Sun Microsystems is working with numerous industry partners to support the use of scripting languages in its Java platform. Sun and Zend are leading the effort, which will create a way for developers to write Java applications using popular scripting languages like PHP, ECMAscript, and ASP. According to O'Reilly, Sun could boost its number of Java developers by another 3 million in this way. Elsewhere, Sun's CEO Scott McNealy defended the business merits of his company's Java effort, saying that, despite disappointing sales of Sun's own Java software, the effort has helped keep Microsoft at bay.

Microsoft's embedded group announced a new "kitting program" today which enables its embedded hardware partners to bundle free Windows CE .NET or Windows XP Embedded toolkits and runtime images with up to 1,000 of their hardware evaluation or development platforms. More details are here.

Here is a review with screenshots of the i686-optimized Red Hat-based JAMD Linux 0.0.6, and a review of the mainland European language-focused Aurox Linux 9 while Rock Linux released version 2.0.0-b4.

"In this letter you will find the result of a brief security audit that we did some time ago for HP-UX platform. We have found 8 vulnerabilities (seven local and a remote one). Technical details about all of the vulnerabilities were sent to the HP security team few months ago and in all cases appropriate security patches are available. Some of them are available for download right now, the remaining ones will be published in the near future." Read the security update here.

One of the most prominent ex-Be engineers back in the "golden days" of Be, Inc., Jean-Baptiste Queru, comments (and here) on beta 5 of YellowTAB's Zeta, an upcoming commercial version of BeOS based on a 2 year-old unfinished Dano/EXP codeline (that was supposed to be 'BeOS 6' if Palm hadn't bought the Be IP). JBQ finds the bloat & the lack of innovation dissapointing compared to what older versions of BeOS offered in their own timeline: "BeOS was about being one step ahead, not one step behind".

Apple resellers are becoming increasingly disgruntled with the product expansion and aggressive pricing of the vendor’s online presence, Apple Store. While a level playing field exists for hardware – allowing resellers to take advantage of face-to-face contact with customers and value-added service levels behind the sale – channel partners are worried about discrepancies appearing in the pricing of some third-party software and peripherals.