Alexander Limi writes "Over a year in development, the Plone Team released the 30+ language strong Plone 2.0 to the public today. It's been a fun year, with a number of surprises - coming out on top of O'Reilly's Open Source at COMDEX vote, powering the Mars Rover site and a lot of positive mainstream press. And the invaluable recognition of becoming recognized as a real word by Google *wink*. A detailed summary of what's new in the 2.0 release is available, and as usual all platforms have dedicated packages/installers that will get you up and running in 10 minutes. Enjoy!"

Garden GNOME writes "The GNOME sysadmin team has just announced that the main GNOME web server has probably been intruded into, leading to the shutdown of the GNOME website, (including bugzilla.gnome.org, art.gnome.org and developer.gnome.org). The GNOME mailing lists, and CVS servers seem to be up, though the FTP server was immediately taken down as a precautionary measure (released sources are believed to be intact). This is bad, because GNOME 2.6 was supposed to be released tomorrow. Let's hope it is a false alarm."

steve.m writes "The BBC are reporting on a new batch of top level domain names being submitted to ICANN for approval. By far the most interesting proposal is for a .mail TLD to register legitimate mail servers. Could this eventually be the end of spam ?" *yawn* The same old discussion, with no implementation in sight.

ImmO writes " The eXtreme Computing Research (XCR) group at Louisiana Tech University is pleased to announce the first public release of HA-OSCAR 1.0 beta. High Availability Open Source Cluster Application Resource (HA-OSCAR) is an open source project that aims toward non-stop services in the HPC environment through a combined power of High Availability and Performance Computing solutions. Our goal is to enhance a Beowulf cluster system for mission-critical applications and downtime-sensitive HPC infrastructures. To achieve high availability, component redundancy is adopted in HA-OSCAR cluster to eliminate single point of failures, especially at the head node. HA-OSCAR also incorporates a self-healing mechanism; failure detection & recovery, automatic failover and fail-back. The 1.0 beta release supports new high-availability capabilities for Linux Beowulf clusters based on OSCAR 3.0 It provides an installation wizard GUI and a web-based administration tool that allows a user to create and configure a multi-head Beowulf cluster. A default set of monitoring services are included to ensure that critical services, hardware components and important resources are always available at the control node. "

darthcamaro writes "I found an interesting article on builder.com that suggests laying 'Siege' to your server to help you setup up a site to withstand /. "One of the great fears for many Web developers, and even more so for Web server admins, is watching their sites brought down by an avalanche of traffic. The traffic may be from a DoS attack, or maybe the site just got slash-dotted. Bottom line: It just isn't available.""

after writes "GameDev.net is reporting events at the Game Developers Conference 2004. The coverage of the conference spans five days, and the first day is complete already. It has plenty of pictures of some of the activities. Finalists of the IGF are also posted with some amazing pictures. Also, an interview with Iain McNeil of Slitherine Software. More updates come on a day-to-day basis, so check it out."

PSUdaemon writes "The University of Geneva has produced a website that allows you to download truly random numbers generated from an Optical quantum random number generator. They will also be releasing a client API that you can use directly in your codes to download random numbers."

ArcRiley writes "For more than a year Xiph hackers have been working on Ogg Theora, an improved version of On2's VP3 video codec. Alpha-3 includes several bitstream changes, VP3 to Theora "upgrade" utilities, and is now supported by Xine, MPlayer, and Real's Helix Player. We're nearing Beta-1 where the format will be frozen, fully documented, and it'll be ready for everyday use."

ccady writes "Mozilla 1.7 beta is out. Not too many new features, but "Mozilla 1.7 size and performance have improved dramatically with this release. When compared to Mozilla 1.6, Mozilla 1.7 Beta is 7% faster at startup, is 8% faster at window open time, has 9% faster pageloading times, and is 5% smaller in binary size." I'll be downloading it."

Andrew Leonard writes "Scott Rosenberg has a column on Salon today about a conference held in honor of the twentieth anniversary of the publishing of 'Programmers at Work.' Among the panelists saying interesting things about the state of programing today are Andy Hertzfeld, Charles Simonyi, Jaron Lanier, and Jef Raskin."

An anonymous reader writes "LinuxDevices.com has published the results of its annual Embedded Linux Market Survey probing developer preferences and industry trends. Over the last four years, the survey has become an important resource for industry analysts and decision makers. Among the revelations: the embedded Linux tools and OS provider market is wide open, with no single dominant vendor; developers care most about Cost/Freeness; ARM is overtaking x86 in embedded systems; developers prefer support fees to runtime license models; and, Linux dwarves all other embedded operating systems, projected for use in half of all embedded projects during the next two years."

andy55 writes "If you thought Apple's online dev resources were already the best out there, they just got better. Apple has announced the launch of their new ADC Reference Library. Named features are: powerful search options, added navigation, 'Getting Started; docs on key technologies, and a more consistent organization. Impressively, the first search I ran in their search engine on a painful Mach-O dev issue I've been fighting for the last week turned up the key obscure tech info I needed!" Meanwhile, skrysakj writes "Apple has launched a new Reference Library. I always thought their help/references for Developers was spotty (either non-existent or dead on) so this should be a welcome change."

prostoalex writes "Research firm Gartner draws attention to the fact that less than a third of people who put Java on their resume actually know their stuff. The knowledge gap between someone who can successfully write a System.out.println() and someone capable of designing and implementing a complex Java system brings to companies being back-logged with pending projects."

An anonymous reader writes "Builder.com, which is part of CNet.com, is now outsourcing some of their writing to India. The funny thing is, the editor claims it's not as much about money as because he's 'getting a better interface with producers of the content.' He claims CNet isn't giving up control, but if they're the publisher, and he's the editor, and they can't hire and manage their own writers, why shouldn't the Indians just put up their own website to replace CNet, and we can all read what they write direct? I mean, we're all going to be buying software direct from Indian companies soon, so why not?" Newsforge and Slashdot are both part of OSDN. OSDN also runs sites like devchannel.org which are more-or-less direct competitors of builder.com.

william_lorenz writes: "With the recent release of KDE 3.2 and KDevelop 3.0, and with the forming of the KDE Quality team as mentioned on Slashdot just days ago, it was an opportune time to read my newest book, C++ GUI Programming with Qt 3. (Qt is of course TrollTech's multi-platform windowing toolkit -- Win32, Linux, UNIX, and the embedded space with Qt/Embedded -- upon which KDE is built. There's a free version licensed under the GPL for non-commercial use and also a commercial version.)" Read on for the rest of Lorenz' review.

An anonymous reader writes "PHP just released the first release candidate of PHP 5 after 4 beta releases. It is considered stable and feature-complete -- so get testing!"

Lord of the OpenBSD writes "At long last, SMP development on OpenBSD looks to be gearing up. One person is now doing full-time funded development on SMP. Project leader Theo de Raadt is now asking for funding for a second developer. Theo has announced that SMP support for i386 is planned for the OpenBSD 3.6 or 3.7 release, the first of which is due in 8 months."

rjray writes with news that yesterday "the W3C gave their official stamp of approval-- Technical Recommendation status-- to VoiceXML 2.0. Trade publications covering this include internetnews.com. The move also recognizes the Speech Recognition Grammar Specification (SRGS 1.0), and combines the two together under the heading of 'Speech Interface Framework.'" Here's the W3C press release.

the.jedi writes "With the release of GTK+ 2.4, and Gnome 2.6 due out some time next week, it seems of some the Gnome developers are looking at how they'll be coding Gnome and the rest of the Linux desktop. Havoc Pennington of Planet Gnome has written a short blog pondering and analyzing the available options as coders move towards high-level languages like java and C#. He gives a good overview and assessment of technologies like mono, OO.org's UNO framework, as well as other ways of tying new languages to the existing code base. An extremely interesting read for desktop linux hackers everywhere." Update: 03/17 14:44 GMT by T : Speaking of the future of Gnome, aeneas writes with a list of Gnome 2.6 release parties around the world (linked from gnome.org/start/2.5).

Marcus Thiesen writes "Debian Installer Beta 3 was released two days ago and I wrote a small review concerning the installation part. The new debian installer is good way to set up your favorite distribution. Nontheless there are a few usability things and I thought that it might be a good idea to write a walkthrough from another point of view: Bob 'average' User."