ruphus13 writes "Time-shifting via Tivo changed the way we consume television programming. Now, Open Source enters the fray. Roku, the streaming-media set-top box has decided to Open Source its software. Roku had received praise for its streaming solution, and was in the press recently for its deal with Netflix, allowing users to stream Netflix movies directly to the box. From the article, 'Roku will release an open source version of its software by the end of the year. The CEO says he's looking for deals with content providers to stream their products through his device, and hopes to sell a bunch of them as a result.'"

Linzer writes "In this blog entry, Fred Crozat (head of Mandriva's engineering team in France) explains in great detail how his team has been detecting and getting rid of bottlenecks in the boot process, from the early stages to loading the desktop environment, thus decreasing overall boot time. An informative tour of the nuts and bolts of the boot process and how they can be tinkered with: initrd, initscripts, udev, modprobe calls. The basic tool they use for performance analysis is bootchart, which produces a map of process information and resource utilization during boot. The final trick: preloading desktop environment files while waiting for the user to type her password."

Merlin42 writes "I recently took a Test-Driven-Development (TDD) training course and the teacher recommended that I read "Working Effectively with Legacy Code" by Michael Feathers. First things first, a note about the title. Feathers defines "Legacy Code" a bit different than you may expect, especially if you are not into the XP/Agile/TDD world. I have heard (and used) a number of definitions for "legacy code" over the years. Most of these definitions have to do with code that is old, inherited, difficult to maintain, or interfaces with other 'legacy' hardware/software. Feathers' definition is 'code without tests.' For those not into TDD this may seem odd, but in the TDD world, tests are what make code easy to maintain. When good unit tests are in place, then code can be changed at will and the tests will tell automatically you if you broke anything." Read on for the rest of Kevin's review.

An anonymous reader writes "GrokCode analyzes more than 200 famous programmers to determine what types of projects made them famous. Inventing a programming language, game, or OS ranked among the top projects likely to lead to fame. Most programmers became famous through their work on only one project. The article also shows that among famous programmers, the ratio of males to females is much larger than among normal programmers."

soliptic writes "The jQuery blog today announced that 'Both Microsoft and Nokia are taking the major step of adopting jQuery as part of their official application development platform.' So the open-source javascript framework will be shipped with Visual Studio and ASP.NET MVC. Microsoft's Scott Hanselman notes: 'It's Open Source, and we'll use it and ship it via its MIT license, unchanged. If there's changes we want, we'll submit a patch just like anyone else.'" There's also a story at eWeek about the decision.

SlappingOysters writes "Despite being announced last year, the merger of Activision and Vivendi into the company Activision-Blizzard only became official recently. Gameplayer investigates how the merger has affected upcoming games and development studios between the companies. As part of that investigation, they received official word that only three Vivendi games made the cut, and in this article they detail which titles have been dropped, which studios have been dropped, and who is likely to snap them up and add them to their portfolio. A lot of big names have been affected."

globeadue writes "My company just tagged me for full time App Dev — I've essentially never coded for money, but the last 3 years of support desk gives me the business sense to know the environment I'll be coding for. Now my company will be training me, so I think the technical side of things will be covered, what I'm looking for is best practices, habits I should/shouldn't develop, etc as I take on my new craft."

CWmike writes "Microsoft confirmed today that it will hand out 'pre-beta' release copies of Windows 7 on Oct. 28, at the Professional Developers Conference (PDC). Mike Swanson, a Microsoft technology evangelist, has said attendees will receive a 160GB external USB hard drive that will presumably include the Windows 7 alpha. Mike Cherry, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft, was cautiously optimistic that today's announcement meant Microsoft was on track with Windows 7. 'If they didn't do this, you would have to wonder if they could make the schedule,' Cherry said."

qazsedcft writes "In a move the company is billing as its first foray into the hardware business, Oracle Corp. said Wednesday it will begin selling server computers that come with its database software pre-installed."

snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister delves into the Android and iPhone SDKs to help sort out which will be the best bet for developers now that technical details of the first Android smartphone have been announced. Whereas the iPhone requires an Intel-based Mac running OS X 10.5.4 or later, ADC membership, and familiarity with proprietary Mac OS X dev tools, the standard IDE for Android is Eclipse. And because most tasks can be performed with command-line tools, you can expert third parties to develop Android SDK plug-ins for other IDEs. Objective-C, used almost nowhere outside Apple, is required for iPhone UI development, while app-level Android programming is done in Java. 'By just about any measure, Google's Android is more open and developer-friendly than the iPhone,' McAllister writes, noting Apple's gag order restrictions on documentation, proprietary software requirements to view training videos, and right to reject your finished app from the sole distribution channel for iPhone. This openness is, of course, essential to Android's prospects. 'Based on raw market share alone, the iPhone seems likely to remain the smartphone developer's platform of choice — especially when ISVs can translate that market share into application sales,' McAllister writes. 'Sound familiar? In this race, Apple is taking a page from Microsoft's book, while Google looks suspiciously like Linux.'"

netbuzz writes "Someone finally took the time to do a count of all the Google apps marked 'beta.' And with fully 45% of its products carrying that familiar tag — including 4-year-old Gmail — Google says there's an explanation: Beta doesn't mean to them what it has long meant to the rest of the tech community. 'We believe beta has a different meaning when applied to applications on the Web,' says a company spokesman."

Technologizer writes "They add insult to injury — and computing wouldn't be the same without 'em. So I rounded up a baker's dozen of the most important error messages in computing history — from Does Not Compute to Abort, Retry, Fail to the Sad Mac to the big kahuna of them all — the mighty Blue Screen of Death. And just in case my judgment is off, I include a poll to let the rest of the world vote for the greatest error message of all." I can't believe that "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that" didn't make the list.

Cory Foy writes "As developers, system admins, and a variety of other roles in IT, we have to deal with code on a daily basis. Sometimes it's just one-off scripts we never have to see again. Sometimes we stare at something that, for the life of us, we can't understand how it came out of a human mind (or, as the book puts it, has a high WTF/minute count). But there is a time when you find code that is a joy to use, to read and to understand. Clean Code sets out to help developers write that third kind of code through a series of essay-type chapters on a variety of topics. But does it really help?" Read below to find out.

recoiledsnake writes "Another submission has been rejected from the iPhone App Store, this time for 'duplicating the functionality of the iPhone Mail application.' The author claims that his application allows the user to log into their multiple web email accounts and that Apple seems to be confusing Gmail and Mail.app. This comes on the heels of Apple rejecting an application for competing with iTunes and rejecting other silly but harmless apps as being of 'limited utility.'" ComputerWorld has an update to the rejected Podcaster app mentioned above. It seems the developer has used Apple's "Ad Hoc" service to begin distributing the software despite the fact that they blocked it from the App Store.

Shin-LaC writes "In a post on their official blog, WebKit developers introduced the 'next generation' of their JavaScript engine, SquirrelFish Extreme, claimed to be twice as fast as its predecessor. The post lists several changes contributing to the performance improvements, including 'bytecode optimization,' a 'polymorphic inline cache' (which sounds similar to V8's 'hidden class transitions'), and a 'context threaded JIT' compiler which generates native code (currently only for x86 processors), and is also applied to regular expressions. The new JavaScript engine is already available in the latest WebKit nightly builds. According to comparative benchmarks, the new engine is around 35% faster than the V8 engine recently introduced in Google Chrome, and 55% faster than Mozilla's TraceMonkey."

Hugh Pickens writes "Although Turing Award-winning computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra once said, 'the use of Cobol cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense,' Michael Swaine has an interesting entry to Dr. Dobb's Journal asserting that Cobol is the most widely used language in the 21st century, critical to some of the hottest areas of software development today, and may be the next language you'll be learning. In 1997, the Gartner Group estimated that there were 240 billion lines of Cobol code in active apps, and billions of lines of new Cobol code are being written every year. Cobol is a key element in the realization of modern distributed business software architecture concepts — XML/metadata, Web Services, Service Oriented Architecture — and e-business."

Da Massive writes "Techworld has an in-depth chat with Simon Peyton-Jones about the development of Haskell and his philosophy of do one thing, and do it well. Peyton-Jones describes his interest in lazy functional programming languages, and chats about their increasing relevance in a world with rapidly increasing multi-core CPUs and clusters. 'I think Haskell is increasingly well placed for this multi-core stuff, as I think people are increasingly going to look to languages like Haskell and say 'oh, that's where we can get some good ideas at least', whether or not it's the actual language or concrete syntax that they adopt.'"

Howling writes "I've been a PHP programmer for a few years and after taking a trip through many sites Ive learned that www.php.net is probably the most complete source when looking for information/documentation. I have been trying to find similar sites for every other language (Java, perl or ASP, for instance) without equal success, though. I ask: what is the best documentation/reference site for your preferred programming language?"

Gamasutra is running a story about how the "hard" modes in games can be designed to include difficulty, but not frustration. They give some examples of the changes made to several games as their difficulty settings are increased, and they discuss some of the simple options, such as increasing the number of required button presses, or increasing the relevant numbers by an arbitrary amount (a boss on easy may hit you for 10 damage, whereas a boss on hard may act the same but hit you for 100 damage). They also talk about maintaining the "illusion of fairness." Quoting: "Bungie's Halo series is often praised for its excellent execution of difficult play in the form of its Legendary mode. Not surprisingly, the team took a very well-thought out approach to introducing and tuning difficult play. Halo 3 gameplay designer Francois Boucher-Genesse explains that it's not just a case of one formula fits all. 'It's not like we just cranked every enemy's health by 200% and called it Legendary,' he said. 'There was a good amount of custom changes made per mission as well. In that sense we encourage players with previous Halo experience to play at least on Heroic, since they get to see the game in its full scale.'"

guzzibill writes "Joel Spolsky has announced the beta release of Stack Overflow, intended to be a high-quality source of answers to software questions. Post a software question and watch the answers flow in. Popularity voting is very much woven into the site, where both questions and answers can be edited for clarity and voted up or down for correctness. Correctly posed questions and insightful answers float to the top. This site has reached critical mass." From Joel's description, he was envisioning a source of technical Q&A about programming. So far, many of the questions are broader and less technical, such as advice on the best book about software development. It will be interesting to see where the community that's forming takes it.