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Dennis M. Ritchie, co-creator of UNIX and father of the C programming language, died this past weekend after a long illness. It's no exaggeration to say that without Ritchie, modern computing would not be what it is today.

Often known as "dmr," Ritchie was born in Bronxville, NY in 1941. He studied at Harvard University, initially focusing on physics. Ritchie said that he entered computing because "my undergraduate experience convinced me that I was not smart enough to be a physicist, and that computers were quite neat."

Dennis M. Ritchie, co-creator of UNIX and father of the C programming language, died this past weekend after a long illness. It's no exaggeration to say that without Ritchie, modern computing would not be what it is today.

Often known as "dmr," Ritchie was born in Bronxville, NY in 1941. He studied at Harvard University, initially focusing on physics. Ritchie said that he entered computing because "my undergraduate experience convinced me that I was not smart enough to be a physicist, and that computers were quite neat."

Oracle continued its acquisition spree this week by snapping up Ksplice, a company that sells a zero downtime update technology for Linux. Ksplice enabled system administrators to apply updates and patches without rebooting or otherwise taking a server down.

According to the announcement, "Oracle believes it will be the only enterprise Linux provider that can offer zero downtime updates, and expects to make the Ksplice technology a standard feature of Oracle Linux Premier Support."

Linux has yet to displace Unix in the data center. Despite Unix server vendor consolidation, most data centers still run multiple flavors of physical Unix servers. That was the take-away from the 2010-11 Unix Vendor Preference Survey of 306 data center professionals conducted by Gabriel Consulting Group (GCG). GCG has been conducting its Unix surveys for five years, and focuses on physical systems, not virtual machines.

Former Apple exec Jean-Louis Gassée wrote a post today on Monday Note arguing "The OS Doesn't Matter." "Once upon a time, operating systems used to matter a lot," he begins. "They defined what a computer could and couldn't do. The "old" OS orchestrated the use of resources, memory, processors, I/O (input/output) to external devices (screen, keyboard, disks, network, printers...)."

But now, there is only one operating system, argues Gassée: Unix. And as such, the OS no longer matters. Or at the very least, its definition warrants re-examination.

Apple develops world-class APIs. But how do they do it?

Here's a bit of insight into the process Apple goes through as explained by Bertrand Serlet, Apple's senior VP of software engineering. He's responsible for leading Apple's software engineering group, and reports directly to Steve Jobs.

The video is quite brief but it's revealing in a few ways.

Have you heard the latest doomsday scenario? In thirty years, the internet will stop working! Apparently, a bug similar to the millennium bug will affect Unix-based systems, like those that run the tubes, in the year 2038. The bug, being dubbed the "2038 bug," arises because Unix-based systems store the time as a signed 32-bit integer, in seconds, from midnight on January 1 1970. And the latest time that can be represented in that format, by the Posix standard, is 3:14 AM on January 19, 2038. After that, times will wrap around and be represented as a negative number.