Tomorrow, ZetaNews will review Zeta RC1, and they are asking you to donate some suggestions. To submit an idea, go here and speak your mind.
Sun Inc. has posted screenshots of their Java Desktop System. It looks nice, although it is more than obviously Windows-inspired, and a few icons (e.g. the one with Network Places) might need some work as they aren't that attractive.

Meanwhile, the other sun has again been flaring at us. Perhaps this time more people will be able to see an aurora. The new eruption will reach the Earth today.
Let's make a quick moral decision. Would you fire someone over making a picture that shows absolutely no more than the inside of a truck with a few palettes of G5 Macs, some trees and some concrete? (see for yourself)

Made up your mind? Good, now click read more.

"So we created two independent, industry leading businesses." is the short message on the Palm website. That's interesting What happened here?

Well, Palm has now split into PalmOne, for the hand held computers, and PalmSource, developers of Palm OS and other software. (click read more below)

The last few days, there have been some mentions of solar flares coming towards the Earth. The strongest solar flare in over 30 years was expected to hit the Earth's magnetical field at 6 PM GMT today, but arrived 11 hours early. It could have allowed us to witness a beautiful and widely visible aurora, but on the other hand it could meanwhile also have caused voltage fluctuations, which might have led to some more power blackouts. A less stronger flare back in 1989 did so in Quebec. Satellites, specifically GPS satellites and the like, would be prone to become confused.

Update: The storm caused by the flare's impact seems to have rapidly weakened. There were no power blackouts but unfortunately no widely visible aurora as well. The components in the flare were pointing northwards. Had they pointed south, then we could have found ourselves in a lot more trouble.
The BeOS Journal will be abandoned for the next few days, because Chris Simmons is going to spend 48 straight hours playing Diablo II, checking out the new skills, weapons, runes, and more features coming with the newly released patch 1.10.

Something that is going to be abandoned indefinitely is the English translation of Technoids Magazine. It turns out that in regard to Technoids he was spending more time translating the articles rather than writing them, without ever getting any feedback on the English magazine, which made him wonder what on Earth he was doing. I'm sorry to hear that, Matthias.

The German version of Technoids Magazine still exists of course, although it's going to be a little bit different from the previous editions. Matthias has written ideas for a new concept, which involves limiting the magazine to a maximum of 40 pages, and improving the magazine's structure, by putting each section on a fixed place within the magazine.

And lastly, BeGroovy returns! It has been quite silent around the once so very active news site, but it now states to be returning. Welcome back!
Rudolf Cornelissen, with whom I did an interview which was posted earlier today, has just released version 0.07 of his nVidia driver, available on his website and for the first time ever also on BeBits.

Major update is the added TNT overlay, which has worked flawlessly on his TNT1, TNT2 and TNT2-M64 cards. The only downside is that it doesn't support downscaling.

As he also briefly mentioned in the aforementioned interview, he still has not been able to solve the CRTC-timing issue with the GeForce FX5600 cards.

Lastly, he can really use your help if you have a yet unsupported card (such as the brand new FX5700 and FX5950 cards). If you do, please do not hesitate to contact him at info.be-hold at inter dot NL dot net. He will greatly appreciate it, and you may get your card fully working under BeOS.
yellowTAB comes with a great announcement today; the long awaited definite release date of Zeta RC1 has been set, and it's going to be no later than on Monday next week. So if you still want to preorder Zeta to get it while it's hot, don't hesitate too long!
The new "official" Radeon driver has been released! It's been a while, but it's there. With the help of ATI Technologies themselves, Thomas has been able to add the Radeon 9700, 9500, 9800 and 9600. Multiple monitors should be no problem. I fired some questions in Thomas' direction during BeGeistert.

Towards the end, Thomas Kurschel clarifies his ideas for the new driver architecture he is designing for OpenBeOS (OBOS). These ideas were first announced at BeGeistert as well. My personal view on it is that it's exactly what BeOS is all about: it's so simple and yet very smart and sophisticated. I love it.

I swear, no more video card interviews for now ;-) Happy reading with this one!

A couple of days ago I sent Rudolf Cornelissen a couple of questions, mainly to ask about the two new GeForce cards nVidia has just released, the FX 5700 and FX 5950. I took the opportunity to ask him a few additional questions as well, specifically involving his nVidia driver, and here is what he replied.

Rudolf among others tells about what the big problem is supporting the GeForce FX 5600 card, his difficulcies implementing 2D-acceleration, and he even gives some helpful tips further down the interview. Hit read more.