"The way things are going with the proposed merger between Hewlett-Packard and Compaq Computer, the next thing you'll see is a supermarket tabloid headline blaring, "Fiorina punches hole in Hewlett's prize cello with high heel," with a subhead that reads, "Carly takes revenge for Walter's plot to have hairdresser make her bald." The real thing is pretty close to that." Read the editorial at ZDNews.

Carson Reynolds writes: "One of the more memorable architectures and operating systems of recent history were the Symbolics Lisp Machine and Genera Operating System. The systems featured such interesting novelties as 36-bit wide processors, hardware support for LISP interpreters, and open source (circa 1986). Those still pining might consider trying to get their own Symbolics system."

There are only 2-3 books regarding Qt, the popular GUI C++ Toolkit for UNIX, Windows, MacOS and embedded Linux. Without doubt, the most important and up-to-date book for Qt until now is "Programming with QT, 2nd Edition", by Matthias Kalle Dalheimer, published by O'Reilly.

Microsoft Corp. today announced that the BMW 7 Series, the line of cars introduced last month in the United States, features Microsoft’s real-time embedded operating system, Windows CE. This announcement comes shortly after Microsoft’s Automotive Business Unit launched Windows CE for Automotive v3.5, the newest version of its telematics software platform based on Windows CE, and announced an end-to-end solution to enable the auto industry to cost-effectively implement and maintain advanced automotive telematics. Siemens VDO Automotive AG, the preferred navigation supplier of BMW, is using the Microsoft Windows CE operating system in the Control Display, which is part of the innovative BMW iDrive concept.

O'Reilly Net features two interesting MacOSX Applescript articles: "Integrating AppleScript and Cocoa" & "Using AppleScript to Compile and Run Java Code".

"The rift between IBM and Microsoft over Web services widened further over the weekend when Web services evangelists from each company clashed over the relative merits of .Net and Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) for building applications that can talk to each other over the Internet." Read the rest of the story at ZDNews.

A while ago I was reading a comment on Slashdot that indicated that evolution in the human population no longer happens. This isn't actually true as humans have continued to evolve albeit in subtle ways - BBC2 had a very good program about this a while back.

A special release of the intent Application Development Kit for Windows and Linux is included on the cover CD of the current issue of digital magazine. Intent is the core technology used in the AmigaDE and is also the standard programming and the platform independent content environment chosen by the Open Contents Platform Association (OCPA) for digital consumer devices. Consumer Electronic Giants including Hitachi, Sony, Kyocera, PSION, Nokia, NEC, Motorola, Grundig, JVC, Fujitsu, Sharp, Epson, Intel, Pioneer, Metrowerks, Sega, Bandai and Capcom are supporting the platform. A full new release of the AmigaDE Software Development Kit will become available for general developers later this year. Software developed for intent works with the AmigaDE platform as well.

Yellow Dog Linux is a complete, Red Hat and RPM based operating system for PowerPC computers. Terra Soft is now taking pre-orders for YDL 2.2 which includes an array of powerful updates, improvements, and support for newer Apple hardware, including improved nVidia support, KDE 2.2.2, Gnome 1.4, kernel 2.4.18, XFree86 4.2.0, and more than 1000 applications to choose from.

"In a decision handed down today in Boston, US District Judge Patti B. Saris ruled on the preliminary injunction motion in MySQL AB vs. Progress Software Corp. On the trademark dispute, on which the Free Software Foundation (FSF) takes no position, she has ruled that Progress Software is enjoined from marketing products under the MySQL trademarks until trial." Read the rest of the press release at Gnu.org. The significance of this trial is that this is the first time where the GPL license will have to "stand" in a court.

"Our strangest dreams sometimes take on a reality of their own. In January, Caldera, the latest owners of the "official" Unix source code, decided to release some of the older versions (up to "V7" and "32V") under an open source license. While not as significant as it would have been, say, ten years ago, it is nice that everyone now has access to the code that first made Unix popular, and that led to the development of the 4BSD system that underlies FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and Apple's Darwin (which in turn underlies Mac OS X). Since I was active in the computer field through almost all the years of Unix's development, I'd like to comment briefly on the Caldera announcement in its full context." Read the rest of the story at O'Reilly.

"Looking at desktop applications for Linux these days has become a bit of a balancing act; on the one hand, there is the obligation to review all of the features objectively. One the other, it has become clear that it is necessary to examine how desktop applications will fit into the corporate environment. While we cannot ignore the home users, there is growing evidence that this will not be the arena where Linux will grow on the desktop." Read the Linux office package roundup at LinuxPlanet.

"Finding solid performance data to help choose among competing technologies is as tough as creating the data in the first place. This is particularly true in the database space, where database vendors routinely use no-benchmarking clauses in their license agreements to block publication of benchmarks of which they do not approve. We tested IBM's DB2 7.2 with FixPack 5, Microsoft Corp.'s SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition with Service Pack 2, MySQL AB's MySQL 4.0.1 Max, Oracle Corp.'s Oracle9i Enterprise Edition 9.0.1.1.1 and Sybase Inc.'s ASE (Adative Server Enterprise) 12.5.0.1." Read the rest of the benchmark article at eWeek. Our Take: Hey, where are my PostgreSQL benchmarks?

"Microsoft will ship Service Pack 1 in Q3 this year, a little later than expected. But from the sound of it the company is planning SP1 more as a bundle of goodies and enhancements than as a plain old fix roll-up. It'll include support for the Mira and Freestyle technologies Microsoft intends to unleash on us, and will also apparently support Tablet PCs, which are due out later this year." Read the rest of the report at TheRegister.