The struggle within companies between their software and hardware business can lead to interesting co-opetition, and sometimes disaster. (A most extreme example being Sony's ignominious fall from the top the portable music device heap as a result of its reluctance to disturb its music production arm's legacy business). IBM, of course, is probably the canonical example, with its various partnerships with Microsoft ending up not only with Microsoft on top, but with its own PC hardware business suffering a long decline into oblivion as a result. Big Blue, presumably trying to avoid a replay, has entered into software licensing agreements with, among others, arch-rival Sun. Now, it seems they're backing off on plans to offer Solaris support for GPFS, their shared disk cluster file system.

The Git distributed source code management system has won over another major project, Perl 5. The Perl Foundation has announced that they have completed moving the source code of Perl 5 from Perforce (proprietary SCM in use by other projects including FreeBSD) to Git and are now opening the system up for developer use. Git is the open sourced source code control system created by Linus Torvalds to manage Linux development. The move to Git gives developers equal and easier access to the Perl source code and the distributed nature of git will allow developers to work on experimental changes to the language more easily.

Devzones, short for development zones, is a type of virtualization found in the Nexenta distribution. It can be used to define a base developer environment, which can be easily cloned many times. These copies can easily be destroyed and recreated.Devzones are built upon Opensolaris Zones, which are extensions of a chroot-like environment for the entire installed system. In other words, it allows for virtualization of an Opensolaris environment (and variants of Linux), without the performance hit that is generally associated with virtualization.This article gives a practical introduction into using Devzones.

Robert Schuster has a very detailed account of the work done to get full Java support on small devices. He managed to cross compile (and package) OpenJDK/IcedTea for OpenEmbedded/ARM through multiple build stages using various free java implementations. This provides full free (GPL) J2SE support for ARM based handlhelds, phones and embedded devices like the BeagleBoard, BUG, OpenMoko, Maemo and the Irex Iliad through Jalimo.

Not too long ago, I was convinced that the modern day gaming world was a rather empty and shallow one. If you grew up with games like The 7th Guest, the Keen series, Metroid, adventure games like Monkey Island or Full Throttle, and so on, more modern games seemed to have little to offer, besides yet another nameless hero in a grey space suit killing aliens in a grey world with the same set of twelve weapons. However, a little speck of hope was flickering on the horizon, a game seemingly made by people who could read my mind; a game about a post-apocalyptic wasteland, filled with quests and epic stories, where you were free to do whatever you wanted. Yes, I looked forward to Fallout 3, and since my computer was too old to run any game more recent than Wolfenstein, I decided to buy a game console. Read on to see how my venture into the world of modern gaming turned out.

The MorphOS development team is proud to announce the public release of MorphOS 2.2, a free update for users of MorphOS 2.1 and 2.0. In addition to numerous bug fixes, MorphOS 2.2 includes additional optimizations and new features such as Kryptos, a disk encryption suite.

IBM delves into what's new in PHP 5.3: Part-1 shows you the changes to the object-orientated capabilities, and Part-2 shows you the exciting new possibilities with real closures and lambda functions.

Microsoft and Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs in Cambridge demoed their nifty NanoTouch, a small device fitting in the palm of one's hand, boasting a 2.4 inch screen and a touch pad on the back so as to utilize the small screen without having to block it with one's fingers. The developers say this technology could develop into electronic jewelry and high-tech clothing, though that NanoTouch looks an awful lot like one of those iPods or Zunes we keep hearing about. Anyone up for a touch-t-shirt with customizable images on front and back? You'd never have to buy another shirt again.

Palm recently announced over $500 million in losses, but then we all knew Palm wasn't too hot on the market these days despite their efforts to sell Windows Mobile devices. Palm is hoping to make a comeback, however, with new smartphones sporting Nova in 2009.

There might be a lot of companies stating that netbooks are just a fad, and that the whole thing will pass (Sony, Apple), but that isn't stopping several chip companies from putting serious effort into improving the performance of these small netbooks. NVIDIA, AMD, and VIA are all hard at work at improving several aspects of netbook computing.

From Phoronix: "Have you ever wondered on what operating system Java works the best? While by no means is it a conclusive multi-platform comparison, for this article we ran a number of Java benchmarks on both Windows Vista Premium and Ubuntu Linux to see how the Java Virtual Machine performance differs. In addition, when running Ubuntu we had tested Sun's official Java package as well as the OpenJDK alternative."

With ever increasing amounts of Javascript on the client side, maintenance is increased by duplicating business logic on the client side;"In this series, learn how to run JavaScript files on the server side, call remote JavaScript functions with Ajax, and use the Java Scripting API with the JavaServer Pages (JSP) technology." Part 1 of IBM's "Javascript EE" series- "Combine JavaScript with Java code on the server to get the freedom to use the same JavaScript routines on both servers and clients, and allow you to maintain a single code base for both Ajax and non-Ajax clients."

It was recently announced at the Android project website that the said mobile system would be receiving an update bringing to light many new features and various bug fixes. The Android team has already begun putting the new code on the public repositories under the "cupcake" branch. Some of the more notable new features and fixes include plentiful email and browser fixes, new video support, and even "basic x86 support," though we're not quite sure just where they're headed with that one.

I interviewed Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier, who is the Community Manager for openSUSE and I asked him about his role in bringing this release to light and how the open source community drives this type of project.Full Story on DaniWeb