The number and variety of computing devices in the environment are increasing rapidly. Real computers are no longer tethered to desktops or locked in server rooms. PDAs, highly mobile tablet and laptop devices, palmtop computers, and mobile telephony handsets now offer powerful platforms for the delivery of new applications and services. These devices are, however, only the tip of the iceberg. Hidden from sight are the many computing and network elements required to support the infrastructure that makes ubiquitous computing possible.

palmOne has acquired the Palm brand from PalmSource. New products from, formally, palmOne should be released as just "Palm" in near future. PalmSource will probably change it's name (let's wait for more news). Some rumors talk about palmOne's PDAs running Windows mobile and PalmOS 6 doesn't get industry support, what's the next chapter of the "Palm" soap-opera?

Not so long ago, adopting Linux for any endeavor was a radical idea. But for the radicals — early adopters and those asked to implement bleeding-edge technologies during the Internet boom — Linux was a perfectly reasonable solution. Paired with Samba, Linux offered more robust file and print services than Windows. Combined with the Apache web server, Linux powered web sites. The latter mixed with OSS tools such as Perl and MySQL transformed the Internet into a World Wide Web of possibilities.

Sun Microsystems has expressed "serious doubts" about the usefulness of the latest Apache Foundation project to create an open source implementation of the Java 2 Standard Edition (J2SE). In an interview with vnunet.com, James Gosling, Java creator and Sun vice president in charge of the programming language, explained that he did not understand why the open source consortium was undertaking the project.

The goal of the Subversion project is to build a version control system that is a compelling replacement for CVS in the open source community. A number of feature enhancements, the most notable of which is support for locking are to be found on version 1.2.

The GNU project and the GCC developers have announced the release of GCC 3.4.4. This release is a bug-fix release, containing fixes for regressions in GCC 3.4.3 relative to previous releases of GCC.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Apple and Intel executives have been in discussions about Apple using Intel chips in its hardware. Apple's only official response at this point is that it's "rumor and speculation," but the Journal implies that it's nearly a done deal. No word on whether Apple would use Intel chips across its product line or just in one or two products, like the Xserve. And this could all just be maneuvering to extract a better deal out of IBM. Losing Apple would be a major blow to IBM's chip business.

Solaris x86 will use GRUB as its boot manager on x86/x64 platforms. See screenshots here.

Interested in tuning your C/C++ applications for Linux on POWER? This article compares the optimization options for both Linux on POWER C/C++ compilers: GCC and IBM XL C/C++. This paper also reviews tactics, such as Interprocedural Analysis, Profile Directed Feedback, and High Order Transformations, which are used by one or both of the compilers to extract higher performance from the Power architecture.

Catching and Throwing in C++ can be tricky, but this chapter will help you to know when and how to use these functions effectively, as well as when you shouldn't be using them.

EMC's vitual machine software edges out Microsoft's in overall features, says Microsoft Magazine.

The latest issue of the Haiku's newsletter has arrived, read it here.

"To save power, the hard drive stops spinning between uses. That's fine. What's not so fine, however, is that it takes six seconds to spin up again and feed its data into the palmtop's memory so you can use it. As a result, your work is frequently interrupted by maddening, six-second visits to the dead zone. Everything is frozen on the screen, no button works and your workflow comes to a crashing halt." Read the full review of PalmOne's Lifedrive at News.com.

There is an interesting and brilliant article on Morphzone about various solutions of approaching installation procedures into Amiga-like OSes and mainly into MorphOS operating system.