MadPengiun has a review of the PepperPad, a Linux-powered competitor to Microsoft's Origami concept, and concludes: "Overall, the Pepper Pad is a sleek ultra mobile PC in a nice form factor with a great touchscreen for navigating, launching applications, watching video and surfing the web. With the advent of AJAX web-based applications for calendaring, editing video, word processing, creating spreadsheets, and more, you can have some good fun with the Pepper Pad and get a wee bit of work done as well. The Pepper Pad won't replace a Sony PSP-type game platform, or a PDA, or a notebook, but it will do some things that those devices won't do."

Geertjan Wielenga, a Sun employee, shows how a pair of wizards in the upcoming NetBeans 5.5 can generate a basic web-application from a database, similar to the initial stages of programming a Rails application in Ruby. The story is in two parts, a quick overview and then a second post with sample code and a screenshot of the wizard.

"This famous controversy is there ever since I became aware of operating systems known as GNU/Linux. The GNU General Public License, which is used by Linux as well as most GNU software, armors both characters. GNU/Linux is the term coined by the Free Software Foundation, Richard Stallman and people who support FSF, for operating systems composed of the FSF's GNU software and the Linux kernel; such systems are generally called Linux."

"Sun Microsystems plans to alter its licensing to make it easier to bundle Java Runtime Environment with Linux. The company will announce the changes and at least one other open-source move at the JavaOne conference later this month, Sun executives said during a press teleconference on Thursday."

"Many times I have come across seemingly hopeless situations where a program when compiled and installed in GNU/Linux just fails to run. In such situations after I have tried every trick in the book like searching on the net and posting questions to Linux forums, and still failed to resolve the problem, I turn to the last resort which is trace the output of the misbehaving program. Tracing the output of a program throws up a lot of data which is not usually available when the program is run normally. And in many instances, sifting through this volume of data has proved fruitful in pin pointing the cause of error."

Microsoft has been looking at a possible acquisition of the Yahoo online portal and search engine, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. Citing unnamed sources, the paper claims that a faction within Microsoft is lobbying to have the company purchase a stake in the search provider, but that such plans are "on hold".

Eighteen months after shipping, AMD's Personal Internet Communicator, aimed at lowering the cost of computing so half the world could enjoy Internet access by 2015, apparently still doesn't run Linux. It now appears the design may actually be rigged to block the use of Linux.

A few days ago we reported on heat issues with Apple's MacBook Pro. As SomethingAwful.com has found out, the issue is related to Apple making errors in applying the thermal paste on various locations in the MacBook Pro. SomethingAwful also gives a DIY fixing guide. Apple, however, was not amused, and sent out a cease and desist letter to SomethingAwful, asking them to remove the link to the MacBook Pro's service manual. Apple is also addressing battery issues.

Since all you boys and girls watch Star Trek: "Physicists Nicolae Nicorovici from the University of Sydney, Australia, and Graeme Milton, from the University of Utah, have proposed that devices called superlenses could be used to create a type of cloaking device. Using a principle called 'anomalous localized resonance', superlenses placed very close to a small object could mask its reflected light waves by resonating at the same frequency, much like how noise-canceling headphones mask sound waves by creating a sound that is at the same frequency but inverted in phase."

"The words coming out of Microsoft are quite bullish, but the numbers aren't, at least according to Wall Street. The problem is those words won't match reality mainly because MS does not grasp the situation it is in. The problem, credibility, the solution, Google."

"Shed Skin is an experimental Python-to-C++ compiler. It accepts pure Python programs, and generates optimized C++ code. This means that, in combination with a C++ compiler, it allows for translation of Python programs into highly efficient machine language. For a set of 16 non-trivial test programs, measurements show a typical speedup of 2-40 over Psyco, about 12 on average, and 2-220 over CPython, about 45 on average. Shed Skin also outputs annotated source code."

Xandros Corporation has announced the availability of Xandros Server, the company's inaugural release of a high-end server distribution based on Debian GNU/Linux: "Xandros becomes the first Linux platform to provide a 'Debian Enterprise' end-to-end desktop and server platform."

An open-source security audit program funded by the US Department of Homeland Security has flagged a critical vulnerability in the X Window System which is used in Unix and Linux systems. Coverity, the San Franciso-based company managing the project under a $1.25 million grant, described the flaw as the "biggest security vulnerability" found in the X Window System code since 2000.

Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.3 has been released. This update fixes a publicly disclosed denial of service weakness. All users are encouraged to upgrade to this version. The bugfixes previously planned for Firefox 1.5.0.3 were shifted to 1.5.0.4, and a quick update was released shortly after the recent 1.5.0.2 release to address the publicly reported issue.