Did you know that Perl creator Larry Wall thinks the community 'paints a little picture in heaven'? In a lengthy interview about the history of Perl, Wall talks about the evolving nature of programming languages, especially Perl, and in the future a lot of people will be getting into programming as a profession, but not calling it programming. Wall's genius is expressed in his desire to not recognise Perl in 20 years, instead to design the ability to create things we will need in 20 or 100 years. And, yes, Wall picked the Camel mascot as it is 'an animal that is self-sufficient in a dry place'.

Slackware, the grand daddy of Linux distributions, has released a new version: Slackware 12.2. This new version runs the 2.6.27.7 version of the Linux kernel. The other updates include Xfce 4.4.3, KDE 3.5.10, HAL support etc. You can get Slackware 12.2 from one of their mirrors.

Many sophisticated machine learning algorithms cannot process large amounts of data on a single node, but Parallel Machine Learning Toolbox (PML) can do so by distributing the computations. This distribution speeds up computations and expedites training by weeks, days, or even hours in an easy, reliable way. PML can run on a wide array of architectures including single-node, small clusters, grids, and BlueGene.

Apart from its use as a powerful Web application development platform, in combination with the Rails framework Ruby is also a powerful scripting language. It has immense capabilities, owing to the availability of many built-in and external libraries, the power of which can be harnessed to solve a great deal of the scripting needs that surface in typical systems administrative work environments.

In an almost indiscernible and confusing article filled with various scientific terms that most cringe to hear, it was described how in October of 2008 scientists successfully stored and retrieved data on the nucleus of an atom-- and all for two short lived seconds. With this new type of storage, a traditional bit can now be both zero and one at the same time, but in order to understand just how this is possible, translate the article linked above to plain English. Data integrity returns after two seconds at 90% and storage is obviously impermanent, so there are many kinks to work out before atomic storage actually serves a purpose, but give these scientists a couple of decades, and it's theoretical that we'll one day have nuclear drives the size of USB drives today (or MicroSD cards, or why not even specs of dust?) that can hold hundreds of terabytes-- even pentabytes-- of information.

Smolt is a hardware profiler developed by Fedora Project to enable users to submit their hardware profiles during installation. Smolt, like PackageKit from Fedora is also a distribution neutral tool and collects stats anonymously and sends it to a central database . The tool is also completely opt-in and guarantees your privacy. While openSUSE has been including Smolt in their repositories for sometime, they have now taken next step and added installer integration to it. There is also a call for other distributions to participate in this effort instead of reinventing the wheel. "Smolt is a project started by Fedora to collect information about the hardware that is used with computers running Linux. We at (open-)SUSE were seeing this demand as well and also were discussing a solution. But it became clear quite quickly that it does not make sense to have a per-distro solution for that - if we want to have momentum with a hardware database a combined effort promises the most."