http://www.osnews.com/ Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2008, David Adams OSNews version 4 donotreply@osnews.com (Adam Scheinberg) donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) Sat, 17 May 2008 06:52:19 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif http://www.osnews.com/ 120 http://www.osnews.com/story/19752/The_2008_Google_Summer_of_Code:_21_Projects_Im_Excited_About/ http://www.osnews.com/story/19752/The_2008_Google_Summer_of_Code:_21_Projects_Im_Excited_About/ Andrew Min gives a taster of the open source goodies being developed at Google's Summer of Code: a GUI for Aptitude, a GUI for Grub 2, search based menu browsing for GIMP and Audacity file import/export with FFmpeg amongst others. Read (or listen to) to the full article at Freesoftware Magazine Sat, 17 May 2008 03:33:53 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (David Adams) General Development 1 http://www.osnews.com/topics/31 News pas de calais http://www.osnews.com/story/19714/From_Win32_to_Cocoa_Part_II/ http://www.osnews.com/story/19714/From_Win32_to_Cocoa_Part_II/ A few weeks ago, Ars published part one in a series called "From Win32 to Cocoa: a Windows user's conversion to Mac OS X". In this series, Peter Bright details why he believes "Windows is dying, Windows applications suck, and Microsoft is too blinkered to fix any of it". Part one dealt with the history of both Windows and the Mac OS, and part two deals with .Net, the different types of programmers, and Windows Vista. Mon, 05 May 2008 12:53:24 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) General Development 59 http://www.osnews.com/topics/31 News Adam S http://www.osnews.com/story/19666/From_Win32_to_Cocoa:_a_Windows_Users_Conversion_to_Mac_OS_X/ http://www.osnews.com/story/19666/From_Win32_to_Cocoa:_a_Windows_Users_Conversion_to_Mac_OS_X/ Ars' Peter Bright wrote an article today entitled "From Win32 to Cocoa: a Windows user's conversion to Mac OS X", in which he explains why he believes "Windows is dying, Windows applications suck, and Microsoft is too blinkered to fix any of it". These are rather harsh words, but there is a definitive element of truth in it. The article is part one in a three-part series. Mon, 21 Apr 2008 19:00:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) General Development 48 http://www.osnews.com/topics/31 News Adam S http://www.osnews.com/story/19662/The_Cost_of_Modern_Software_Development/ http://www.osnews.com/story/19662/The_Cost_of_Modern_Software_Development/ Geek.com is running an opinion piece on the extensive reliance of programmers today on languages like Java and .NET. The author lambastes the performance penalties that are associated with running code inside virtualised environments, like Java's and .NET's. "It increases the compute burden on the CPU because in order to do something that should only require 1 million instructions (note that on modern CPUs 1 million instructions executes in about one two-thousandths (1/2000) of a second) now takes 200 million instructions. Literally. And while 200 million instructions can execute in about 1/10th of a second, it is still that much slower." The author poses an interesting challenge at the end of his piece - a challenge most OSNews readers will have already taken on. Note: Please note that many OSNews items now have a "read more" where the article in question is discussed in more detail. Sun, 20 Apr 2008 15:43:49 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) General Development 97 http://www.osnews.com/topics/31 News http://www.osnews.com/story/19561/Amanda_2.6.0_Released/ http://www.osnews.com/story/19561/Amanda_2.6.0_Released/ Amanda developers released Amanda 2.6.0 today. This is a significant update to Amanda backup software with improvements in ease of installation and configuration, security, scalability and robustness. Amanda 2.6.0 is available for download (in both source and binary-package form) here. Update: Other interesting open source releases today: Inkscape 0.46, AbiWord 2.6.0 and Ardour 2.4.0. Wed, 02 Apr 2008 01:30:12 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Eugenia Loli-Queru) General Development 13 http://www.osnews.com/topics/31 News http://www.osnews.com/story/19497/Microsoft_Forges_First_Official_Link_to_Eclipse/ http://www.osnews.com/story/19497/Microsoft_Forges_First_Official_Link_to_Eclipse/ "Microsoft today announced its first collaboration with the open source Eclipse Foundation by committing provide engineering support to allow the Eclipse Standard Widget Toolkit use Microsoft's Windows Presentation Foundation. The move aims to make it easier for Java developers to write applications that look and feel like native Windows Vista, according to Microsoft." Thu, 20 Mar 2008 17:52:49 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) General Development 17 http://www.osnews.com/topics/31 News WillM http://www.osnews.com/story/19495/Google_Summer_of_Code_2008_Is_on/ http://www.osnews.com/story/19495/Google_Summer_of_Code_2008_Is_on/ Google announced the participating Open Source Projects this Monday. Following that, students are encouraged to select projects they are interested in and submit their work proposals from March 24 to 31. Among the participating projects are: Debian, DragonFly BSD, ES operating system, FreeBSD, Gentoo, GNU Hurd, Haiku, Linux, NetBSD, and openSuse. Overall, projects range from kernel hacking to web applications. Last year, 900 students were accepted, with Google paying them and their mentoring projects up to USD 4.5 Million. Thu, 20 Mar 2008 16:23:18 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (David Adams) General Development 15 http://www.osnews.com/topics/31 News Ford Prefect http://www.osnews.com/story/19479/From_BFS_to_ZFS:_Past_Present_and_Future_of_File_Systems/ http://www.osnews.com/story/19479/From_BFS_to_ZFS:_Past_Present_and_Future_of_File_Systems/ "Computer platform advocacy can bubble up in the strangest places. In a recent interview at a conference in Australia, Linux creator Linus Torvalds got the Macintosh community in an uproar when he described Mac OS X's file system as 'complete and utter crap, which is scary'. What did he mean? What is a 'file system' anyway, and why would we care why one is better than another? At first glance, it might seem that file systems are boring technical widgetry that would never impact our lives directly, but in fact, the humble file system has a huge influence on how we use and interact with computers." Mon, 17 Mar 2008 07:36:10 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) General Development 36 http://www.osnews.com/topics/31 News http://www.osnews.com/story/19471/Some_Nice_Features_of_the_Objective-C_Language/ http://www.osnews.com/story/19471/Some_Nice_Features_of_the_Objective-C_Language/ The Mac and iPhone SDK are based on the Objective-C programming language, a surprising alliance of C and Smalltalk. Features such as meta-classes, message sending, dynamism, C compatibility, etc., contribute to define the development experience on Apple's platforms. Here is a little list of things that, in Philippe Mougin's experience, contribute to make Objective-C a powerful and fun programming language. Fri, 14 Mar 2008 20:29:05 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) General Development 20 http://www.osnews.com/topics/31 News Philippe Mougin http://www.osnews.com/story/19462/GCC_4.3.0_Released/ http://www.osnews.com/story/19462/GCC_4.3.0_Released/ The GNU project has released version 4.3.0 of the GNU Compiler Collection. "The GNU project and the GCC developers are pleased to announce the release of GCC 4.3.0. This release is a major release, containing new features (as well as many other improvements) relative to GCC 4.2.x." Wed, 12 Mar 2008 17:54:07 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) General Development 15 http://www.osnews.com/topics/31 News RJop http://www.osnews.com/story/19411/Developing_Rails_Applications_on_Mac_OS_X_Leopard/ http://www.osnews.com/story/19411/Developing_Rails_Applications_on_Mac_OS_X_Leopard/ "Ruby on Rails is a popular and powerful open source web framework for rapidly creating high-quality web applications to help you keep up with the speed of the Web. Rails is thriving on Mac OS X, and Leopard comes pre-installed with Ruby, Rails, Mongrel, Capistrano, Subversion, and other tools that help to streamline the development and deployment of Rails applications. This article gives you a full tour of Ruby on Rails 2.0 on Leopard - starting with building a web application using the latest Rails features with Xcode 3.0, and finishing with deploying the application to a production server running Leopard Server." Sun, 02 Mar 2008 01:28:39 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) General Development 21 http://www.osnews.com/topics/31 News Hakime http://www.osnews.com/story/19335/LLVM_2.2_Released/ http://www.osnews.com/story/19335/LLVM_2.2_Released/ LLVM 2.2 has been released. Wikipedia summarises: "The Low Level Virtual Machine, generally known as LLVM, is a compiler infrastructure, written in C++, which is designed for compile-time, link-time, run-time, and 'idle-time' optimization of programs written in arbitrary imperative programming languages. The LLVM project started in 2000 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign." Wed, 13 Feb 2008 14:29:14 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) General Development 4 http://www.osnews.com/topics/31 News kad77 http://www.osnews.com/story/19272/How_to_Recognize_a_Good_Programmer/ http://www.osnews.com/story/19272/How_to_Recognize_a_Good_Programmer/ How do you recognize good programmers if you're a business guy? It's not as easy as it sounds. CV experience is only of limited use here, because great programmers don't always have the "official" experience to demonstrate that they're great. In fact, a lot of that CV experience can be misleading. Yet there are a number of subtle cues that you can get, even from the CV, to figure out whether someone's a great programmer. More here. Tue, 05 Feb 2008 01:37:05 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Eugenia Loli-Queru) General Development 85 http://www.osnews.com/topics/31 News http://www.osnews.com/story/19256/PHP_4_Is_Dead_-_Long_Live_PHP_5/ http://www.osnews.com/story/19256/PHP_4_Is_Dead_-_Long_Live_PHP_5/ "PHP 4, deployed on tens of millions of servers globally, is among the most successful languages of all time. But its run is coming to an end. Active development for the scripting language has been discontinued and security updates will conclude in August. And for some developers, PHP 4 will be history before Valentine's Day. On February 5, a group of influential Open Source projects will collectively stop all new development on their respectively platforms using PHP 4. However, there are still some holdouts opposing a complete transition to PHP 5 and it's not entirely clear whether or not PHP 4 will ever truly disappear." Fri, 01 Feb 2008 20:49:05 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) General Development 11 http://www.osnews.com/topics/31 News anonymous http://www.osnews.com/story/19237/Arc_Released/ http://www.osnews.com/story/19237/Arc_Released/ "This site is about Arc, a new dialect of Lisp. It's unfinished, but usable, so we decided to release what we have so far. The current version compiles into MzScheme and structurally is as much a skin on MzScheme as a separate language. For example, Arc's read is MzScheme's, and so are Arc's numbers and math operations. But from the average programmer's point of view, Arc is no more similar to Scheme than any two Lisp dialects are to one another. Arc is designed above all for exploratory programming: the kind where you decide what to write by writing it. A good medium for exploratory programming is one that makes programs brief and malleable, so that's what we've aimed for. This is a medium for sketching software." Tue, 29 Jan 2008 23:06:50 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) General Development 6 http://www.osnews.com/topics/31 News rayiner