Ben Rothke writes "Outsource: Competing in the Global Productivity Race is a persuasive overview of the outsourcing phenomenon. Author Edward Yourdon's premise is that outsourcing is not going to disappear anytime soon, and -- given the success that many companies have begun enjoying during the past few years -- it is not likely to level off anytime soon. Outsourcing is now a mainstream phenomenon and is affecting more and more workers, in nearly every knowledge-based sector. In a nutshell, this is Yourdon's book of how to prepare yourself for the inevitable." Read on for the rest of Rothke's review, as well as Jason Bennett's different take on the book.

Masa writes "SuperSite for Windows has a nice interview called "Windows XP Service Pack 2: The Inside Story". The interview gives a good insight, what kind of a project the Service Pack 2 was, how it got started and how huge effort it actually was." The ITMJ Product Guide is part of OSTG, as is Slashdot.

Anonymous Coward asks: "It would seem that naught but its developers themselves like the GIMP's UI. How would you like the GIMP to look? Reply with links to GIMPed (or Photoshopped, if you swing that way) screenshots. Individual features, the menu structure, or (preferably) default workspaces after you open up a blank new canvas." With the release of version 2.2 in the bag, 2.3 development should now be in full swing. What aspects of the interface do you think the GIMP team should make for the next release and for future relases down the line?

patonw asks: "I just started working for a company as a programmer on a project with a huge existing codebase. The person hiring me half-jokingly said that it usually takes new employees two years before they understand the system. What I am looking for is not just an editor/browser but a program that displays functions and classes as connected graphs -- preferably free. I would like to view how programs are structured by function calls and class relations. I have access to several different kinds of platforms/operating systems."

stas writes "After almost 3 years of work mod_perl 2 is almost ready for its 2.0.0 release. We plan to make the gold release in a few weeks. Please help to test the release candidates by starting to port your mod_perl 1 applications to mod_perl 2. Make sure to read the documentation and report any problems that you may have discovered. Thanks."

Bert690 writes "To complement the recent dissection of Google Suggest's innovative front end, I investigated [Coral Link & mirror] the back end of the system in an effort to determine just how it generates suggestions. Along with some preliminary findings, you'll find a pointer to a program for enumerating all possible suggestions from a given starting point. I found the number of possible suggestions to be surprisingly small considering the immense scope of the web."

scc writes "Get it here. Trolltech's press release gives the details, including the projected release date: late first quarter 2005. Qt is the cross-platform GUI framework at the heart of KDE. At the same time, Trolltech released under the GPL Qtopia 2.1, an implementation of their GUI framework for Linux-based PDAs."

An anonymous reader asks: "Our small southern shop (an eleven man team) is about to commence development on some medical software geared for physician's offices and hospitals. Since we have never developed in this area before (our primary source of income comes from developing software for regional transportation offices of the government) we are at loss for the reigning technologies. The two technologies we are considering are J2EE and .NET. What are the opinions of the Slashdot crowd? Surely others have developed for the monstrous healthcare industry. Thanks!"

Proph3t writes "The up and coming operating system, SkyOS has just announced the ports of Thunderbird and Firefox, both in their 1.0 stable versions. Moreover, they will be releasing a 30-page guide on how to port these two excellent Mozilla applications to alternative operating systems soon."

gavinroy writes "As can be seen at PostgreSQL, the PostgreSQL www team has released the new version of the site sporting a new clean and more professional look. This is hot on the heels of PostgreSQL 8.0 RC2 which includes numerous bug fixes and is one step closer to production ready PostgreSQL on the Win32 platform." Neil Bahroos points out this ZDNet article on the upcoming 8.0 release.

J. Misael G. points out a NewsForge article on recent moves by some database vendors to loudly release (some of) their products as open source, asking the vital question "How much open source beer are these newcomers bringing to the database bash, or are they simply coming in and asking where the cups are?" (Slashdot and NewsForge are both part of OSTG.)

Arno contributes a link to Paint.NET, a free-of-charge raster-graphics program for Windows XP machines. "Quote: 'Paint.NET is image and photo manipulation software designed to be used on computers that run Windows XP. Paint.NET is jointly developed at Washington State University with additional help from Microsoft, and is meant to be a free replacement for the MS Paint software that comes with all Windows operating systems. The programming language used to create Paint.NET is C#, with GDI+ extensions.' It really seems like a nice tool. I definitely prefer its UI to GIMP's."

Python for Series 60 has been released on the Forum Nokia website. The release notes included in the package seem to give a fairly realistic image of the current status, and the demo apps and documentation seem to be quite good. The supplied documents even hint that there might be an OpenGL-API in the future. Alas, the emulator package seems to be for Windows only, as are the required S60 SDKs.

An anonymous reader writes "a consortium of European research institutions and open source software companies have paired up to manage the complexity of large scale, modular projects by establishing a program called EDOS, Environment for the Development and Distribution of Free Software. Planners intend to move away from centralized builds and storage to a distributed process, form a language-agnostic bug testing system and turn to theoretical computer science to safeguard dependencies."

avitzur writes with a link to the story behind the Macintosh Graphing Calculator. An excerpt from this strange account: "It's midnight. I've been working sixteen hours a day, seven days a week. I'm not being paid. In fact, my project was canceled six months ago, so I'm evading security, sneaking into Apple Computer's main offices in the heart of Silicon Valley, doing clandestine volunteer work for an eight-billion-dollar corporation."

Robert Accettura writes "In a rather comical spirit, Seth Spitzer (of ex-Netscape fame) is asking Thunderbird users to donate one dollar (or about 0.77 if you're in Europe) to Scott and David, the lead engineers of Thunderbird. Unlike Firefox, with quite a large community submitting patches, Scott and David have been working with much less community aid, and still managed to deliver a very solid product. This is a little way to thank them for managing to do so much with so little to keep our inboxes free of spam and easy to use."

gManZboy writes "We've been hearing about self-healing systems for a while, but (as is usual), so far it's more hype than reality. Well it looks like Mike Shapiro (from Sun's Solaris Kernel group) has been doing a little actual work in this direction. His prognosis is that there's a long way to go before we get fully self-healing systems. In this article he talks a little bit about what he's done, points out some alternative approaches to his own, as well as what's left to do."

Robert Nagle writes "Over the last year, Zope and Plone have gained mindshare as open source web application servers. In the last few months, two books have come out about how to use, extend and administer Plone. One is Andy McKay's Definitive Guide to Plone (available for free online), and the other is Julie Meloni's Plone Content Management Essentials." Read on for Nagle's review of both books.

An anonymous reader writes "It seems like some of the members of the Apache Software Foundation are a little angry with the PHP Community because they don't recommend using Apache 2.0 with PHP. Since PHP is installed on half of all Apache servers this is a major issue for them. A number of high-profile PHP community members such as John Coggeshall and Chris Shiflett have blogged about this decision in light of a recent posting by Apache Software Foundation Member Rich Bowen which called PHP's anti-Apache2 stance FUD. Is there any real reason for the PHP community to start recommending Apache 2.0, especially when the 1.3.x series of Apache is rock solid and proven? Note Rich did later commend PHP for being a great product, so it's not all flames."

r3lody (Ray Lodato) writes "Just because Linux is under the GPL, some people believe that it's pretty standardized. Actually, each distro has its own little additions and, consequently, quirks. Writing an application to work reliably under all variations is not a slam-dunk. The Linux Standard Base Specification seeks to provide the common ground that all Linux apps should adhere to, and therefore make reasonably sure that they will work as advertised. Building Applications with the Linux Standard Base is a reference manual for application developers to make sure their programs will work across the Linux map." Read on for the rest of Lodato's review.