, supports multiprocessing and it is GUI-oriented (fully OOP). Today we are hosting an interesting interview with the AtheOS creator, Kurt Skauen. Kurt is talking about his views on binary compatibility in future versions, multithreading and the future of his OS in general.

MozillaZine reports that the next minor version of Mozilla, 0.9.4 should be out soon, while MozillaQuest reports that this release is scheduled for September 7th. MozillaQuest also reports that version 1.0 is set back for release to 2002 when previous roadmaps had set this release for December 2001.

This interview gives some more insight regarding Amiga`s imminent PDA adventures. Note that soon you will be able to use this PDA content and other AmigaDE software transparently with AmigaDE players on both Linux and Windows based platforms. How well such players will sell remains to be seen. Here`s a rather positive quote from John Harris (well known games designer of games like Frogger, Jawbreaker and Mouseattack) regarding his work for Amiga: "It literally revitalized my life!"

Microsoft announced that its WindowsXP operating system is now complete and that the company will present the final "gold code" version to computer manufacturers today. Windows XP is scheduled for widespread release on October 25th and will be available in several versions: WindowsXP Home Edition will be available as an upgrade for Windows 98/ME users while WindowsXP Professional will be available as an upgrade for Windows 2000/NT users. In the meantime, this month 10 years ago, Linus Torvalds first invited open-source folks to play with his free operating system. Now Linux has grown a lot and it is serious business for giants like IBM, Compaq and HP and competes straight with Microsoft's OS offerings.

Intel and Symbian have announced that the two companies will work together to accelerate software development for wireless devices based on the Intel PCA and the Symbian OS. Just check out how sweet these mobile phone devices look like here, here and here.

In this interesting interview, Hyperion Entertainment gives their views upon the currently troubled Linux games market. Ben Hermans also recently attended a Dutch Amiga show as one of the AmigaOne partners. Hyperion has acquired many game licenses for various alternative computer platforms, including Majesty and Soldier of Fortune.

While a lot of Linux companies are closing one after the other and a lot of people are starting to wondering if GPL software can actually bring some money in, Hewlett Packard gave Linux a big boost yesterday as they announced they would use the operating system to power everything from cell phones to stereos. HP said it would develop new security software for Linux, as well as HP Chai-LX, a program to develop Linux applications for small consumer devices like stereos and cell phones. This may very well be the fruit of the work of one of the most important people in Linux history, Bruce Perens, who was recently hired by HP. Our Take: Even if Linux never make it to the desktop market and be able to beat Microsoft's OS offerings (Linux covers about 1% of the desktop market surveys report), it sure can have lots of usages in the embedded market, where some say that "this is where the real money is."

ZDNet writes: "Over the last decade, Linux has evolved from the pet project of a Finnish university student to a worldwide platform. The undisputed strength of Linux in the server arena has led to widespread adoption in the business arena--case in point, the ubiquitous Apache Web server, which serves roughly 65 percent of the world's Web sites." ZDNet continues with a full review of seven well-known Linux distributions, an interesting read especially for those who are still undecided as to which distro suits them better.