From Slashdot: "There are more than 2,500 documented programming languages and O'Reilly has produced a poster called History of Programming Languages, which plots over 50 programming languages on a multi-layered, color-coded timeline."

MandrakeSoft recently emerged from the bankruptcy protection it sought last year. To find out what happened and why MandrakeSoft is enjoying success, NewsForge caught up with MandrakeSoft CEO François Bancilhon, and Mandrakelinux co-founders Jacques Le Marois and Gaël Duval.

Neural nets, also known as artificial neural networks, mathematically model bioelectrical networks in the brain. Massively parallel and more inductive than deductive, they are used for everything from voice and character recognition to artificial intelligence. Python developer Andrew Blais introduces you to the simplest of the neural nets, the Hopfield -- and his net.py application gives you a hands-on opportunity to explore its ability to reconstruct distorted patterns.

In an interview with LinuxQuestions.org, Jean Tourrilhes discusses how he first got introduced to Linux, OS zealotry, the origins of his famous Wireless How-to page, Linux on the desktop, the state of Linux wireless device driver support, the best and worst wireless chipset manufacturers, the biggest limitations of the current 802.11 implementations and his opinion on the emerging wireless networking standards.

Three MSDN articles: Dare Obasanjo provides examples of lesser-known class functionality in System.Xml.Schema namespaces. This second of a three-part article series explains how to write, install, and debug your own tasks to enhance what is possible to build with MSBuild. While ASP.NET 2.0 is completely backwards compatible with ASP.NET 1.1, its new features may require you to revise parts of your Web applications. This article provides a detailed analysis of how changes in ASP.NET 2.0 will influence your porting decisions.

"Kommander is on its way to become one of the most compelling tools in KDE. It has elements that should be very interesting to application developers, power users, newbies and companies looking at using the Linux desktop. So the answer to the question many of you may be asking, "What is Kommander?", really has to be answered from each perspective. A simplified technical description is that Kommander is two programs, an editor and an executor, that produce dialogs that you can execute." Read the article at TheDot.

This chapter is a short, casual introduction to Subversion. If you're new to version control, this chapter is definitely for you. We begin with a discussion of general version control concepts, work our way into the specific ideas behind Subversion, and show some simple examples of Subversion in use.

Red Hat's Havoc Pennington blogs about the issue of dependency hell and weighs in the good and bad of static linking. He also links to an interesting article by Jono Bacon.

Two months ago, Gnome took its software repository offline in order to bolster internal security, and since then there has not been a focal point on the internet for GNOME software. We're happy to announce Gnomefiles.org, a resource for Gnome/GTK+ developers and users to post and find software. Read for more info and the prizes we offer to the first devs that will submit an app.

The Mono team just released Beta 3, the final beta before we see the 1.0 release candidate and final. Elsewhere, the Cocoa# developers got their first window showing on the MacOS X, and they also got inheritance working. This is a young binding, but here is a screenshot of what it looks like.

Sun said it will take an "aggressive" approach to opening up the source code of its core operating system. It just isn't saying when. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based network computer maker fended off questions from reporters and analysts Tuesday during a briefing centered on the major developments for Solaris 10. The enterprise platform is scheduled for a September 2004 launch date to coincide with the shipment of Sun's next generation Java Enterprise System. Update: More here.

Iconbar.com and Drobe are reporting that Castle Technology has revoked RISCOS Ltd's licence for developing and distributing RISC OS. This is aparently due to a legal dispute over licence terms.

How committed is IBM to the open-source movement? Officially, IBM is the world's loudest promoter of open-source software, spending millions to run Linux advertisements and fund an open-source development lab, and devoting hundreds of its own programmers to cranking out open-source code.

PostgreSQL 7.4.3 was released yesterday. Here is a official announce and new features list.