e8johan asks: "I currently work at a company in the automotive industry. It is importat to ensure quality and for our products we use extensive testing before, during and after the assembly. Now I have been asked to help in the creation of a company instuction for ensuring that all 'in-house' developed software works properly. I have written a short summary describing the essentials such as: "do not ignore compiler warnings", "always describe what the code is intended to do in your comments", "do not assume that all users run in the same environment", etc. I now feel that I need more input, has anyone done anything like this before? How do you test your software?"

axehind writes "IBM announced release 1.9.0 of NGPT (Next Generation POSIX Threading). The goal of this project is to attempt to solve the problems associated with the use of the pthreads library on Linux and improve significantly on the POSIX compliance of pthreads on Linux. It's licensed under the LGPL and can be downloaded here."

bnoise writes "There has been air traffic delays of up to 6 hours today above UK (and this includes north atlantic flights). A BBC News article points out the reasons: a software upgrade. Another article gives more general information about the delays. Companies pin-pointed are IBM (initial development) and Lockheed Martin. If only they were using Open Source Software in the aviation industry... By the way, is there any Open Source project in the aviation sector? A search on Freshmeat gives back 5 projects."

hated writes "OpenSSH-3.2.2 is just released. Among some security fixes associated with Kerberos/AFS token passing, privelage separation has begun to be show up, experimentally right now of course. A paper on OpenSSH privelage separation is available. Pop on over to one of the mirror sites and get your brand spanking new version. The portable website doesn't currently list 3.2.2, but the FTP sites do have it."

skia writes "Interesting topic with an even more interesting backdrop: Tracking Assets in the Production of "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within". From the article: "Creative processes don't have clearly defined paths... therefore, the attempt to give a static definition for such process has to face the tension between divergence towards the creative possibilities and convergence towards the pre-defined mechanical process that databases can handle." It also links to Beating the Averages, which is another must-read for /.ers."

axehind writes "In this Byte.com article, Dr Moshe Bar explains some of the differences between IA32 and IA64. He also explains some things to watch out for when porting applications to the IA64 architecture."

Peter Wayner writes: "There are 1693 books for sale at Amazon.com with the word "java" in the title and almost all of them are earnest, chipper books that promise real programmers, dummies , and nuts that learning Java is easy. Bruce Tate's, Bitter Java , is not one these books." Read on to see if you'd like to experience Bruce Tate's bitterness first hand.

udif writes: "Almost 2 years after it was originally announced, the first drop of the OpenWatcom C++ source code is here. 18,000 files, 78MB uncompressed source code (about 28MB compressed). It's version 0.80 and is incomplete, but most of the code is here."

gergnz writes "Just popped into my inbox, GCC 3.1 released. There are many bug fixes over 3.0. "we focused more on quality than new features" Mark Michell. Here are the changes, and you can see a list of ftp servers here. This is the release I have been waiting for. I will now upgrade :-) Well Done to all involved!"

SEWilco writes "OSDN's NewsForge reports that Carnegie Mellon University has started a Sustainable Computing Consortium to improve the quality and security of software. The only news release is that NASA gave CMU $23 million to help create dependable software. SCC members get an internal-use license for SCC software. So taxpayers are paying millions to create proprietary software, and companies get access for a few thousand dollars. (There is some blurring between CMU's SCC and CMU's High Dependability Computing Consortium, although HDCC's web site has been idle for a year.)"

Handy writes "Web Services (SOAP, .net, WSDL ^? , UDDI ^? ) create an even greater need for robust security. Exposed interfaces and fragmented administration coupled with a need for app-level security points to a greater need for a centralized managed security services model."

cwimmer asks: "I work for a technology company in the United States who survived the economic slowdown by trimming fat where necessary. Unfortunately, it seems that my small programming team must've looked like mostly fat to management: it has been trimmed from a high of 5 to the current 2. We have been given a very large programming project that we estimated would take 4 coders (the size of the team at the time) 6 months to deliver. I have been given deep pockets with regard to moving some or all of the project to an offshore partner, and I can probably get 4 or 5 programmers in India. Does anyone have any pointers on managing a team of programmers on the other side of the world?"

Eugenia writes: "Over a month ago it was reported that a developer had forked the Athe(na) operating system and ported its GUI on top of Linux, without the use of XFree86. This combined OS, called Cosmoe, would support Linux, AtheOS, BeOS and even Macintosh's Carbon APIs (without the use of GNUStep - his port of Carbon is wrapped around the Be API). OSNews today features an interview with the architect of the combined OS, Bill Hayden, where a lot of things are explained about his plans for Cosmoe."

Cpt Kirk writes "For anyone wanting to get into digital interactive tv development using MHP, we've got a couple of tutorials online for you, check em out and let us know if they're helpful. Esgem MHP Resources"

Anonymous Chris writes: "I was reading up at LinuxArtist.org and saw mention that Crystal Space is running a contest, with first, second, and third prizes of $500, $250, and $200. This is how the developers decided to distribute a $1000 grant from the Linux Fund. The deadline for your game/demo/tool is August 2002. At least there's still good news in some parts of the Linux Gaming front."

mtve writes: "Have you ever seen source code that is valid on four languages: Perl, C, Befunge, and BrainF*ck? During last Perlgolf season famous Perl hacker Jérôme Quelin submit such inconceivable masterpiece and now he published expanded explanation of his solution. Caution: that text can hurt your mental health. Play Perlgolf!"

An Anonymous Coward++ writes "This google thread announces the first C++ compiler that can actually handle the whole language (we'd been waiting for half a decade here). The company that did it is EDG. They're a tiny outfit, but they're apparently also behind the Intel compiler (both on Windows with Visual C++ extensions, and on Linux with GCC extensions). There are rumors they can compile the Linux kernel too."

Mister Snee writes: "As of the latest WINE release, the developer who's been working on the ActiveMovie and DirectShow code for the last nine months suddenly pulled it all from the source tree, citing fears of trouble under the DMCA." And an anonymous reader submits: "TransGaming Tecnologies is offering much of its own proprietary code up for exchange if Codeweavers are willing to relicense some of their code under the less restrictive (more free) X11 licence (eg contributing it to the X11 fork of wine, Rewind). Details can be found at this post by CEO Gavriel State. This all came from the Codeweavers-dominated recent licence change (to the LGPL) which was done in an attempt to steal TransGaming's Direct3D code and force them to open up all their work (thus have no means to make money)." Your attitude toward these license machinations may vary; Codeweavers seems unlikely to oppose people making money from WINE development.

Jeremy Andrews writes: "Peter Chubb posted a patch to the lkml, with which he's now managed to mount a 15 terabyte file (using JFS and the loopback device). Without the patch, Peter explains, "Linux is limited to 2TB filesystems even on 64-bit systems, because there are various places where the block offset on disc are assigned to unsigned or int 32-bit variables." Peter works on the Gelato project in Australia. His efforts include cleaning up Linux's large filesystem support, removing 32-bit filesystem limitations. When I asked him about the new 64-bit filesystem limits, he offered a comprehensive answer and this interesting link. The full thread can be found here on KernelTrap. Reaching beyond terabytes, beyond pentabytes, on into exabytes. I feel this sudden discontent with my meager 60 gigabyte hard drive..."

customWorks asks: "I've been approached to write a piece of custom software for a small business owner with the promise of autonomy in its design and implementation. I do not intend to stick around for incremental development after I've delivered it, and so I feel strongly that open sourcing the software would be prudent for the both myself and prospective client. That said, I still expect to be paid for the developing the software. The issue of course is over convincing the client of the benefit of giving away the source to something they've just paid to have developed. I'd like to know if any of you who've done similar contract work have had experience (success?) in presenting an argument for open sourcing the end product? What were the major concerns/misperceptions that you had to overcome in making the case for open source?"