I'm long past the point of being bothered by people who write angry letters to me (or in today's world, writing blog posts about me) because I didn't favorably review their preferred operating system or software program. If I'm emailed with an assault on my credibility, sometimes I write back and explain my testing methods, my experience, and how I reach my conclusions. Rather than continue to repeat myself, I've decided to take the time today to write this article so that I can link to it in the future.

Prentice Hall's Ajax, part of the Bruce Perens Open Source Series (though this book has nothing to do with him specifically) is an outstanding guide to building or enhancing Web sites with Ajax techniques. Rather than assume that the reader already knows JavaScript and XML, Ajax starts the story from the beginning and teaches Ajax from the ground up.

The Haiku Project had its annual conference in Orlando this past weekend, and though I have little experience with BeOS or Haiku, I decided to attend and write about the conference because it's 20 minutes from my home. It's called WalterCon because "Walter" was one of the proposed names for what was to become a free replacement for BeOS. Be, Inc. may be dead and gone, and the BeOS source code may have been sold and warehoused, but the spirit of Be lives on in Haiku and WalterCon. If only it had a little more developer support, you'd be hearing about the Haiku operating system a lot more often. Heck, you might even be using it.

Mandriva Linux, once the most popular desktop GNU/Linux distribution, still enjoys an enthusiastic following and a positive cashflow, and has settled into the niche it established in 1999: a technologically advanced operating system that's easy to install, configure, and use without dumbing everything down. Last year's merger with Conectiva and Lycoris more than doubled the size of the company, bringing together hundreds of dedicated and experienced employees to further challenge the Red Hat and Novell desktop GNU/Linux stalwarts. Below are interviews with three of those everyday people who make Mandriva Linux and its surrounding community great.

Theo de Raadt, the leader of the OpenBSD project and a vociferous crusader for hardware (especially networking) documentation, recently went public with his concerns about the One Laptop Per Child project's choice to use a wireless networking chip from Marvell, a company with an unusually poor record of supporting free software operating systems, in the 2B1 laptop computer that it is developing. Marvell is unwilling to freely supply hardware documentation so that programmers can create device drivers that properly interface with its wireless chips, and beyond that, Marvell also refuses to allow OpenBSD and other free software operating systems to freely distribute firmware binaries that are necessary to use Marvell wireless devices. So why, then, was it chosen for the OLPC project, which claims to "support open source?" If de Raadt's email was the first you heard of the conflict, you're probably confused as to what's going on. Below are explanatory interviews with various people who were or are involved with this situation: Theo de Raadt, Richard Stallman, Jim Gettys, and Jonathan Corbet.

Recently Crucial Technology celebrated its 10th birthday by releasing a commemorative limited edition DDR2-667 RAM module. It's been 10 years of affordably-priced and reliable memory modules, and 10 years of lifetime warranties on RAM that is guaranteed to work with your computer. In the interview below, Crucial Memory's general manager Fred Waddel talks about the evolution of computer memory in recent years, his company's impact on the industry, and a retrospective on the most important moment in Crucial's history.

In an effort to convince hardware manufacturers that GNU/Linux is worth supporting with drivers and specifications, Novell Inc., which sells the SUSE Linux family of operating systems, has published this short survey for corporte GNU/Linux users. It only takes a minute or so to complete, and could give Novell some sway with hardware vendors and OEMs.