bluephone writes "Today AMD announced that they're now opening the source to the AMD Performance Library (APL) under the Apache license. The newly opened code is now hosted at SourceForge (the corporate overlord of Slashdot) under its new name, Framewave. Phoronix says, "The AMD Performance Library / Framewave covers a multitude of operations from simple math operations to media processing and optimizations for multi-core environments." No word as to if it does your laundry. The SourceForge page says that while Framewave is 'sponsored' by AMD, it is "very much an open-source venture. While AMD will continue to participate in and contribute to the project, third-party developers are welcome and encouraged to implement all or part of the code base and/or to create derivative works." Being Apache licensed, it's quite open, so this doesn't seem to be mere lip service."

An anonymous reader writes "When Richard Feynman investigated the Challenger disaster as a member of the Rogers Commission, he issued a scathing report containing brilliant, insightful commentary on the nature of engineering. This short essay relates Feynman's commentary to modern software development."

Microsoft has released documentation on their Office binary formats. Before jumping up and down gleefully, those working on related open source efforts, such as OpenOffice, might want to take a very close look at Microsoft's Open Specification Promise to see if it seems to cover those working on GPL software; some believe it doesn't. stm2 points us to some good advice from Joel Spolsky to programmers tempted to dig into the spec and create an Excel competitor over a weekend that reads and writes these formats: find an easier way. Joel provides some workarounds that render it possible to make use of these binary files. "[A] normal programmer would conclude that Office's binary file formats: are deliberately obfuscated; are the product of a demented Borg mind; were created by insanely bad programmers; and are impossible to read or create correctly. You'd be wrong on all four counts."

An anonymous reader writes "Last week the Software Freedom Law Center published A Legal Issues Primer for Open Source and Free Software Projects. The primer, written for developers, has sections on copyrights, trademarks, patents, and organizational structure. Linux-Watch has reviewed the guide, saying 'I think any open-source developer or open-source group administrator must read this paper.'"

beuges writes "The Associated Press is reporting that Microsoft will make full versions of their development tools available to students. "The Redmond-based software maker said late Monday it will let students download Visual Studio Professional Edition, a software development environment; Expression Studio, which includes graphic design and Web site and hybrid Web-desktop programming tools; and XNA Game Studio 2.0, a video game development program. Gates said students will want to try Microsoft's tools because they're more powerful than the open-source combination of Linux-based operating systems, the Apache Web server, the MySQL database and the PHP scripting language used to make complex Web sites. But Gates said giving away Microsoft software isn't intended to turn students against open source software entirely. Rather, he hopes it will just add one more tool to their belt.""

Tendraes brings us a story about legal experts who are warning that Microsoft's "covenant not to sue" over use of the OOXML specification is both ambiguous and untested. Developers wishing to make use of OOXML are unlikely to understand the complex legal language of the Open Specification Promise, and such a document - being neither a release nor a contract - has never been tested in court. From ZDNet Asia: "David Vaile, executive director of the Cyberspace Law and Policy Center at the University of New South Wales, said that Microsoft participants at a recent symposium on the issue found it challenging to explain how an ordinary person 'or even an ordinary lawyer' could easily determine which parts of the specification were covered. 'This lack of certainty would mean a cautious lawyer may be reluctant to advise any third party to rely on the promise without extensive and potentially quite expensive analysis, and even that could be inconclusive,' Vaile said. 'In turn, this could restrict its viability as a usable standard for less well-resourced users, including small developers and many public organizations.'"

The Narrative Fallacy brings us a story about a project by University of Alabama researchers to develop a database capable of anticipating targets for future guerrilla attacks. Quoting Space War: "Adversaries the US currently faces in Iraq rely on surprise and apparent randomness to compensate for their lack of organization, technology, and firepower. 'One way to combat these attacks is to identify trends in the attackers' methods, then use those trends to predict their future actions,' said UA-Huntsville researcher Wes Colley. 'Some trends from these attacks show important day-to-day correlations. If we can draw inferences from those correlations, then we may be able to save lives by heightening awareness of possible events or changing the allocation of our security assets to provide more protection.' Researchers reviewed the behavior signatures of terrorists on 12,000 attacks between 2003 and mid-2007 to calculate relative probabilities of future attacks on various target types."

An anonymous reader writes "In a similar vein to the previous discussion about the New York professors taking Java to task for damaging Computer Science education, Mike Anderson of the PTR group wonders why it's so hard to find good embedded developers these days. 'As for today's CS programs, it seems that long gone are the computer architecture classes, writing code in assembly language (or even C at this point) and engineering software economics. In fact, a large number of CS majors apparently believe that everything can be implemented in a virtual machine and that both memory and [CPU] cycles are infinite.'"

performance geek writes "LLVM 2.2 was released yesterday! This is the thirteenth public release of the open-source compiler that started as a GCC fork. LLVM supports several aggressive optimizations, in compile-, link- and run-time, and often produces faster (1.5-3x) code than GCC. It is also much faster than GCC at compiling (despite the slow link-time optimizations). Gentoo users are already trying to build the whole system with the LLVM toolchain to get the extra performance bit."

Meredith writes "This is a great interview with Joel Spolsky of Fog Creek Software. Joel talks about the negatives of taking money from venture capitalists, and how the entrepreneurs that don't take money become 'super entrepreneurs,' learning how to make something significant out of nothing. This is a very popular interview among tech entrepreneurs and provides really valuable information for startups."

eldavojohn writes "It's a common string you see at the start of an HTML document, a URI declaring the type of document, but that is often processed causing undue traffic to W3C's site. There's a somewhat humorous post today from W3.org that seems to be a cry for sanity and asking developers and people to stop building systems that automatically query this information. From their post, 'In particular, software does not usually need to fetch these resources, and certainly does not need to fetch the same one over and over! Yet we receive a surprisingly large number of requests for such resources: up to 130 million requests per day, with periods of sustained bandwidth usage of 350Mbps, for resources that haven't changed in years. The vast majority of these requests are from systems that are processing various types of markup (HTML, XML, XSLT, SVG) and in the process doing something like validating against a DTD or schema. Handling all these requests costs us considerably: servers, bandwidth and human time spent analyzing traffic patterns and devising methods to limit or block excessive new request patterns. We would much rather use these assets elsewhere, for example improving the software and services needed by W3C and the Web Community.' Stop the insanity!"

An anonymous reader writes "Local search engine company, Zvents, has released an open source distributed data storage system based on Google's released design specs. 'The new software, Hypertable, is designed to scale to 1000 nodes, all commodity PCs [...] The Google database design on which Hypertable is based, Bigtable, attracted a lot of developer buzz and a "Best Paper" award from the USENIX Association for "Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data" a 2006 publication from nine Google researchers including Fay Chang, Jeffrey Dean, and Sanjay Ghemawat. Google's Bigtable uses the company's in-house Google File System for storage.'"

An anonymous reader writes "How will you use XML in years to come? The wheels of progress turn slowly, but turn they do. The outline of XML's future is becoming clear. The exact timeline is a tad uncertain, but where XML is going isn't. XML's future lies with the Web, and more specifically with Web publishing. 'Word processors, spreadsheets, games, diagramming tools, and more are all migrating into the browser. This trend will only accelerate in the coming year as local storage in Web browsers makes it increasingly possible to work offline. But XML is still firmly grounded in Web 1.0 publishing, and that's still very important.'"

An anonymous reader writes "I have code that I've written for my current company that I'd like to open-source. The only problem is that my company has the usual clause that says that anything I write belongs to them. Now that they've decided to abandon my code for another product that replaces its function, I'd like to continue working on my project as well as open it up to the world. The easy part is cleaning it up and posting it on SourceForge and Freshmeat. The hard part is making sure that I am free of any legal complications in the future. I've looked online to try to find a legal document I could present to my employer to get them to sign off on it, but I'm not having any luck. Has anyone else been in this boat or can refer me to some legal documentation that may help out?"

JonRob writes "The first development snapshot of Fedora 9 (Sulphur) has been released, providing both a KDE and a GNOME live CD. This is the first of three test releases before the final version of Fedora 9 this April. The alpha features many changes including KDE 4 by default, GNOME 2.21.4, support for creation of encrypted partitions and for resizing EXT2/EXT3/NTFS partitions during install, speed improvements to X, the Linux 2.6.24 kernel, and much more."

The Association for Computing Machinery has announced the 2008 Turing Award Winners. Edmund M. Clarke, Allen Emerson, and Joseph Sifakis received the award for their work on an automated method for finding design errors in computer hardware and software. "Model Checking is a type of "formal verification" that analyzes the logic underlying a design, much as a mathematician uses a proof to determine that a theorem is correct. Far from hit or miss, Model Checking considers every possible state of a hardware or software design and determines if it is consistent with the designer's specifications. Clarke and Emerson originated the idea of Model Checking at Harvard in 1981. They developed a theoretical technique for determining whether an abstract model of a hardware or software design satisfies a formal specification, given as a formula in Temporal Logic, a notation for describing possible sequences of events. Moreover, when the system fails the specification, it could identify a counterexample to show the source of the problem. Numerous model checking systems have been implemented, such as Spin at Bell Labs."

jadavis writes "The release of the long-awaited PostgreSQL version 8.3 has been announced. The new feature list includes HOT, which dramatically improves performance for databases with high update activity; asynchronous commit; built-in full text search; large database features such as synchronized scans and reduced storage overhead; built-in SQL/XML support; spread checkpoints; and many more (too many major new features to list here). See the release notes for full details."

Jonathan Wise writes to share with us an interesting bit of prose describing life as a software engineer. "I am, in the States, known as a Software Engineer. In Canada we're not allowed to call ourselves engineers, although the discipline is no less rigorous than any other kind of engineering. But perhaps its for the best, because 'engineering' describes only a part of what I do. A software developer must be part writer and poet, part salesperson and public speaker, part artist and designer, and always equal parts logic and empathy."

Open Standard Lover writes "XMPP (eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) has been getting a lot of attention during the last month and it seems that the protocol is finally taking off as a general purpose glue to build distributed web applications. It has been covered that AOL was experimenting with an XMPP gateway for its instant messaging platform. XMPP has been designed since the beginning as an open technology for generalized XML routing. However, the idea of an XMPP application server is taking shape and getting supporters. A recent example shows that ejabberd XMPP server can be used to develop a distributed Twitter-like system."

nushoin writes "Gnome and KDE are the two major desktop environments used on Linux today. However, Gnome is growing more and more affiliated with Microsoft's proprietary technologies (Mono, OOXML). Targeting the Gnome desktop environment could prove dangerous in the long run, assuming that one would like its applications to run on distributions other than SuSE. On the other hand, TrollTech is being bought by Nokia, whose commitment to the desktop world remains to be proven. Assuming that one would like to develop a desktop application (either free or closed source), which desktop environment would you target, and what widget tool kit would you use?"