"Robots that can climb stairs, crawl over ditches, survive three-story falls—and pester people who ignore your e-mails. Morticia is quite the capable robot. She can scramble over the outback at about 15 kilometers per hour, climb stairs, survive a 10-meter drop onto a concrete floor and even navigate underwater. Not bad for a little critter that’s less than 20 centimeters high and 65 centimeters long—about the size of a small suitcase." Read the rest of the interesting report at TechReview.

Sun Microsystems on Monday said it has reorganized and re-branded its disparate software lines and put them all under the Sun ONE umbrella. By re-branding its software, Sun hopes to better explain, and hence sell, its software to large corporate customers. As a result, the iPlanet Web Server, software for running large Web servers, will be rechristened the Sun ONE Web server, while the Chilisoft ASP will go by the name Sun ONE Active Server Pages. Our Take: As you can see, Sun is going full speed with Sun ONE, which is pretty much a similar range of products and strategy as Microsoft's .NET. A lot of people in our forums have dismissed the whole idea of .NET (most without knowing what .NET and ONE really are), but the bottomline is that it makes sense on how the future of computing is going to look like. If it won't be Microsoft and its .NET, it will be Sun and ONE. Bottomline is that you can't get away from this "new way of doing things." Exactly as we said in the last paragraph of our .NET editorial two months ago. Update: Java and .NET battle for the web's future.

If you're a C++ programmer who's interested in cutting down on development and debugging time, you'll want to know how to make the most efficient reuse of the code you write. This tutorial explains what a custom class template is, how to define a template in C++, how to instantiate and use template classes, and how to optimize C++ templates for AIX. More tutorials/articles for IBM's high-end products can be found here.

We got Linux distributions for geeks (Debian), distros for businessmen (Red Hat), home users (Mandrake) and... Germans (SuSE :). However, there was never before a distribution specifically targetting developers and speed, both at the same time. Enter Gentoo Linux, the fastest loading, fastest-operating Linux distribution to date.

David Chester released a second version for his libXFT "hack" which brings better quality anti-aliased fonts under X11 and KDE. "For fonts and sizes that appeared the most fuzzy with hinting completely disabled, this code brings significant improvement" David writes. At his home page you will find comparison screenshots, "before and after", and the actual binary and code for the replacement libxft.

CRUX is a lightweight, i686-optimized Linux distribution targeted at experienced Linux users. In the new version (195 MB ISO), there are about 45 package updates including glibc 2.2.5, XFree86 4.2, and kernel 2.4.18. Mozilla 0.9.9 is now the default browser. Pkgutils 4.1 provides means to protect selected configuration files from being overwritten when upgrading packages.

BeGeistert is a biannual meeting of BeOS users and developers held in Germany. BeOS developer and frequent OSNews writer Nicholas Blachford, wrote a review of the meeting and also reveals some news having to do with a possible come back from YellowTab and some working code presented by OpenBeOS members. Nicholas also includes a small mpeg video and many pictures of the meeting.

"I’ve been having a discussion with someone from IBM about whether it’s ever possible for Free Software to have a nice human interface. In theory, I think it is possible. But in practice, the vast majority of open-source projects are also volunteer projects; and it seems that the use of volunteers to drive development inevitably leads the interface design to suck. The reasons are many and varied, and maybe one day I’ll turn this into a long and heavily-referenced essay. But in the meantime, here’s a summary." Matthew Thomas, a Mozilla contributor, explains why not many of the Free applications feature a good UI like most of their commercial counterparts do.

When the loss of about 1,000 computer servers in the World Trade Center attacks put Lehman Brothers in the market to buy millions of dollars of systems, it looked at Linux. American Banker tells the story.

The Open For Business web site features a review of the OEone Homebase 1.3 operating system. OEone is based on Red Hat, however its user interface is brand new, it has been written from scratch (in the Mozilla XUL API). The company behind OEone also sells machines with their software pre-installed, a software developed in such a way to resemble something between an Internet Appliance and a light iMac-like office workstation. OEone is something to definately check out, since they offer more than IAs do, however they are built in such a way to be simplistic, just like IAs. An older review of both the OEone machine and software can be found at NewsForge.

The first release candidate for Microsoft's Windows .Net Server software family will be released this quarter, with a final release of the product set for the end of the year. Microsoft released the third beta for the product in late October and has been receiving extensive feed back from testers since then. The release of this server family has been pushed back twice, with the last delay being attributed to Microsoft's "Trustworthy Computing" initiative, which resulted in development being halted and all code being reviewed.

The reporters of a French Amiga magazine called AmigaPower have been so kind to post some pictures of an AmigaOne computer running TurboLinux. Initial AmigaOne ATX motherboards come with a soldered 600 MHz G3 PowerPC CPU, built-in 10/100 ethernet, USB, AGP (2xSpeed), AC97 Soundchip, MC97 modem, UDMA100 IDE controller and costs 600 Euros (ex. VAT). A more expensive version is expected to be released later this year, having a socketed CPU and a 4xSpeed AGP bus, which will allow the installation of one or two G4 processors. Boards can be pre-ordered from Computer City, KDH Datentechnik and Vesalia.

One of the biggest complaints these days about Web services is the security issues within a Web service environment. IBM and Microsoft just released specifications describing Web Services Security (WS-Security). There is an developerWorks overview document and a whitepaper describing this model that supports, integrates and unifies several models, mechanisms, and technologies.

In his first article about Jython, Noel Rappin discussed the features of the Python scripting language and its Jython implementation that would be of greatest interest to Java programmers. Jython is a complete implementation of the Python programming language written in 100% pure Java, and allows easy access to Java libraries. This article contains 10 tips for using Java objects in Jython.