The November edition of the Syllable Development Newsletter is now available -- highlights include kernel work, Glibc updates and more. Additionally, plans are underway for SYL-CON, a user and developer meetup. See this post or contact Mike if you're interested.

A quick visit to Frys Electronics last weekend left me with (yet another) webcam. But not an ordinary webcam: this is an utrla tiny cam, created specifically to mount on laptops!

In part three of this three-part series, the authors offer a real-world implementation example of how the Analytics Acceleration Grid Environment (AAGE) can be used to deliver a virtual system environment that supports a wide range of application requirements, and makes the best, most efficient use of computing resources and data regardless of where or in what format they reside.

According to WindowsForDevices, Microsoft's Mobile and Embedded Devices Group has just released the final version of Windows XP Embedded with Service Pack 2. The latest release of the componentized version of Windows XP -- targeting a wide range of embedded systems and devices -- is now available for free download from Microsoft's website. The free 120-day evaluation software kit comprises the entire product including binaries and tools, and can be used to develop, build, deploy, and test a target OS image in a real device.

The MSDN Magazine Dec 2004 is released with articles of Windows developer interest. Articles include Operators in Basic, .NET Code tuning and profiling, Optimization for .NET apps on PocketPCs.

There won't be just one Longhorn Server. Instead, there will be nearly a dozen customizable variants, partners say.

The python final release of Python 2.4 was just released. Python 2.4 is the result of almost 18 month's worth of work on top of Python 2.3. New features are, but not limited to, function decorators, generator expressions, a number of new module and more.

The Linux distro is due to release a version of its operating system that can be run directly off a CD-ROM, so that people can try Gentoo without installing it.

Datamation ran an article about databases running on OpenVMS that never die or quit. These databases have uptimes longer than the existance of Linux and definitely longer that Microsoft product lifetimes. Here's the article.

Alistair Crooks announced today that the NetBSD Packages Team will start a freeze on the pkgsrc tree in order to prepare for the release of the fourth stable branch, pkgsrc-2004Q4. The freeze will begin on December 6th 2004, and will last for a maximum of 2 weeks, during which the developers will bring down the PR count and fix problems shown by the bulk builds. Update: LiveCD/ISO instructions.

Charles Keenan provides specific tasks for setting up a Serviceguard high availability cluster on HP-UX/Linux, including example commands to help illustrate key points.

Learn how to write your own resource-management code when you create types that contain resources other than memory, particularly for disposing of nonmemory resources.

The IT sector today is a complete mess. The end-users rarely understand this, but most insiders reach a point when they realize that things should be different. The problems are numerous but they all reduce to a basic principle. IT and consumer electronics companies are interested more about money than helping people solve their problems. Of course companies need to make a profit and nobody denies that. They should however make money by helping people and not by creating more problems for them.

The GNU General Public License, which is the most widely used free-software license and is used to license the open-source Linux kernel, is set for its first revision in 13 years. Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux operating system, last week weighed in on the upcoming challenges facing GPL Version 3.