GETTING A BYTE OF THE ACTION

By: Jackie Spong With a teleputing explosion in the wings, the rise of web surfers seeking downloadable information will challenge Napster-wary content police. The pending convergence of cellular telephones and digital organizers promises to introduce a new era of mobile teleputers. These devices will offer full-fledged web browsing, speech recognition, and perhaps even videoconferencing in addition to the usual e-mail, web clippings, and stock quotes. As a result, the demand for data storage on these devices is likely to be insatiable, a fact that has not gone unnoticed by the Copyright Police.

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Tin dogs

By: Franco Vitaliano Japan is currently spearheading a market charge in consumer robotics. The Japanese, as any manga fan knows, are big into robots. So with Asimov's robotic dictums drumming through my head, I turned on Sony's second-generation robot dog, the AIBO ERS-210. Many technology pundits have billed this little metal critter as the most advanced consumer robot system ever offered, bordering on sentience even. My robodog's first startup was so embarrassingly awkward, however; I almost immediately dismissed it as a $1,500 ripoff.

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Is this any way to build a kernel?

By: Matthew Jacob The three major Berkeley-based Open Source variants (*BSD) and Linux offer good economic value. They're cheap (free), quick to adopt new technologies successfully, and as responsive to quality problems as commercial offerings. With all that going for Open Source, the challenge for Open Source communities is to make the best use of a geographically distributed group of engineers.

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WAP Is Dead Long Live XML !

By: Kris Buytaert Wireless Application Protocol-that dominant buzzword for the last six months-has ended up as nothing but a gadget for people with too much money. Yes, WAP-billed as an emerging standard for displaying and delivering wireless information on phones, pagers, and PDAs-is Dead. As we've known it.

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Last Rage

By: Sam Bogoch Sam Bogoch, CEO of BigStorage, has a vision for turning the ultimate hacking machine into the ultimate computing machine.

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Master Class

By: Kris Buytaert Wanted: Cyber-glue for authentication Answer: LDAP

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Masterclass

By: Perry Metzger BSD's link to the Internet protocol stack

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Can Transmeta leverage Open Source to go head to head with Intel and AMD?

By: Michelle Kraus In the fall of 1999, e-business was sizzling in the VC community and companies that provided the Open Source infrastructure for e-business were hot commodities. A year later, the NASDAQ was heading south faster than a student on spring break. With the bottom having fallen out of that market, many are asking: What will happen to these companies? How will they diversify their revenue streams? Specifically, how will they grow their businesses to profitability?

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BSD performance watch: new queues from set of system calls

By: Perry Metzger In building high-speed servers, performance is the name of the game. Getting that extra performance sometimes means working smarter rather than harder. Take the problem of building very-high-speed Web servers. One may expect that, with the hardware-performance increases seen since the Web's early days, a modern machine can nicely handle thousands of clients at once. In practice, this isn't always the case. Reason? Issues that belong in the realm of software engineering.

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Kernel value in the light of BSD: Forgive the glare

By: Pat Lynch February is "Linux kernel" month at OSDN; because this is a BSD column, I thought that this would be a good time to explore the differences between BSD and Linux. Let me first mention that Linux is a kernel, not an operating system. An OS, together with the kernel, is generally called the userland.

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