It's easy to get lost in the world of "little languages" -- quite a few have been written to scratch some itch of a company, individual, or project. Rexx is one of these languages, with a long history of use on IBM operating systems, and good current implementations for Linux and other Free Software operating systems. Rexx occupies a useful ecological niche between the relative crudeness of shell scripting and the cumbersome formality of full systems languages.

"I love my black cat. It has served me well since October with its new Finder, refined interface, Fast User Switching, and Exposé. I love Panther so much that I am willing to debate until the wee hours of the night with PC Zealots and die hard Classic supporters about its merits. Even in all of its glory, however, there is always room for improvement." Read the suggested improvements article at MacZealots.com.

This article is the second in a series of whitepapers on using the new Linux 2.6 kernel by William von Hagen of TimeSys. von Hagen's whitepapers place special emphasis on the primary issues in migrating existing drivers, applications, and embedded Linux deployments to a Linux distribution based on the 2.6 kernel.

eWEEK.com caught up with PalmSource CTO Larry Slotnick at this week's developer shindig to get an update on the new Palm OS, forthcoming plans and how the company "integrated" the BeOS ideas into the PalmOS.

The Mono Project has released a small bug-fix release of Mono, 0.30.1. They have also a new document that describes some common tricks to improve the performance of your Mono or .NET application. These are a summary of techniques that we employed to tune our own C# compiler.

"The worst part about this is that the MCSEs involved are right: Linux can never be as good a Windows 2003 server as is Windows 2003. Linux isn't a cheaper form of Windows; direct substitution without change in thinking fails initially from a technology perspective and fails in the longer term from a cost perspective", says Paul Murphy.

Novell Inc. and adopted prodigy SUSE Linux struck a one-two punch at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo here in late January with declarations by top executives that Novell will be a major player in the Linux world and is committed to responsibly shepherding the operating system and Novell’s other open-source projects.

OperaJournal reviews the newly released Zeta RC2 Deluxe Edition. Screenshots included.

When some people hear the words "home automation," they think about the Jetsons or multi-million-dollar concept homes of the future. Others think home automation is just a geek fantasy that wouldn't add any real value to their lives. Read the article at MacDevCenter.

David LeBlanc introduces a C++ template class that helps reduce the chances of incurring integer arithmetic errors in your code. The code is fast, flexible, and easy to use. Get a handle on optimizing floating-point code using the Microsoft Visual C++ (v8.0) method of managing floating-point semantics. Create fast programs while ensuring that only safe optimizations are performed on floating-point code.

Market researcher IDC expects to announce within weeks that Linux' PC market share in 2003 hit 3.2%, overtaking Apple Computer Inc.'s Macintosh software (as reported a few weeks ago it has fallen at 1.8%, for the first time). And the researcher expects Linux to capture 6% of this market by 2007. That's still tiny compared with Microsoft's 94% share. Desktop Linux hasn't had any appreciable effect on Microsoft's finances yet, but it could do damage if Linux manages to grab a 10% share of the market, say analysts. IDC estimates that desktop Windows' share will shrink slightly, to 92% in 2007 as Linux' share doubles. The first big question though is how all this will have an effect to Apple's business.

The latest GNOME Development release, 2.5.4, is ready for testing. It is available for immediate download on ftp.gnome.org and mirrors.

The second release candidate of the 5.2.1 is now available (mirrors). It includes fixes to mksnap_ffs, SysV Shared Memory, devfs, IPSec, GEOM, the ata driver and many others. This is probably users' last chance for bugfinding as the final release is expected to be less than a week away.

With BitRock Installbuilder, BitRock aims to make easier to install and distribute Linux applications. It allows you to create easy-to-use installers that can be run in GUI, text, and unattended modes.