If you are a DBA or a database programmer, your manager may have asked you to prepare a breakdown of employees by location and department, or a breakdown of products by category and provider. If your boss is a techie, instead of a breakdown she might have mentioned a pivot table, or, if she likes to use "the right words," a cross-tabulation, Giuseppe Maxia writes. Elsewhere on OnLamp.com another article advises on "Quick and Dirty RDBMS Tuning".

"This online training lesson contains material taken from our introductory courses. This particular section presents the basic approaches to message passing for communication between concurrent tasks. In an actual training course, this section would be preceded by introductory sessions covering the fundamental definitions of embedded and real-time systems, as well as the fundamentals of multi-tasking (priority-based pre-emptive task scheduling)." Read it here.

For a limited time, you can order the full version of Microsoft Services for UNIX 3.0—at no charge (see conditions). A $99 retail value, Windows Services for UNIX 3.0 provides an integrated environment in which to run applications for both Windows and UNIX on a single system. This offer is available only in the United States while supplies last, so act now (offer expires Dec. 31, 2003).

DesktopX is a program that lets you design your own desktop by adding "objects" that can do pretty much anything you might imagine for it. Version 2.0 has just been released and it's a radical re-design that has focused on improving the functionality, performance, and memory use of it. If you don't have DesktopX, you can download it on its own here or get it as part of Object Desktop.

My husband and I are thinking of buying the Canon Optura Xi camcorder soon (in our opinion, the best DV camera at this range). Because I run so many OSes I always have 'embedded' in me this "thing" to only buy supported hardware by the major OSes. I am sure Optura's DV part will work fine with some Linux tools, but then what? How do I easily edit my... masterpiece and burn DVDs or VCDs via an integrated solution and send them to our families in Greece and France?

After spending a few months as a download available only to YDL.net members, Yellow Dog Linux 3.0.1 ISOs are now freely available. The distro now includes HFS+ support and the 2.4.22-based kernel.

Earlier this year Novell purchased Ximian Software, the primary sponsor of the Mono Project. Novell is committed to providing support for open source development and specifically the Mono Project. There are plans for providing additional services around the Mono Project including support and consulting. Novell is also involved in providing resources for contributors by way of Novell Forge which will become the home for many Mono based projects and a community around Mono. Read the article here.
Update: On other C#/Mono news, the Qt# bindings project is almost on a halt, OSNews learned. Developers wanted to help out the one remaining developer, Marcus Urban.

OSDL has been running performance tests with hackbench to measure the improvement of the scheduler, compared to Linux 2.4.18. A write-up of these results with graphical plots is posted here.

Apple on Friday seeded its Select and Premier Apple Developer Connection members with the latest builds of Mac OS X 10.3.2 Panther Server and Client. Both seeds carry build number 7D18 and weigh in at 52.8 and 35.7MB, respectively.

IBM won a tactical victory Friday in a legal battle with SCO Group when a judge ordered SCO to show within 30 days the Linux software to which it believes it has rights and to point out where it believes IBM is infringing.

"For years, it has seemed that the GNU/Linux desktop was right on the cusp of being ready for the mainstream desktop out of the box. Recent distributions, such as Mandrake Linux 9.2, bring the desktop to the mainstream, but something is still lacking: complete unity." Read more at OfB.biz. Update: On other Ximian news, the first release of Dashboard is coming along soon.

December 15 will be D-day for a number of Microsoft's established products, which the company is removing from its sales channels as a result of its legal settlement with Sun over Java.

In a followup to his original interview, Jeremy Hogan discusses some of the reasons Red Hat had for EOL'ing RHL, future licensing options for RHEL (including free devel copies), the most common Fedora misconception, his take on UserLinux and more.

Sam Hiser interviews Novell's Chris Stone about Linux, Ximian, strategy and more.