An anonymous reader writes "Many enterprise Java technology developers build their own object management infrastructures to improve application performance. However, traditional object pools encounter problems in applications that run across distributed JVMs on multiple physical machines. In this article, Zhengrong Tang presents an object management framework that uses the concept of scopes to handle distributed systems with ease."

pvdabeel writes "Gentoo/PPC developer, IBM employee and former PPC64 kernel maintainer Tom Gall has announced beta-level live CDs and stages for ppc64. The hardware supported by gentoo-ppc64 is PowerMacintosh G5, IBM pSeries, older IBM 64 bit RS/6000s (such as the model 260, 270, F80, H80, see linuxppc64.org for a complete list) and soon IBM iSeries hardware. Gentoo-ppc64 is the other side of the ppc equation, it is a 64-bit kernel as well as a 64 bit user space. We are the first linux distribution to offer a 64-bit top-to-bottom solution which is not a toy environment. This is a significant and exciting step as there is interest in cluster computing circles, users of java, and more generally those who have needs of large address spaces. It's fairly exciting to be on the forefront and continue to push the capabilities of linux on ppc64 forward."

theodp writes "Wired picks up on the observation made by Jason Fried that more and more sites and tools are launching and remaining in 'beta' mode. Prominent sites like Google News, A9, Froogle, Friendster, Tribe, and Orkut all sport 'Beta' disclaimers. Is this to get users to do the testing, a subtle way of saying 'don't expect support', or simply a marketing ploy to generate buzz by making users feel 'exclusive'?"

mAsterdam writes "At his code blog Mark Lentcner writes: "A while back, I saw Larry Wall give a short talk about the current design of Perl 6. At some point he put up a list of all the operators - well over a hundred of them! I had a sudden inspiration, but it took a few months to get around to drawing it..." You might want to take a look at this and think about which operators are yet to be discovered."

Dcoder writes "The MPC codec has finally completed its transition to the open source world by making Musepack.net its new official home, featuring a complete collection of tools, plug-ins and codec binaries (Linux, Win32 and Mac OS X) and the sourcecode to the complete SV7-1.15r codec source. Additionally, Peter Pawlowski has recently completed his work on an LGPL-licensed portable mpcdec library, which comes with floating and fixed-point math modes and performs at around 10x realtime on a Intel XScale 400Mhz and is even fast enough to bring MPC decoding to slower ARM chips like the iPod's ARMv4. Musepack's outstanding quality has been proven only recently by a public listening test."

AciDive asks: "I am currently working on developing a game and I want to use OpenAL for the sound. I have downloaded the SDK and currently have it working with Dev-C++. The reference documentation that comes with the SDK is good but it leaves something to be desired. What I would like to know is has anyone here on Slashdot ever done any sound programming with OpenAL and if so what resources did you use to get yourself started?"

ryen writes "Designed to compete against MS Office, EIOffice 2004 is coded in Java therefore able to run on both Windows and Linux. EIOffice 2004 offers features which should get a few users' attention, but does it have enough to have people switching from MS Office? Flexbeta has the review." That's Evermore Integrated Office, if you're wondering.

akahige writes "Fresh from the debunking of the 'Linus couldn't possibly have written an OS without ripping someone off' book published by the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution, Tanenbaum has published an email he got from the consultant hired to do the code comparison between MINIX and Linux. Among other juicy comments, 'pay no attention to this man.' (There was no stolen code, either.) In related matters, ESR was apparently sent a pre-release excerpt of the book which he completely eviscerates with his usual zeal. Another story on NewsForge." See our previous stories if you're coming to this late.

beelsebob writes "Rosyna, the famously tellytubby-like Unsanity Developer has spoken out in the defense of their Application Enhancer (APE) framework. The framework has taken a beating since it came out, being accused of being spyware, or of crashing computers. In fact Unsanity have only received one bug report about APE itself, which was promptly fixed. The article is a very good defence of the product, and a very good read."

An anonymous reader writes "According to a CNET News article: 'Oracle will finish switching its 9,000-person in-house programming staff to Linux by the end of 2004, the database powerhouse said Wednesday. In October, the company finished the Linux transition for the 5,000 programmers of its Oracle Applications software. Now the transformation has begun for those who work on the database product, said Wim Coekaerts, director of Linux engineering, in an interview at the CeBit trade show in New York.'"

Alex_Ionescu writes "WineHQ brings us the scoop on the latest developments in ReactOS, as well as on Steven Edward's excellent job on porting Wine to MingGW and linking the two platforms together. This is an interesting insight into the WINE and ReactOS project, and a must-read for anyone interested into the future of Windows-replacement projects like these."

Anonymous Cowardly Lion writes "An interesting article written by a professor at the University of Toronto argues that next-generation programming systems will combine compilers, linkers, debuggers, and that other tools will be plugin frameworks [mirror], rather than monolithic applications. Programmers will be able to extend the syntax of programming languages, and programs will be stored as XML documents so that programmers can represent and process data and meta-data uniformly. It's a very insightful and thought-provoking read. Is this going to be the next generation of extensible programming?"

jvsanford writes "Three Old Dominion University (ODU) computer science professors plan to develop a 'deep' web search engine that searches digital libraries and collections that expose their metadata via the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). In addition, they are also planning to develop an Apache module, mod_oai, that will increase the number of people who can export their metadata and resources via OAI-PMH."

Spencerian writes "Aaron Hillegass new book, Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X, 2nd Edition, is a very helpful book for developers interested in getting not only their feet wet, but become totally immersed in creating applications using the OpenStep-derived API known now as Cocoa. Don't dive in without knowing how to swim in C++/Java, however." Read on for the rest of Spencer's review.

podo asks: "I've spent the past two months of my life working almost full time on a PHP/MySQL based web site for a client. Today I received an e-mail from the client point me to a similar web site set up by a competitor. 'Doing exactly what we are doing.' The site in question is not doing what we are doing, they have no dynamic content, no web forms, just e-mail addresses. They scarcely have any content (I counted only four HTML pages) at all. The client is chastising me for taking a long time and because the other site is 'much more impressive visually' than ours. Has anyone else found themselves in a situation where their painstaking work is compared to work which is a showcase for mediocrity? How have you dealt with such clients who fail to see the difference between a shoddy rush job and real quality?"

JimCricket writes "There's an interesting piece at Download Aborted about using distributed computing (a la SETI@Home, Grid.org, etc.) in the film industry. With the recent release of Shrek 2, which required a massive amount of CPU time to complete, one must wonder why the film industry doesn't solicit help from their fans. I'd gladly trade some spare CPU time in exchange for the coolness of seeing a few frames of Shrek 3 rendered on my screensaver!"

Alex Garrett writes "First, a quibble. Hardcore Java is not hardcore. Hardcore is implementing coroutines in assembly language or creating a full-fledged OO system in 6K. But if you ignore the title and judge the book solely on its merits you'll find that a Java novice will find a good selection of interesting topics and even an expert will learn a few things. The expert will also find plenty of things to disagree with -- some matters of opinion and others of fact." With that start, read on for the rest of Garrett's review of Hardcore Java, a book in which he finds slightly more worth for Java novices than experts.

Robert Accettura writes "According to ZDNet, Microsoft may be feeling threatened by Linux gaining ground in the High Performance Computing (HPC) arena. As a result, they have formed a HPC group to bring windows to these systems. It makes a mention of how clustered computing may be a target. I guess the only thing better than crashing 1 computer at a time is crashing an entire room full at once."

AllMightyPaul writes "Last Friday, the Mozilla Organization announced Mozilla 1.8a. You can download Mozilla 1.8 alpha (with torrents available) from the Mozilla public FTP server. Features include a basic upload FTP UI, improved junk mail filtering, and the number of cookies that Mozilla can hold has also increased 'dramatically.' What's amazing is that they haven't even released Mozilla 1.7 yet. Here I thought that Mozilla was going to standardize on 1.7."

Orbital Sander writes "According to the Apache News Blog, the Geronimo project has voted in favor of applying to be a top-level Apache project. Geronimo aims "to produce a large and healthy community of J2EE developers tasked with the development of an open source, certified J2EE server, that is ASF licensed and passes Sun's TCK reusing the best ASF/BSD licensed code available today and adding new code to complete the J2EE stack." So far, Geronimo has lived in the Apache Incubator."