ivi asks: "I first bumped into the XP approach to system development, some years ago, on Dr Dobbs' now-defunct Seminar-On-Demand site TechNetCast. XP has some short, simple rules for growing software from Users' Stories, eg, with programmers working in pairs, showing prototypes to Users "early & often" et al. Download this XP site (under 400KB, zipped) for more. So, who's used or using XP, does it work for OSS projects & what have your experiences been with it, so far?"

prostoalex writes "The topic of starting your own software company was recently brought up on Ask Slashdot as a way to fight current employment trends. Eric Sink from SourceGear, who shared his software company-building experience before has written a new article published on MSDN. Getting started with your own software company suggests several simple steps to evaluate your abilities, count your estimated expenses and then start the software company, if the idea still seems feasible."

CowboyRobot writes "ACM's Queue has an article entitled, Culture Surprises in Remote Software Development Teams that reviews differences in cultures and explores the impact they have on distributed software development teams. From the article: "In Western societies, decisions are made on the basis of input from those involved. In cultures with greater hierarchies, group members assume an authority will decide and they are only to enact the decision." Some stereotypes and some common sense, but I recognized myself in the descriptions of the 'typical American'."

A reader writes: " It appears that Ken Coar will be doing an IRC chat on Slashnet today. Ken's an Apache core developer and director, as well as author of The Apache Cookbook." It's worth noting that DevChannel is part of the sinister keiretsu. As pointed out, it'll be in #forum, at 2:00 PM EST today.

wherley writes "AP reports that IBM'er David Bradley, who came up with the (in)famous Ctrl-Alt-Delete key combination, is retiring. The article mentions: 'At a 20-year celebration for the IBM PC, Bradley was on a panel with Microsoft founder Bill Gates and other tech icons. The discussion turned to the keys. 'I may have invented it, but Bill made it famous,' Bradley said. Gates didn't laugh. The key combination also is used when software, such as Microsoft's Windows operating system, fails'." We featured a story on Bradley a few months back.

JigSaw writes "When doing research for his evaluation of Solaris 9 on his Ultra 5, Tony Bourke kept running into the same comment online over and over again: Sun's C compiler produces much faster code than GCC does. However, he couldn't find one set of benchmarks to back this up and so he did his own."

BB maintainer Dan Mills writes "The Ximian Build System, Build Buddy, is now available to the community. This is a very exciting moment, and one that many of us at Ximian have been hoping would come. Build Buddy is a cross-platform packaging system designed with flexibility, reproducibility, and automation in mind. It features: support for producing RPM, Deb, and SD (HP-UX) packages; a testing/package verification framework; Red Carpet integration; command-line and Web interfaces; support for remote build scheduling via XML-RPC; reproducible build environments (chroot jails); and flexible XML package metadata description. Sound interesting? Visit primates.ximian.com/~thunder/bb for other documentation and links. We are very interested in starting a user and developer community around BB. Feel free to contact us via the mailing lists if you have any questions."

Oskuro writes "According to this story at news.netcraft.com, Debian was the fastest growing distribution in the last 6 months, closely followed by SuSE and Gentoo. RedHat, while still reigning, has started to lose sites in Netcraft's survey after they announced the end of support for their desktop releases. The survey is based on the stats from webservers which include the distribution name in their webserver's header." Maybe it would grow even faster when Java issues are worked out -- read more below on that.

An anonymous reader writes "Robin 'Roblimo' Miller will be hosting an IRC interview with Ken Coar tomorrow. Registration for the discussion is required. This is your chance to interview Ken Coar directly." Coar sits on the Apache Foundation's board, and has written a few books on Apache besides. You might want to check out the Apache website to catch up on recent developments before taking part, too.

Alex Moskalyuk writes "Before Sun monopolized the notion of 'write once, run everywhere,' those who enjoy programming in C++ had the choice of using Qt libraries that provide cross-platform GUI support. C++ GUI Programming with Qt3 is written by the employees of TrollTech, the company that created and currently distributes the Qt environment." Read on for the rest of Alex's review.

MadSaxon writes "gumstix.org has a brief but titillating description of a very small Linux machine based on the PXA255: 20 x 80 mm, '64MB SDRAM, 4MB Flash, MMC/SD/SDIO slot, and power management. It takes 3.6V - 5.0V power, and has been drawing under 200 mA.' It weighs less than 12g sans battery, and 'can fit in a collar undetected.' Is collar-top computing the Next Big Thing?"

An anonymous reader writes "artima.com has a very interesting interview with Anders Hejlsberg - the Borland guy now at Microsoft who can best be defined as MR C# - doing all the stuff that Borland wouldn't let him do. He discusses generics in C#, Java (1.5) and C++. Naturally there is the chance of bias but he does raise some interesting points againt Java's generics. Specifically that Java's genericised collections will have to box all primitive types as full objects, whereas C# does not. This is a big performance plus for C#. Java created the primitive types in the first place to address performance concerns but appears to be stepping sideways here. I can't help wondering if Sun has taken this approach to get the syntatic sugar in the language without requiring a bytecode change, but perhaps in a future VM version will allow primitive generics (obvioulsy forcing a bytecode regeneration)?"

SilentSage writes "The U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security is offering e-mail alerts on major virus outbreaks and other Internet attacks. The article found here says 'Anyone who signs up with the new National Cyber Alert System will receive e-mails about major virus outbreaks and other Internet attacks as they occur, along with detailed instructions to help computer users protect themselves.'"

damohasi writes "According to Microsoft Knowledge Base, MS "plans to release a software update that removes support for handling user names and passwords in HTTP and HTTP with Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) or HTTPS URLs in Microsoft Internet Explorer". Whether this will break rfc 1738 or not, it might get webspace provider in trouble who offer @-domains like the German 1und1."

Utawoutau asks: "As a student nearing graduation with high interest yet no game industry experience I have been taking a serious look at the position of Level Designer. In order to apply for such a position of course, I would need an impressive portfolio. I am aware that a number of games, Neverwinter Nights for example, come packaged with level development tools and that a number of other games have tools (official or not) that are readily available on the Internet. I am interested in hearing opinions from others that have experimented with the level design tools for a number of games as to what they found the easiest, the most fun, the most in depth, and the most impressive to work with. In particular, I am interested in a game whose tools strike a good balance between all four of the above criteria."

azzkicker asks: "I was reading some AP articles on offshoring. It talks about the struggles of out-of-work programmers and the shifting of jobs overseas [in the US]. Part way through one article it says: 'The average programmer commands $60 an hour in the United States, six times the rate in India.' I don't disagree with the Indian rate (USD $80/day, $400/week, $20,800/year gross), but what is with the US rate (USD $480/day, $2400/week, $124,000/year gross)? I know that programmers are billed out at high rates, but most of my programmer friends in Midwest, USA (years of experience and CS degrees) don't even see $50K/year. What is the actual rate most programmers see? Do you see $60/hr? Is the US rate misleading corporations into outsourcing?" Does offshoring really save corporations that much money?

thefinite writes "This article needs to be read by anyone interested in the outsourcing of IT jobs to India, no matter your opinion of it. It dispels some rumors (for example, if Indian IT companies do such bad work, why are over half of Carnegie Mellon's highest-rated programming companies Indian?). It addresses all of the arguments. Perhaps most importantly, it adds faces to the problem. It not only tells us about the American programmers who are out of jobs, but also about the Indians who are getting them. In the end of it, this is what Free Trade is about: people. This article makes that clear."

R.S.D. asks: "I see all these Ask Slashdot articles about unemployment these days. Why don't a few of you guys get together and start a software company? Out there in the world, there is still a lot of software that needs to be written, and people are still pumping lots of money into software (and biotech). In fact, the software sector is still described as the enduring leader in raising venture capital, though apparently in Silicon Valley more money is going out of the maturing software industry and into things that are still high-tech like biopharm and nano. Is anyone else trying this? If so, how's it going? If not, why not?" This is easier suggested, than implemented. For those who have gone this route, what suggestions would you give to those who may follow?

omin0us writes "over at http://cacko.zaurususergroup.com, we are working on a Full X11 based Linux distro for the Sharp Zaurus SL-c7x0/860 series of PDAs. The screen has a usable full VGA resolution of 640x480 and the distro uses Openbox/ROX Desktop as its Native WM. But others such as Fluxbox, Afterstep, and XFCE have been compiled for it and run nicely. You will also find a WIDE variety of compiled apps in the Feed on the Cacko website such as a native GCC Compiler, XMMS, Mplayer, prboom, Gimp, Gkrellm, Abiword and numerous others. Many different screenshots of it in action may be found here. This is truly bringing desktop linux to the PDA. Also, another project that has branched from Cacko Linux is Gentoo for Zaurus. This project, at the moment is based on the Cacko X11 environment, but will eventually become a full Gentoo environment. "It can emerge packages, sync, or create Gentoo packages using the -B switch in emerge." This should be an interesting project to watch."

dogas queries: "I work for quite a large company that is creating quite a large web-based enterprise-level application. We've been in development for a long while, and currently our app is only native to IE 5.5. At this point it would take a *lot* of effort to bring our app up to to be Standards-compliant. Now management wants our app to be more flexible, such that if the customer wants to customize the look-and-feel, it won't be a major undertaking that will kill the structure. Naturally, we're switching to a CSS-based layout, ripping out the IE proprietary Javascript in favor of ECMAScript, and bringing the whole app to XHTML 1.0 Transitional compliance while we're at it. Since we started coding the front end at about the time of the browser wars, we didn't have the luxury of planning to use the W3 standards (especially since they were not complete, and browsers weren't honoring them anyways). I'm wondering what type of priority creating a standards-compliant web app is in other companies, and if that priority is being raised given the benefits of creating pages that separate structure from style from behavior."