http://www.osnews.com/ Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2009, David Adams OSNews version 4 donotreply@osnews.com (Adam Scheinberg) donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) Sun, 29 Nov 2009 01:34:55 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif http://www.osnews.com/ 120 http://www.osnews.com/story/22498/Atlas_Beta_Launched/ http://www.osnews.com/story/22498/Atlas_Beta_Launched/ The beta for Atlas has been launched on November 15. Atlas is a visual development tool for creating web applications using the Cappuccino framework. "Atlas is a development tool for building Cappuccino applications. In addition to managing your project files and editing code, it includes a powerful visual layout tool for designing your interfaces without ever having to touch code. Designers are empowered to interact with their designs instantly, which means programmers get to finished applications faster." Mon, 16 Nov 2009 19:32:52 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) General Development 8 http://www.osnews.com/topics/31 News Alex Popov http://www.osnews.com/story/22267/Google_Earth_Tracks_Traffic_Clouds_You/ http://www.osnews.com/story/22267/Google_Earth_Tracks_Traffic_Clouds_You/ Some of the kids over at Georgia Tech have recently unveiled a development that takes realtime information from varied sources such as CCTV cameras and motion detectors and layers it on to Google Earth and Microsoft Virtual Earth. The result? The ability to watch things happen as they happen anywhere in the world (well-- not quite anywhere just yet, but that's the idea). While this undoubtedly reeks of "awesome," the mind of a suspicious citizen of the 21st century automatically jumps to a future Orwellian land of Big Brothers who are this time running professional versions of Google Earth in dark offices atop mile-high, tinted-window skyscrapers. Wed, 30 Sep 2009 22:26:15 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Jordan Spencer Cunningham) General Development 10 http://www.osnews.com/topics/31 News http://www.osnews.com/story/22261/Network_as_Platform_Cisco_Developer_Contest/ http://www.osnews.com/story/22261/Network_as_Platform_Cisco_Developer_Contest/ Cisco recently announced the finalists in its "Think Inside the Box" Developer Contest. The contest is intended to "promote the concept of the network as a platform" and it's based on the capabilities of the Cisco Integrated Services Router Application Extension Platform (AXP), which is essentially a Linux blade that plugs into the Cisco Integrated Services Router. Teams from all over the world entered the contest, and seemed to really run with the idea of offloading tasks to the network hardware. Read on for our interview with one of the contest's finalists. Wed, 30 Sep 2009 18:03:19 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (David Adams) General Development 1 http://www.osnews.com/topics/31 Interview http://www.osnews.com/story/22202/Can_Computers_Win_the_Turing_Test_/ http://www.osnews.com/story/22202/Can_Computers_Win_the_Turing_Test_/ Can computers win the Turing Test? Imagine a day when a machine will say, "Move over Turing! You can no longer consider machines to be less smart than humans! After all, we can think too. We do all the thinking and processing and you take all the credit, just because you are our creator! ". That would be an awkward and exciting situation. To be honest, there is a valid argument here in this imaginary conversation. As naive as it may sound for now, let me assure you that such a scenario is not far away. Applications are becoming more and more logic-oriented and increasingly intelligent. Wed, 23 Sep 2009 08:00:26 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (OSNews Staff) General Development 46 http://www.osnews.com/topics/31 Feature Jitesh Dundas http://www.osnews.com/story/22135/The_Problem_with_Design_and_Implementation/ http://www.osnews.com/story/22135/The_Problem_with_Design_and_Implementation/ I've been developing software for quite a few years. One of the issues that seems to come up again and again in my work is this concept of design and implementation. I recall it being a significant part of my education at the University of Waterloo's Computer Engineering program as well. The message was always the same. Never write code first. First you must design software by writing a design document, flow charts, pseudo-code, timing charts... then it's merely a trivial matter of implementing it. Make note of the attitude here given towards implementing. The real work is in the design, and it's just a trivial matter of implementing it. It sounds so simple doesn't it? Now, how often does this work out in real life? Wed, 09 Sep 2009 16:17:05 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (OSNews Staff) General Development 82 http://www.osnews.com/topics/31 Feature Yamin http://www.osnews.com/story/22010/Interview_Martin_Odersky_on_Scala/ http://www.osnews.com/story/22010/Interview_Martin_Odersky_on_Scala/ Scala looks like it is becoming the web 2.0 darling, popular with Twitter and LinkedIn developers but also heavily utilized in the corporate space. Martin Odersky speaks in detail about the language in this interview. He talks about why it could become the language of choice for social networking platforms, particularly after doing well in the acid test of being used by sites like Twitter and LinkedIn. "Twitter has been able to sustain phenomenal growth, and it seems with more stability than what they had before the switch, so I think that's a good testament to Scala," he said. Tue, 18 Aug 2009 18:54:31 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) General Development 3 http://www.osnews.com/topics/31 News inkslinger http://www.osnews.com/story/22007/F-Script_2_0_Available/ http://www.osnews.com/story/22007/F-Script_2_0_Available/ The F-Script project has announced the availability of F-Script 2.0, a set of open source tools for dynamic introspection and scripting of Cocoa objects on Mac OS X. The package provides Mac OS X developers and power users with graphical tools for exploration and interactive manipulation of objects. It also provides programmatic tools for scripting, in the form of a Smalltalk dialect directly hosted on top of the Objective-C runtime. This new version of F-Script introduces major new features including system-wide scripting, dynamic Cocoa class creation, 64-bit support and automatic garbage collection. Mon, 17 Aug 2009 22:48:24 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (OSNews Staff) General Development 0 http://www.osnews.com/topics/31 News Philippe Mougin http://www.osnews.com/story/21948/Git_Gets_Demystified_and_Subversion_Control/ http://www.osnews.com/story/21948/Git_Gets_Demystified_and_Subversion_Control/ Distributed version control systems (DVCSs) offer a number of advantages over centralized VCSs, and for Subversion users looking to explore this model, Git is a great place to start. Using Subversion as a baseline, this articles shows how to install Git, set up a remote repository, and begin using basic Git commands. Wed, 05 Aug 2009 12:29:04 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) General Development 11 http://www.osnews.com/topics/31 News http://www.osnews.com/story/21919/How_Microsoft_Made_PHP_Suck_Less_on_Windows/ http://www.osnews.com/story/21919/How_Microsoft_Made_PHP_Suck_Less_on_Windows/ Windows might be a popular platform for running certain kinds of Web applications. But too many developers have been burnt by trying to deploy PHP applications on a Windows server. "If you banged on [a PHP application] too hard on Windows, IIS would crash, and nobody could tell why it died," Microsoft's Garrett Serack says. Microsoft is aiming to change that. In fact, while you weren't looking, they already made some improvements. Thu, 30 Jul 2009 16:06:05 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) General Development 8 http://www.osnews.com/topics/31 News estherschindler http://www.osnews.com/story/21838/File_System_Evangelist_Interview_with_Valerie_Aurora/ http://www.osnews.com/story/21838/File_System_Evangelist_Interview_with_Valerie_Aurora/ Jeff Layton talks to Valerie Aurora, file system developer and open source evangelist, about a wide range of subjects including her background in file systems, ChunkFS, the Union file system and how the developer ecosystem can chip in. Wed, 15 Jul 2009 21:17:46 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) General Development 6 http://www.osnews.com/topics/31 News linuxmag http://www.osnews.com/story/21800/First_Steps_in_Scripting_the_Vim_Editor/ http://www.osnews.com/story/21800/First_Steps_in_Scripting_the_Vim_Editor/ In part-1 you can begin to understand the fundamental components of the Vimscript programming language with simple script examples. In Part-2 you can learn how to create and deploy new user defined functions in the Vimscript language. Wed, 08 Jul 2009 21:11:35 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) General Development 3 http://www.osnews.com/topics/31 News http://www.osnews.com/story/21786/Create_a_Mobile_Application_for_Android_Using_Scala_Eclipse/ http://www.osnews.com/story/21786/Create_a_Mobile_Application_for_Android_Using_Scala_Eclipse/ The Android operating system provides a powerful, open platform for mobile development. It leverages the power of the Java programming language and the Eclipse tools platform. Now you can add the Scala programming language to that mix. In this article, see how you can use Scala as the primary development language on Android. Tue, 07 Jul 2009 13:40:46 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) General Development 7 http://www.osnews.com/topics/31 News http://www.osnews.com/story/21780/A_Second_Order_Virtual_Machine_with_Falcon/ http://www.osnews.com/story/21780/A_Second_Order_Virtual_Machine_with_Falcon/ "Lately, the Falcon Programming Language has attracted growing interest and excited a deal of curiosity. In this article I'll document some unique features of Falcon that allow users to build easily what I define as a 'second order virtual machine'." Mon, 06 Jul 2009 15:46:25 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) General Development 6 http://www.osnews.com/topics/31 News pas de calais http://www.osnews.com/story/21755/PHP_5_3_Released/ http://www.osnews.com/story/21755/PHP_5_3_Released/ "The open source PHP language is seeing its first major update in two years courtesy of today's release of PHP 5.3, along with a long list of new features designed to expand its capabilities and accelerate performance. The PHP 5.3 release is a bigger release than developers first intended, and takes on some features that were originally intended for PHP 6. The new release also comes as the open source language continues to face competitive challenges from multiple technologies including Ruby, Java and .net." Wed, 01 Jul 2009 15:42:18 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) General Development 1 http://www.osnews.com/topics/31 News http://www.osnews.com/story/21746/FastOS_Workshop_Video_Proceedings_Available/ http://www.osnews.com/story/21746/FastOS_Workshop_Video_Proceedings_Available/ The video proceedings of the 2009 FastOS workshop are being made available as a video podcast rss feed (also available for subscription directly from the iTunes store). The first three talks are now available with new talks being posted every week. The complete schedule of talks along with the slides which were presented are available here. FastOS is a Department of Energy/Office of Science funded program focused on exploratory work in operating systems and runtimes for petascale and beyond supercomputers. Mon, 29 Jun 2009 20:04:35 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) General Development 1 http://www.osnews.com/topics/31 News ericvh