Will Red Hat and SuSE be drawn into the SCO v. IBM fracas? In an informative interview SCO-Caldera's Chris Sontag tells MozillaQuest.com's Mike Angelo there is SCO-owned code in Red Hat and SuSE Linux and no tainted code in the "Linux kernel that Linus and others have helped develop."

Avoid the overhead of large numbers of very similar classes with the Flyweight pattern. Learn how to recognize instances that are fundamentally the same except for a few parameters, move those variables outside the class instance, and pass them in as part of a method call. There is more development articles for C, C++, Java etc to read, here.

Within the next year, PC makers are expected to start selling a powerful new generation of home computers that run on 64-bit microchips. But consumers might initially find little extra value in these PCs, despite their exponentially more powerful features. Read the rest of the article at Reuters.

Today we feature an in-depth interview with three members of FreeBSD's Core (Wes Peters, Greg Lehey and M. Warner Losh) and also a major FreeBSD developer (Scott Long). It is a long read, but we touch a number of hot issues, from the Java port to corporate backing, the Linux competition, the 5.x branch and how it stacks up against the other Unices, UFS2, the possible XFree86 fork, SCO and its Unix IP situation, even re-unification of the BSDs. If you are into (any) Unix, this interview is a must read.

"The installation of a new distribution from SuSE has for several years here been a battle between two conflicting issues: the install has a better than even chance of not going smoothly, but once the ordeal is survived it is quickly forgotten in the face of an excellent system. That was exactly the case here with SuSE 8.2 Professional." Read the review at LinuxAndMain.

Nicholas Blachford from Genesi (also ex-Amiga, ex-BeOS developer) sent us in an announcement regarding the new Pegasos machines, the BeOS connection and the availability of NewOS for Pegasos.

BeGeistert 010, the place for BeOS developers to meet up, is now over and BeOSJournal features a round up of the event, plus an interview with Sequel OS' Frans Van Nispen.

Matthias Ettrich is the creator of the KDE desktop environment. At LinuxJournal, Aleksey Dolya interviews Matthias about the process of creating KDE and what he's up to these days.

Today, we feature a mini Q&A with Vikas Deolaliker, Group Product Manager of the Competitive Strategy Group at Sun Microsystems. We discuss a number of issues that arise on Sun's stategy in light of the recent releases of the AMD Opteron and Microsoft Windows Server 2003. We also get a taste of Sun's position on the limited hardware support of Sun Solaris 9 on x86.

ActiveWin features a review of Visual Studio .NET 2003 development suite. They cover feature-set, usage, installation, pricing and what's still missing.

Epic's Tim Sweeney has been advocating AMD's 64-bit platform since its official unveiling at Comdex last November. With this in mind, Firingsquad decided to ask Tim about Epic's 64-bit UT2K3 port, Epic's 64-bit plans for their next generation Unreal engine, and his thoughts on the Opteron architecture.

Jobs has a new direction. While the 48-year-old chief executive's roots are in the arcane programming codes of Silicon Valley, Jobs is today increasingly fashioning himself as a digital entertainment impresario. Over the past two years, he has turned Apple into a producer of entertainment technology for digital photos, movies and music, culminating in Monday's unveiling of the online music service. Read the news here, here, here or here. "Faster Than the Speed of Software: The record labels have a new idea for selling music online. The only catch: This time, they are ahead of the technology needed for it to happen" Los Angeles Times report.

Found a couple interesting links over at NooFace, a site dedicated to user interfaces. First, Microsoft Research is plugging away at one of the growing dilemmas in computing: so much data, so little time. XTend is a next generation product which uses a powerful Relational File System to deliver the world's first "Save With" oriented interface. And speaking of Knowledge Management (where XTend can be useful), you can read this recent interview over at TheIdeaBasket with the CEO of YellowPen, Inc.

IntelliJ IDEA is a Java IDE packed with leading-edge development features which include: industry setting refactoring support, intelligent code editing assistance, a wide range of J2EE development features for rapid web-application and other enterprise development, a powerful Code Inspection tool, integrated CVS, VSS and StarTeam support, an Open API for third-party plug-in support, and a mountain of other productivity features that make Java development a pleasure. Version 3.0.4 was released recently for Mac OS X, Windows, Solaris/Unix and Linux.