Sony Corp. this week will launch its new handheld device that marries the Palm operating system with the video capabilities for which Sony is known. From ZDNN.

Reuters reports that shares in Irish chip designer Parthus Technologies Plc surged over 20 percent Wednesday
after it announced a product that would let the whereabouts of a mobile phone user be pinpointed to within five yards.

Check out Burning Man, reports TechWeb. It’s the annual Nevada desert
confab that is expected to draw up to 28,000 artists, IT
professionals, public relations staffers, and others. It
runs from August 28 to Sept. 4.

A federal court set the week of October 2 for opening arguments in the trial pitting music song-swap company Napster against some of the giants of the recording industry. From Reuters.

Pixami has added Linux support in response to the operating system’s overwhelming adoption on the Internet, and by the online photo industry in particular. From BusinessWire.

Reuters reports that online auctions have sparked the largest number of complaints to a new U.S. government office tracking fraud on the Internet.

A typical computer game centers around a violent war zone piled high with corpses, reports WiredNews.com. But what if those
bullets turned the bloody bodies into a field of healthy humans, frolicking among the flowers?

“Not all users of proprietary systems look upon Linux enthusiasts with disdain. The
last place I worked at, the networking department installed a proprietary firewall
system that had a limitation of 100 active rules.” From OSOpinion.

You thought Office 95 was a big deal? ZDNN reports that Microsoft is lifting
the veil of secrecy around what it claims will be its ‘most
significant’ desktop suite to date.

From a column at OSOpinion: “Open source software has an implicit connection to RFC standards-based
protocols. There are many reasons for this, and one of them may even be laziness
(it is easier to follow standards than to re-invent them) but the net result is best
exemplified by our star child of the open source movement, the Internet world of
open participation.”