An anonymous reader writes "Sean Moss-Pultz has just announced on the OpenMoko mailing list that the Neo1973 is finally available for purchase. OpenMoko.com is now taking orders via credit card. OpenMoko intends to 'free your phone' through a hardware-independent and open source user interface backed by the Linux kernel. This device could very well stand as a competitor to the more expensive Apple iPhone, but at a fraction of the price and with no vendor lock-in. Although the devices in this release cycle (GTA01) are mainly intended for developers, the up-and-coming devices targeted to the consumer market (GTA02) will also feature WiFi capabilities, a 3D acceleration unit, and 256MB of on-board flash. Both units will use the MicroSD card interface for removable storage and have USB client / host capabilities. For a full feature list, check out OpenMoko.com or the OpenMoko Wiki."

Coryoth writes "A new book is trying to claim that computer science is better off without maths. The author claims that early computing pioneers such as Von Neumann and Alan Turing imposed their pure mathematics background on the field, and that this has hobbled computer science ever since. He rejects the idea of algorithms as a good way to think about software. Can you really do computer science well without mathematics? And would you want to?"

ThinkGeek writes "Dating back to the venerable DEC VT100, the 80 column terminal has served us well for over 25 years. Even now, many open source projects and common conventions require lines of code and documentation to fit on that terminal. I am not alone, judging by code I've seen in and out of the open source world, in finding that number insufficient for coding, much less more verbose writing. Given that modern graphical displays (and all popular editors) are capable of far more, is it time we came up with a new standard-sized terminal? If so, what should the new standard be?"

Jean-Marie Dautelle writes to inform us that the public review period ends on July 8 for JSR-275, "Measures and Units" Early Draft. The JSR-275 will be a major enhancement for Java 7 by providing "strong" typing (through class parameterization) and easy internationalization of Java programs, preventing conversion errors. The latest version 0.8 is available as a PDF. The reference implementation is provided by the JScience project under a BSD license."

foobarf00 writes "LinRails is a binary package that includes Ruby-1.8.6, Rubygems-0.9.4, Rails 1.2.3, Mongrel 1.0.1, MySQL-5.0.41, ncurses-5.6, OpenSSL-0.9.8e, and zlib-1.2.3. Its goal is to make it easy to get a Ruby on Rails development environment running in no time. This initial 0.1 release doesn't have a Web server in the package; opinions are solicited as to which to include."

An anonymous reader notes that InfoWorld is covering a survey of North American developers that claims that Linux is gaining share as the number of developers targeting Windows fell 11 percent over the last year. Evans Data has been conducting these surveys of client, server, and Web developers since 1998. Evans Data says that the arrival of Windows Vista likely only kept the numbers from being even worse. The big gainer wasn't developing for a Web platform, but rather for Linux and "nontraditional client devices." Windows is still dominant, with 65% of developers writing code for this platform. Linux stands at almost 12%, up from 8% a year earlier. The article says that Evans Data collected information on Mac and Unix development but did not include them in this year's report.

netbuzz writes "SAP's CEO Henning Kagermann uses the undoubtedly lawyered term 'inappropriate download' to describe the company's questionable actions. Henning blames a rogue business unit, but there can be no mistaking the fact that Oracle caught SAP with its hand in the IP jar on this one. The legal proceedings that will follow should prove interesting. 'The admission hurts SAP's reputation in the battle with Larry Ellison's Oracle in the $56 billion market for software that manages tasks such as payroll. The rivalry between SAP and Oracle escalated when Oracle filed its March 22 lawsuit claiming SAP workers hacked into a Web site and stole software codes on a grand scale.'"

jeebus writes "This week a Deloitte study has shown that high on the agenda of CEOs around the world is the shortage of tech talent. Is a shortage of talented geeks in the market seeing a return of the dot-com culture with foosball tables, beanbags, and inflated salaries used to entice talented workers? Welcome to Web 2.0 work culture, the future of yesterday. 'Global recruitment companies were telling prospecting employees that they were no longer going to be employed just because they were a technical guru. They were going to have to learn to dress, communicate, and adapt all the traditional corporate ideals that IT has been exempt from during the dot-com boom. Fast forward to Web 2.0 and while workplaces aren't as cheesy with their decor as they were were in the late '90s, and developers aren't getting paid $100K for being HTML and JavaScript jockeys, geeks just aren't chuffed with corporate culture.'"

E5Rebel noted that Don Marti has a piece that talks about "Core Linux developers are finding themselves managing and checking, rather than coding, as the number of kernel contributors grows and the contributor network becomes more complex."

JLester writes "Wired Magazine has an interview this month with Hans Reiser (of the ReiserFS journaling file system for Linux) from prison. It contains more details about the murder case against him. Some of the questions still go unanswered though."

Tathagata asks: "I'm a student, on my final year in a college in India, and I have been using GNU/Linux for quite sometime now. Though I'm from a Computer Science background, getting into a project that involves serious programming was not possible, as people (read teachers) run away if you utter the word 'Linux'. They are generally not bothered about mentoring someone on an exciting project, and they would suggest you to get settled with Visual Basic, .NET, — and would prefer a 24 hour solution when it comes to programming. So, my programming endeavors have remained limited to writing few lines of C/C++, or Java. For last few days, I've been googling, and trying to read how to join an existing Open Source project." What suggestions would you pass along to someone who is willing to join his first Open Source effort?

NewsCloud writes "After reading about the Facebook platform launch, I spent the next week learning the API and building my application. Facebook's platform has been pretty successful despite complaints of poor documentation, instability and outcries over its application approval process. I've been waiting two weeks for my application to be approved for their directory and had my account disabled (temporarily) after I invited a large number of colleagues. While I'm impressed with the potential of the platform, the experience has made me more concerned about the lack of transparency in privately held social networks and the risks we take as developers when we invest time in a company's platform. Facebook's home page advertises itself as "a social utility that connects you with the people around you." My concern with Facebook is that there's no one regulating the utility."

iPhoneLover/Hater writes "Gizmodo is running an article analyzing the potential failure of the iPhone as a truly revolutionary platform. The reason: no SDK to harness the true power of Mac OS X and the frameworks contained in Apple's smart cell. From the article: 'According to Apple, "no software developer kit is required for the iPhone." However, the truth is that the lack of an SDK means that there won't be a killer application for the iPhone. It also means the iPhone's potential as an amazing computing and communication platform will never be realized. And because of this and no matter how Apple tries to sell it, the iPhone won't make a revolution happen.'"

An anonymous reader writes "Via Wired, a blog post in which BMC Software's Whurley and Google's Greg Stein agree that the GPL v3 is currently on a path that will alienate developers. Stein has an interesting theory called 'license pressure' which is similar to 'pricing pressure'. 'Due to pressure from developers, all software is moving towards permissive licensing" translation, the GPL and developers are moving in opposite directions ... Developers care about the licenses on the software they use and incorporate into their projects, they like permissive licenses, and they will increasingly demand permissive licenses.'"

An anonymous reader writes "These newfangled memory-managed languages like Java and C# leave an old C++ dev like me feeling like I am missing the love. Are there any good C++ tools out there that do really good memory validation and heap checking? I have used BoundsChecker but I was looking for something a little faster. For my problem I happen to need something that will work on Windows XP 64. It's a legacy app so I can't just use Boosts' uber nifty shared_ptr. Thanks for any ideas."

Threaded writes with news from Ars that Intel has announced major updates to its C++ and Fortran tools. The new compilers are Intel's first that are capable of doing thread-level optimization and auto-vectorization simultaneously in a single pass. "On the data parallelism side, the Intel C++ Compiler and Fortran Professional Editions both sport improved auto-vectorization features that can target Intel's new SSE4 extensions. For thread-level parallelism, the compilers support the use of Intel's Thread Building Blocks for automatic thread-level optimization that takes place simultaneously with auto-vectorization... Intel is encouraging the widespread use of its Intel Threading Tools as an interface to its multicore processors. As the company raises the core count with each generation of new products, it will get harder and harder for programmers to manage the complexity associated with all of that available parallelism. So the Thread Building Blocks are Intel's attempt to insert a stable layer of abstraction between the programmer and the processor so that code scales less painfully with the number of cores."

An anonymous reader sends us to a blog posting (with the YouTube video embedded) about Linus Torvalds' talk at Google a few weeks back. Linus talked about developing GIT, the source control system used by the Linux kernel developers, and exhibited his characteristic strong opinions on subjects around SCM, by which he means "Source Code Management." SCM is a subject that coders are either passionate about or bored by. Linus appears to be in the former camp. Here is his take on Subversion: "Subversion has been the most pointless project ever started... Subversion used to say, 'CVS done right.' With that slogan there is nowhere you can go. There is no way to do CVS right."

Erebus writes "Jamie Cansdale released a free addin to Visual Studio back in 2004 to help developers build unit tests. His only problem was, he enable his addin for all versions of VS - including the Express addition which isn't suppose to support addins. After over a year of trying to talk with Microsoft and understand how and why he was in violation of their license agreement, during which they would never explain specifically which clause in the license was being violated, they sent the lawyers after him and pulled his MVP status. To top it all off, Jamie is actually a Java developer by day — his addin was originally developed just as a hobby project. A full account is available on his blog, including all email correspondence he had with Microsoft and the now 3 letters received from Microsoft lawyers. The lead product manager for Visual Studio Express has responded to Jamie's posts."

eldavojohn writes "A Microsoft executive announced that the next Windows will be fundamentally redesigned to handle the numerous cores of present and future processors. The article notes that the NT technology underneath Vista has been able to take advantage of multiple processors since 1993, and can now handle 32 or 64 cores. And since Microsoft completely rewrote the 20-year-old GDI/GDI+ model for Vista, what more can (or should) they parallelize? It will be interesting to see how Microsoft tackles the race conditions and deadlocks that come with pervasively multithreaded software and in the past complicated attempts (like that of BeOS) to utilize multiple CPUs. Do you think it's it a smart move to further complicate an operating system to take advantage of multiple cores, or should Microsoft stick to its knitting while applications take advantage of (possibly) more resources?"

Mister Inbetween writes "Google is rolling out a technology designed to overcome the major drawback faced by all web-based applications: the fact that they don't work without an internet connection. Google Gears is an open source technology for creating offline web applications that is being launched today at Google's annual Developer Day gatherings around the world."