As seen at NewMobileComputing: Meet Cog, an aluminum robot born in the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and a compelling experiment in robot cognition. It's tethered to dozens of rack-mounted PCs running QNX, the popular embedded systems OS.

If you ask a Slackware fan why she likes Slackware, she will probably mention Slackware package management as one of the features she likes. In what way does the Slackware package system differ from most other package managers? In one word: simplicity. In three articles I am going to cover some important aspects of Slackware package management. In this article I am going to show the anatomy of a Slackware packages. In part 2 and 3 I will cover the package tools and the process of creating a Slackware package.

The "Rise of the Machines" might be taking the cinemas by storm these days, but the Rise of the Apple lately also is taking the IT industry by storm with the introduction of the Power Mac G5 and Mac OS X Panther 10.3 last month. Let's see what the OSNews readers are thinking of the Macs. Come in and vote in our two Mac polls.

Tao Group announced major enhancements and additions to its intent technology suite, and the launch of the intent 2 SDK. Technology components include: Qi (Brandable Control Center), iSS (intent Sound System), iVE (intent Visual Environment), Java solutions, and gaming.

Java-GNOME is a set of java bindings for the GNOME and GTK libraries so GNOME applications can be written in Java. The bindings are implemented via a JNI layer that accesses the native libraries. After many months, version 0.8 is released, which adds support for GTK+ 2.x and GNOME 2.x.

From DistroWatch: The developers of Ark Linux have reached a new milestone with the release of Ark Linux 1.0-alpha8. The ISO images are available from various FTP mirrors, which are slowly being populated. No release notes or readme files have been published at the time of writing, but the ISO images (only the first image is required for installation) can be downloaded from the mirrors. Ark Linux is a free Linux distribution designed for non-technical users and ease-of-use is its primary objective.

NeoNerds.net have snagged an interview with the project manager of the Syllable project, Kristian "Vanders" Van Der Vliet. In this interview, NeoNerds reveals the current status of the project, as well as the projected future of Syllable as a desktop and office OS.

A new beta SP1 build, 1023, was made available to Microsoft beta testers. Changes include:

"Many enterprise software users and vendors have made significant commitments to open source technologies. Projects such as the Linux operating system, Apache Web server, and the Perl programming language, have proven themselves as viable alternatives to equivalent commercial offerings. But what about the tools used to hold core information assets? Are open source databases ready for the enterprise?" Read the article at LinuxWorld.au.

Software designed by humans will always have flaws, says Microsoft, but the company argues that its security record is improving. Microsoft has admitted it does not expect to ever release completely secure, flawless code, but denied that its software was any less secure than any other complex code.

Castle Technology, makers of an XScale based desktop machine, announced today they had purchased RISC OS from the previous owners, Pace. RISC OS was initially developed by Acorn, starting in 1988, and has appeared in a large number of Acorn machines, and later on machines by other manufacturers.

wx.NET is a C# wrapper for wxWindows, providing a portable GUI toolkit for .NET programs. wx.NET can be used with various implementations of the CLI, including .NET, Mono, and DotGNU Portable.NET. Other C# wrappers for popular freely available toolkits are GTK# and QT#. Also, more developers are needed to assist porting Mono or dotGNU to Mac OS X.

The MorphOS/Pegasos Quickstart Guide written by Jürgen Lucas has updated to version 2.5. The guide shows you how to install MorphOS on Pegasos with an empty IDE hard drive. Thanks to Andreas Zierl and Fabrice Lehaut the guide is beside german also available in english and french.

NASA recently benchmarked Apple's dual 2GHz Power Mac G5 at its Langley Research Center in Virginia. The main purpose of the tests was to compare the G5 to the G4 for "computational fluid dynamics applications" however they also compare it to the Pentium 4.