yfnET writes "In recent weeks, The Economist has run a number of articles addressing the ever-increasing complexity of software systems. The magazine, with typical Economist wisdom, casts an eye towards past human endeavors for lessons on how today's IT industry can succeed in dealing with complexity. As part of last month's extensive survey of information technology (see Related Items sidebar), the magazine offers insight on the limits of real-world metaphors, the perils of managing a rat's nest of obsolescent systems, and the need for 'disappearing' technology. And hitting newsstands just today is an overview of development models for increasingly large and unwieldy software projects. Among other things, this article compares the open source model to Microsoft's efforts using a quasi-open license. It also describes the 'agile' programming movement and its potential to keep even the most gigantic of projects under control."

rvannieuwpoort writes "Ibis 1.0 has been released. Ibis is a flexible and efficient Java-based programming environment for Grid computing. Ibis improves Java's serialization and RMI performance up to a factor of 10. It also extends Java with a range of communication paradigms, including group communication, divide-and-conquer and collective communication. An additional nice feature of Ibis is that it can communicate through firewalls, without opening ports, using TCP. Ibis is free software (BSD-style license). It runs on any platform that has a Java 1.4 or higher JVM."

Biomemetic writes "Valve announced yesterday that they'll be releasing the Source SDK next week, along with a "surprise for the community". Incidentally, the sound stuttering bug (actually three bugs, to do with texture loading problems), has been solved and an update released through Steam." Relatedly, Highpriest writes "According to gamerankings.com, Half Life 2's average review is higher than Halo 2's. Half Life 2 has recieved a 96.6% overall rating wheras Halo 2 came in with a 95.1%."

ZX81 writes "We've just completed an interview with Mark Spencer AKA Markster, the creator of Asterisk (an Open Source PBX replacement running on Linux). He details the start of the Asterisk project and the direction for the future."

tbirdsaw writes "I was browsing for information on how to run Linux on the PS2 without a Linux Kit (they've stopped selling them in the U.S., AFAIK). While searching, I stumbled across Sony's Open Source Code website. They have quite a few products that run an embedded linux system, including some professional video switchers (MVS8000?) and at least several of their relatively new XDCAM disc-based video format decks. Might make for some hardware/firmware hacking in the near future?"

An anonymous reader writes "From the OOo site: 'OpenOffice.org 2.0 is coming fast and it needs a new splashscreen. You can help. Send us your best by 10 December and it might be seen on the desktops of tens upon tens of millions next year.' For more information, visit the OpenOffice.org website."

TuringTest writes "The webzine User Instinct carries an article on Usable GUI Design showing that good user interfaces are not beyond the means of free and open software development: 'This article presents five key points of user interface design [...] that any software developer should be able to use.' In related news, The Economist writes against software complexity in an interview to MIT's John Maeda, PhD in interface design. See also OpenUsability, a project for testing user interfaces in a bazaar-like model. The specifics of UI design in Open Source projects has been previously debated on Slashdot."

comforteagle writes "In the aftermath of our last interview with Tom Lord, regardless of personalities, it became apparent that the idea of decentralizing CVS is a big deal. Many mentioned darcs as an alternative to Arch. Mark Stosberg has interviewed project head-hancho David Roundy about darcs, his 'theory of patches,' what's next, and on using Haskell for the project."

James Edward Gray II writes "Beginning Perl (Second Edition) is a well named text that starts exactly where it claims. It assumes no prior knowledge of Perl or of programming in general. If that describes your needs, this book is a fine place to start." Read on for the rest of Gray's review.

TrippTDF writes "I just took a new job at a small software company as an assistant project manager. While I have a little management experience, none of it is related to software. What advice can you guys give me on not becoming a PHB? What are qualities that you wish your manager(s) had?"

An anonymous reader writes "This study compares the real-time capabilities of various Linux kernels. It was part of a project to upgrade the control software in water-wave generators at research institutions around the world. The results of the study were used by Akamina for the selection of a new RTOS for the control system upgrade of Canada's largest hydraulics and coastal engineering laboratory, the National Research Council Canadian Hydraulics Centre in Ottawa."

sombragris points out this interview on OfB, excerpting "Open for Business Associate Editor Eduardo Sánchez sits down with Scott Wheeler, creator and lead developer of JuK, and a member of the KDE Multimedia Team, to find out where the KDE multimedia department is headed in general, and concerning a replacement for aRts, more specifically."

DrWho520 points out this report at silicon.com which begins "A flaw in Sun's plug-in for running Java on a variety of browsers and operating systems could allow a virus to spread through Microsoft Windows and Linux PCs. The vulnerability, found by Finnish security researcher Jouko Pynnonen in June, was patched last month by Sun, but its details were not made public until Tuesday." The hole affects Linux and Windows.

bababooey182 writes "The Programmer of the Month (POTM) contest series has returned. POTM was a fantastic programming contest series that ran from 1993 to 2000, and participants were greatly disappointed when it ended. Fred Hicinbothem, the brains and personality behind the POTM, brought it back a few months ago, and the POTM has the same community feel that it did back in the day. Here's to another long run. The current contest deadline is November 30th."

Crow writes "IBM developerWorks has posted an interview with John McCalpin, one of the guys who works on the POWER line of processors. He discusses work on POWER5 (and how the design process works at IBM -- he's also involved in work on the POWER7) and defends the decision that IBM doesn't hand-tune their ICs (as has often been criticized on Ars Technica. Also covers some of the features in the POWER processors, like SMT, the Hypervisor and virtualization -- even addresses the question of whether AIX was designed by space aliens or not. The POWER5 just broke the 3 million transactions per minute barrier on the TPC-C benchmark."

asa writes "Today we've shipped the latest Alpha release on the road to Mozilla 1.8. With nearly 600 bug fixes since Alpha 5, A6 contains some exciting new Gecko work. You can help the Mozilla team as we drive toward 1.8 by downloading and testing this release. Get the release builds and notes at mozilla.org."

Craig Maloney writes "I'm skeptical whenever a publisher uses the words 'Definitive,' or 'Complete,' or (especially) 'Ultimate' in the title of a computer book. Sadly, the typical book so labeled is a jumble of incomplete ideas crammed together with very little depth. Worse, some books do little more than re-print the various command-line switches for the application. Michael Kofler's The Definitive Guide to MySQL (2nd ed.) is just the opposite. There're still lots of ideas crammed inside of the book, but they're carefully explained and expanded. The book weighs in at a hefty 802 pages, with very little fluff. " Read on for the rest of Maloney's review.

Carlos Camacho writes "Programmers new to the Mac platform, as well as newbie Mac coders often ask (or complain) about available development tools. Most often, Apple's Xcode is recommended since it is free, and a pretty slick package. For cross-platform work, Metrowerks CodeWarrior series has been with us since the early PowerPC days, and is very flexible in its support for multi-platforms. But with if you want to work in a language other than Objective-C,C, C++ or Java? Or learn an entirely new language? How does the Macintosh fare? iDevGames, a site devoted to Mac game developers, has put together a list of "alternative" development tools for Mac OS X. A good number of the tools listed are either free, or low-cost. So, if you're interested in playing around with Lua, Ruby, something similar to HyperCard, or one of the many BASICs, check out "Alternative Development Systems for the Mac.""

An anonymous reader writes "Multithreading and concurrency are nothing new, but one of the innovations of the Java language design was that it was the first mainstream programming language to incorporate a cross-platform threading model and formal memory model directly into the language specification. While this simplifies the development of platform-independent concurrent classes, it by no means makes writing concurrent classes trivial -- just easier."

jg21 writes "LinuxWorld draws attention to a curious use of ESR's The Cathedral and the Bazaar by the Sun Microsystems exec who currently talks about Linux more than he does even about Java. Apparently Sun's President and COO Jonathan Schwartz said at a press briefing last week that Java with its JCP is more like ESR's Bazaar than Linux, which he dismissed as being "awfully cathedral-like" since Linus is the final arbiter (or Great Dictator), and not a committee." But be sure you don't mis-use the word Java in this Bazaar or the Mall Police will totally get you.