Ars reviews the Alienware Sentia m3200, a 12" laptop which is not unlike Apple's iBook in case of features. Ars concludes: "The Sentia m3200 is small, light and fast enough to be a very good machine for many tasks. It's not built to handle the latest 3-D games, as it uses onboard graphics, but it makes up for that by being a well-rounded multimedia machine and the fact that it runs cool is a nice plus. When the kinks are ironed out of PowerCinema, the Instant-On feature will make more sense."

"The National Archives of Australia has announced that it will move its digital archives program to software that supports the ODF. The significance of this example is that the NAA gathers in materials from multiple sources, in many different formats, which will need to be converted to ODF compliance for long term archival storage. The NAA's decision provides a new and distinct case study for those considering a move to ODF. Unlike Mass. or Bristol, the NAA will deal almost exclusively with documents created elsewhere. As a result, it provides a 'worst possible case' to test whether operating an ODF environment in a world that uses multiple non-ODF compliant formats is practical."

Abraham Lincoln once said "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt." Apparently, Tuttle, OK city manager Jerry Taylor never got the memo. Barely a week after his humiliating brush with celebrity after the CentOS fiasco, Taylor has definitively proven that arrogance and ignorance make a humorous combo. The Tuttle Times covers the embarassing incident, along with Taylor's gotta-see-it-to-believe-it response.

Combining power with ease of use, the Rexx scripting language is enjoying a surge in popularity. Howard Fosdick introduces this free language and explores some of the basics you need to know before getting started. Elsewhere on that site, this chapter describes Python's built-in operators as well as the precedence rules used in the evaluation of expressions.

The community effort hosted by the Apache Software Foundation to create an open source, J2SE 5.0 compatible Java runtime/virtual machine is progressing slowly but steadily. Despite some indifference and prejudice by some OSS pundits, the project has been recently moving along nicely with key players like Intel and IBM contributing their own programmers and source code to the effort.

Folks, as the webmaster of OSNews, I'm sorry to report that the OSNews server was hacked early this morning by a l33t haxx0r known only as "osV_rul3z." Although our database server does not appear to have been comprimised, all of the advertising code was deleted and our code was slightly modified to make everyone a premium level subscriber. Rest assured, we are working on the problem and hope to have OSNews restored to its original state as quickly as possible. UPDATE: As everyone suspected, April Fools!