As you all know I have been to BeGeistert last weekend (if you didn't yet know, scroll down to the review). This meant I wasn't able to bring you news updates. Well, here they are. So many things happened or were announced this past weekend that even Eugenia did a small news update on OSNews about the recent developments around BeOS. According to BeUnited, their Java project has been updated from 1.4.0 to 1.4.2, with a complete command line version including JavaVM, javac, javah, jar and several others. Submission of a full version to Sun Microsoystems is scheduled for early 2004.

Firebird 0.7 has just been released. The BeOS Journal managed to hold an interview with Elliot Rosenberger, the developer of Firebird. It's quite an interesting read I may add.

There is a new OpenBeOS newsletter! Michael Phipps said it was nice in time for BeGeistert, but he probably didn't know that an increasing group of BeGeistert visitors is already arriving on Friday, which means that they aren't going to check if there's a new OBOS newsletter, among a column and an editorial also featuring a nice status report by Michael about all projects running.

ZetaNews mentioned that Dutch Zeta presentations can be held, something that actually was arranged at this BeGeistert. Things just need to be sorted, but more about that later. As for the Dutch BeOS Usergroup, also known as DuBeUs, there are indeed attempts to bring it back to life. The website (which seems to be down at the moment) will be updated again, by whom we do not yet know, for the first time in over 3 years. There are obviously still quite some Dutch BeOS users out there, and now a release of Zeta is drawing closer, and OpenBeOS also progressing on, things may start to look very bright for this usergroup again.

Another thing announced at ZetaNews is that a German company called SoftMaker is looking for yet another operating system to port their software to, and they have opened a poll for it. Their word processor TextMaker and their spreadsheet application PlanMaker, are currently available for Windows, Handheld PCs, Pocket PCs, Linux and FreeBSD, so Zeta also wouldn't look bad on that list. Not to forget they are also working on an innovative mobile office suite titled Office anywhere (working title, I like the name). So go over and vote for "Zeta" now!

With a few more bugs to be fixed, a version 0.07 of the NVidia TNT/GeForce driver is expected to be out soon, Rudolf Cornelissen announced on his website. The driver may also have added TNT overlay support. I already Rudolf's prescence on BeGeistert, from what I heard he wasn't feeling too healthy, so get well!

Just to end up with something I found pretty cool: The result from the Windows Interoperability 2003 survey is that essentially, companies using Windows for servers use it because it's the standard, because it's there, but most of them don't believe most of the stuff Microsoft tells them about where it's taking the platform and how great it is. Wow, who would have thought. Read more about it at The Register.