The Mac's commitment to standardization doesn't just have the effect of knowing what the main controls do in a rental car. It removes the need to focus on the interface from the process of learning to use the application. In other words, that Windows interface barrier is completely missing in the Apple world because the Mac OS transparently hosts the applications without imposing itself on the user's attention. Read the article here.

Following recent discussions about tuning swapiness and dynamically allocating swap as needed, a new discussion ensued on the lkml questioning the need for swap altogether when a system has "sufficient" ram.

Many enterprise Java technology developers build their own object management infrastructures to improve application performance. However, traditional object pools encounter problems in applications that run across distributed JVMs on multiple physical machines. This article presents an object management framework that uses the concept of scopes to handle distributed systems with ease.

OrangeCrate has an interview with Matt Asay, Director of Novell's Linux Business Office. He talks about Linux strategy, the GPL, partnerships, and Linux on the desktop.

The Contiki operating system is an open source, Internet-enabled, operating system designed for tiny systems and runs on a variety systems ranging from the Commodore 64 and the Atari Jaguar to small embedded micro-controllers. Oliver Schmidt and Glenn Jones now bring the Internet and the web to the classic Apple ][e surfing the web is available (9 megabytes, DivX encoded).

The Brazilian Linux distribution Kurumin has just released version 3.0 final. I don't know much more, because my Portuguese isn't so good. Download locations, ChangeLog, and plenty of other information is available here, along with plenty of other useful information, I'm certain.

PEAK is a Python framework for rapidly developing and reusing application components. While Python itself is already a very high-level language, PEAK provides even higher abstractions, largely through the clever use of metaclasses and other advanced Python techniques. In many ways, PEAK does for Python what J2EE does for the Java™ language.

Novell is embarking on an "eat your own dog food" project in which it will eventually migrate all of its 6000 employees worldwide to SuSE Linux (and drop MS Office for OpenOffice). The company's Australian employees will be the advance guard. Many of them have already been using OpenOffice for some time, and the transition has been relatively smooth. According to the article, "Using a custom set of technologies which read Windows users preferences into SuSE after a dual-boot installation, the average desktop can be migrated in less than an hour."