Suchetha writes "In a posting on his Google+ page Linus Torvalds announced the launch of Linux kernel 3.0. This follows the kernel missing the planned release date of the 19th because of 'a subtle bug.'"

drspliff writes "Oracle today announced it's completed the acquisition of K-Splice, dropping support for Redhat, CentOS, and SUSE, and closing doors to new customers. Unless of course you want to become an Oracle Linux Premier Support subscriber — then it comes as standard."

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Peter Wayner provides an overview of the more compelling NoSQL data stores on offer today in hopes of helping IT pros get started experimenting with these powerful tools. From Cassandra, to MongoDB, to Neo4J, each appears geared for a particular set of application types, providing DBAs with a wealth of opportunity for experimentation, and a measure of confusion in finding the right tool for their environment. 'There are great advantages to this Babelization if the needs of your project fit the abilities of one of the new databases. If they line up well, the performance boosts can be incredible because the project developers aren't striving to build one Dreadnought to solve every problem,' Wayner writes. 'The experimentation is also fun because the designers don't feel compelled to make sure their data store is a drop-in replacement that speaks SQL like a native.'"

An anonymous reader writes "JPC — the pure java PC emulator — has now been upgraded to JPC2, and can run WindowsXP inside the Java Applet sandbox."

An anonymous reader writes "An 80-foot wide visualization screen at California ISO graphically displays sensor readings from thousands of smart meters as well as provides predictive analytics. By analyzing the grid and environmental inputs like where the wild fires are burning, Space-Time Insights claims its algorithms head off power outages before they can materialize, turning California ISO operators into forecasters instead of damage controllers. If it keeps the lights on and the air conditioners running, I'm all for it!"

theodp writes "ZDNet reports that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's office issued a fact sheet during her visit to India confirming that the U.S. and India will be working together to develop an open source version of the Data.gov project, which was launched in 2009 by off-to-Harvard Federal CIO Vivek Kundra to serve as a central repository of data collected by the US government. The Hindu Business Line notes that Clinton was also pressed to exempt Indian techies in the States on H-1B or L1 visas from U.S. social security taxes, an exemption that, if granted, could reportedly result in savings of at least a billion dollars for the country's software industry."

Gamespot reports on a discussion at the Develop 2011 conference in which a panel of game designers debated whether recent big-budget releases like Heavy Rain and L.A. Noire were too long for a typical gamer's taste. Quoting: "'Gamers are losing patience,' said [Alexis Kennedy of Failbetter Games], when asked about his own experiences with Heavy Rain, 'so many people don't reach the end and lose the full impact of the story.' He wasn't complimentary of its narrative either, questioning the benefit of basing a game on long-form narrative such as film, resulting in a 'bastardized' storyline that doesn't quite work. ... The likes of social and casual games, particularly the cheap games available on mobile, have changed the expectations of gamers, the panel concluded. Since gamers are paying less money, there's less need to create 10-hour-plus gaming experiences, because consumers no longer feel shortchanged."

donniebaseball23 writes "id Software co-founder John Carmack defended the creativity of first-person shooter games in a recent interview. The legendary programmer, who was a pioneer in the shooter genre with Doom and Quake, said he doesn't like hearing from developers that shooters aren't good because they're not reinventing the wheel. 'I am pretty down on people who take the sort of creative auteurs' perspective. It's like "Oh, we're not being creative." But we're creating value for people — that's our job! It's not to do something that nobody's ever seen before. It's to do something that people love so much they're willing to give us money for... you see some of the indie developers that really take a snooty attitude about this,' he lamented."

badger.foo writes "OpenBSD-current just turned 5.0-beta, providing us a preview of what the upcoming release (slated for November 1st) will look like. Peter Hansteen takes us through the main new features and explains the development process that has consistently turned out high-quality releases on time, every six months for more than a decade."

JustinRLynn writes "A recent Google+ Post by Linus Torvalds indicates that version 3.0 of the Linux kernel will have to wait due to the discovery of a 'subtle pathname lookup bug.' Linus indicates, 'We have a patch, we understand the problem, and it looks ObviouslyCorrect(tm), but I don't think I want to release 3.0 just a couple of hours after applying it.'"

mikejuk writes "It's a prejudice the young and old both share, but with opposite conclusions, of course. Young is best or old is best — most have an opinion. Now we have some interesting statistics ingeniously gathered and processed by Peter Knego, 'big data' style, that 'proves' older is better when it comes to programming, at least!"

iamflimflam1 writes "The Guardian is running a story on how app developers in the UK are withdrawing from the U.S. app store over patent fears. 'The growth of patent lawsuits over apps raises serious issues for all the emerging smartphone platforms, because none of the principal companies involved — Apple, Google or Microsoft — can guarantee to protect developers from them. Even when the mobile OS developer has signed a patent licence — as Apple has with at least one company currently pursuing patent lawsuits — it is not clear that it has any legal standing to defend developers.' This follows a blog post from the iconfactory about the death of independent developers. Have the big corporations really won? What is the future for small teams and one-man-band developers?"

Makoss writes "Normal cryptographic hash functions turn any input text or data into a compact set of bits; useful for computers, not useful for humans. Visual hash functions turn data into graphical representations which are more easily recognizable and memorable to humans. You've seen Identicons and other simple geometric image generators already, but Vash takes the technique beyond basic geometry and produces some really striking images."

CWmike writes "Hoping to further sharpen OpenOffice's competitive viability against Microsoft Office, IBM is donating the code of its Symphony open source office suite to the nonprofit Apache Software Foundation. Apache could fold this code into its own open source office suite OpenOffice, on which Symphony was based. In June, Oracle donated the OpenOffice suite to Apache. 'Prior to Apache's entry, there really hasn't been enough innovation in this area over the past 10 years,' said Kevin Cavanaugh, an IBM vice president. 'It's been constrained because we haven't had a true open source community with a mature governance model.'"

An anonymous reader writes "Last year Apple quietly authorized private-label app stores with its OTA (over-the-air) protocol, and now an Apple spin-off is offering the first hosting service to uses OTA to create alternative app stores for iOS devices like the iPhone and iPad. One of the first is Cisco's App Fridge (for cool networking apps), but a dozen other Fortune 500 companies have also signed up. And this fall, Apperian promises to add Android apps to its service, enabling one-stop-shopping for private-label apps store hosted in the clouds. So far these store are for employees only, but by 2012 Apperian claims it will be offering alternative app stores for the rest of us."

jfruhlinger writes "Opponents of software patenting have been rather heartened by recent developments in the Oracle-Google lawsuit, which have seemed to indicate that Oracle's patent case is weakening. But now the judge in the case has some sharp questions for Google, given that Google tried to negotiate with Sun over the patents in question before going on to develop Android without them."

ThirdNormal writes "In a really painful move for most third party developers RIM's code signing servers have been down and having issues since the weekend started. This has caused a furor in the Blackberry Support Forum, and must surely exacerbate the defecting of developers from the Blackberry platform."

mikejuk writes "In case further proof were needed that JavaScript shall indeed inherit the earth, we have the news that Stanford has adopted JavaScript to teach CS101 — Introduction to Computing Principles: 'The essential ideas of computing via little phrases of JavaScript code.' You can even try it out for yourself at Stanford's course page."

ndogg writes "The open source Python projects Pantyshot and Upskirt have caused quite a stir within the Python community, and catalyzed the leaving of one of their developers (a woman whose native language is not English.) The original developer, Frank Smit, has renamed Pantyshot to Misaka, but that too has suspect etymology, as Violet Blue points out."

jfruhlinger writes "There was a bit of a kerfuffle when the Mozilla Foundation's community coordinator brushed aside concerns from enterprises that Mozilla's rapid release schedule clashed with organizations' need to carefully vet software upgrades. One thing that could bridge the gap between these worldviews is a widespread adoption of open standards. After all, if IE 6 dealt with web pages in a standard way, it wouldn't have been so painful to keep it around as long as it lurked on many corporate desktops."