Today at PCBurn we're taking a look at Mark G. Sobell's "A Practical Guide to Linux Commands, Editors, and Shell Programming". It aims to be a complete learning and reference guide to the Linux shell. We'll take a look at the salient points that a reference and teaching book should cover and see how "A Practical Guide..." addresses them.

"In this article, I'll attempt to list what I believe to be the most salient points of the economics of programming languages, and describe their effects on existing languages, as well as on those who desire to write and introduce new languages."

Needham & Co. estimates that the "iPod halo" may have attracted up to 400,000 Windows users to the Mac so far this year. In a note to clients, analyst Charles Wolf observed that Apple's "key drivers" (iPod and the iPod halo effect) "continue to work". He believes Apple is set for even more growth in the future. Wolf wrote: "The iPod continued to lure Windows users into the Macintosh fold (in the third quarter). Mac unit shipments rose 35 per cent, three times the PC market growth rate."

In the dawn of the end of IBM's OS/2 Stardock's CEO Brad Wardell pays his respects to the venerable operating system by writing a long article about the history of the OS. Stardock was one of the major third party software houses for OS/2 back in the day and so Brad has lived OS/2 from up close.

Microsoft dropped support for Exchange 5.5 on December 31st, 2004. Exchange 5.5 users can upgrade to Exchange Server 2003, continue to run 5.5 with all accompanied security risks, or switch over to another mail/groupware system.In this article I propose a fourth option that is really options two (run Exchange) and three (run another mail system) combined.

The Spec# programming system is a new attempt at a more cost effective way to develop and maintain high-quality software. Spec# is an extension of the object-oriented language C#. It extends the type system to include non-null types and checked exceptions. It provides method contracts in the form of pre- and postconditions as well as object invariants.

The open-source Firefox browser and Thunderbird e-mail client will be updated for the second time in a week because of code changes that have stopped some third-party extensions from functioning correctly.

Ruby on Rails is a relatively new web application framework built on the Ruby language. It is billed as an alternative to existing enterprise frameworks, and its goal, in a nutshell, is to make your life -- or at least the Web development aspects of it -- easier. This article will contrast the Rails framework against a typical J2EE implementation using common open source tools that are regularly found in enterprise applications.

This article describes in detail what to expect from Sun when it comes to the SPARC platform. The 8-core Niagara chip, now planned for early 2006, is the most impressive: "In practical terms, what Niagara delivers is a chip that consumes about 56 watts that has about the same performance on infrastructure workloads as a four-way SMP rig of Xeon processors or a two-way setup using dual-core Xeons. These Xeon setups will consume hundreds of watts per processor."

Mad Penguin's Adam Doxtater reviews Slackware Linux 10.1: "It's stable, fast, and has a reputation for the most excellent quality control in the business."

With the uptake of IP telephony continuing apace and the proliferation of IP devices in general, has the time finally arrived for an old concept – power over Ethernet (PoE)? For certain deployments of IP based technology, PoE is not only cost effective but arguably essential.

One of the new requirements of WM5 was that it now had to be installed in the flash ROM instead of the main RAM (on WM5 there is only "program" memory and not "data" memory shared anymore). Microsoft's Mike Calligaro blogged as to why this change can save lots of battery life.

The rules of C++ are designed to guarantee that type errors are impossible. Casting, however, subverts the type system and can lead to pesky errors in compiled code. This chapter explains why it's a good idea to forgo casting as much as possible in C++.

I've always been a huge fan of BeOS. However, there was no denying the fact that the BeOS was getting old. As many other BeOS fans, I closely followed two projects: Haiku, and yellowTAB's Zeta. The latter released 1.0 a few weeks ago. Here are the findings of an old BeOS user.