Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux and the maintainer of the development kernel, expressed concerns that the kernel development process may need to be changed to make sure that Morton is not overworked. "One issue is that I actually worry that Andrew will at some point be where I was a couple of years ago - overworked and stressed out by just tons and tons of patches," said Torvalds. "If Andrew burns out, we'll all suffer hugely."

Two interesting newsbits from the PPC world. Firstly, Genesi has announced that it will develop a dual 970MP (dual-core G5) server, named Open Server Workstation, following their Open Desktop Workstation. Secondly, Freescale has said that their dual-core G4 processors have been delayed until the second half of 2006. Update: "Libfreevec is a free (LGPL) library with hand-optimized replacement routines for GLIBC, such as memcpy(), strlen(), etc. These routines have been written specifically to take advantage of the AltiVec, and will only work on processors that include this unit."

As expected, Palm has announced the Treo 700w, a Windows Mobile powered smartphone with a square 240x240 resolution. Top brass from Palm, Microsoft (including Bill Gates) and Verizon Wireless gathered in San Fransisco this morning to launch the device. Palm noted that this project has been in the works for, "a couple of years" and that it was one of the worst kept secrets in the industry. In addition, here (.pdf) are some Windows Mobile UI design tips and tricks. Update: Here is the official press release.

"Ubuntu never positioned itself as a Debian derivative, like Xandros, Mepis, or Knoppix. Ubuntu publicly acknowledges its relationship with Debian, and Canonical, through its recently founded Ubuntu foundation, hires some Debian developers. All this should be good news; but for some it's not. Whether on Distrowatch or on forums, voices whisper that Ubuntu has a dirty secret you may not want to hear: they don't keep the compatibility with Debian, and they want to fork away from their mother distribution."

Jonathan Schwartz keeps singing Sun's favourite tune - that Web services, not desktop apps, are the future. "The majority of the applications that will drive the next wave of innovation will be services, not applications that run on the desktop. The real innovation is occurring in the network and the network services," Schwartz said.

Amanith Framework is a cross-platform (Linux, Win32, Mac OX X, FreeBSD, Linux and IRIX) open source C++ framework for 2D and 3D vector graphics. The new 0.1.1 release adds support for 64bit. New supported environments are Linux x86_64 (with gcc) and Windows XP 64 (with Visual Studio .Net 2005).

Open-source databases will not succeed without commercial support, says Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle. "One of the myths of open-source is that it's built by a bunch of guys who work at RadioShack."

The end of the world is near. At last that of the Unix world. That's the prediction of Donald Feinberg, vice-president of Gartner. "Linux is coming, Unix is dead." But there's no need to panic. Not just yet. The end is not going to come overnight or even in next week or year, but it is certain, or as he puts it, "an absolute".

Jim Allchin, a senior Microsoft Corp. executive, walked into Bill Gates's office here one day in July last year to deliver a bombshell about the next generation of Microsoft Windows. "It's not going to work," Mr. Allchin says he told the Microsoft chairman. The new version, code-named Longhorn, was so complex its writers would never be able to make it run properly.

"Version 0.8.2 is now available, with some important bugfixes and changes. This update adds SMP support to the system, for our multi-processor friends, as well as fixing an issue with "mountroot", after performing an installation. Please see the changelog for a full description of the changes. People running 0.8.1 need not download the full ISO again, since the update to 0.8.2 is available as on Online Update, through the PC-BSD update manager." Read the release notes, and download here.

To respond to the somewhat alarmingly real threat of spyware, malware, and to a lesser extent viruses on the Windows platform, Microsoft used its recently-acquired security technology combined with its own in-house work to build Windows OneCare Live (codenamed Atlanta). Read here for a preview. Please note that the 'next' button is placed underneath the Google ads, almost invisible.

According to the Cola Coder, an upcoming update to ZETA 1.0 will enable booting from USB devices. This will not only allow installation of ZETA on laptops that do not have an optical drive, but it will also make it possible to install to and run ZETA from a USB memory stick.

Shed Skin is an experimental Python-to-C++ compiler. It can convert many Python programs into optimized C++ code, without any user intervention such as adding type declarations. Its main purpose is to optimize algorithmic-like Python code, by applying advanced global type inference techniques.

The Java programming language is powerful, but it has significant limitations for lightweight development. For certain problems, other programming languages such as Ruby may lead to better productivity. This article shows you what's important for productivity in an application's language.