Most Java programming language developers are introduced to Eclipse through its function as an IDE. The Eclipse IDE actually consists of a collection of interacting components called plug-ins. This article traces the evolution of plug-ins from Eclipse V2.1 through today's OSGi-based implementation.

Windows 2003 Server is a more reliable server operating system than Linux, a research firm said Monday. According to the Yankee Group's annual server reliability survey, only Unix operating systems such as HP-UX and Sun Solaris 10 beat Windows on uptime. Windows 2003 Server, in fact, led the popular Red Hat Enterprise Linux with nearly 20 percent more annual uptime. The Yankee Group made a point of stressing that the survey was not sponsored or supported by any server OS maker.

Google is launching an online spreadsheet that will let you load Excel files and share documents online. Up to 10 people can work on the spreadsheet at the same time - the names of people editing and reading it will appear in a chat window. Users can save the documents to their Google account or export them as .csv, .xls or html files. Like the launch of Gmail, Google is limiting the number of new users for software - still in beta - to avoid overloading its systems. Cnet wonders, should Microsoft be worried?

"Originally, I had never intended to write a follow-up to 'Why First Generation Apple Products Suck'. But after receiving exceptional feedback on my thoughts, I think I need to make few things clear. Many of you thought I was unfairly singling out Apple even though defective first generation products are a common occurrence across the technology sector – software or hardware. Just to be clear, let’s not mesh software and hardware together. Neither I nor anyone else should ever expect software to be perfect. On the opposite end, with hardware, it is possible to perfect the craft of developing tangible products, such as the iPod music player."

The Open Source Development Labs announced today that Debian has registered the Sarge release as compliant with its Carrier Grade Linux 2.0.2 specification. The move brings Debian in line with offerings from commercial vendors such as Red Hat, Novell, and Motorola.

While some just talk about the quality of open source software, Red Hat said it's actually doing something about it. Commercial Linux vendor Red Hat announced at the company's annual Red Hat Summit last week that it is launching a project directed squarely at quality assurance.

"In this article, you'll learn about four powerful but easy-to-use game engines that will handle the heavy lifting for you, freeing you to concentrate on the fun parts of game development. You don't need a large budget, big teams, or awe-inspiring artistic and programming skills. All you need is a Mac running Mac OS X, a game engine, and a willingness to jump in and try out some ideas to see if they can gel into a fun and exciting game. With these tools, you're closer than you think."

Microsoft plans to make several significant tweaks to the next beta of Windows Vista to make a key security feature less annoying to users. In response to widespread criticisms that the implementation of the UAC (User Account Control) feature triggers too many privilege elevation prompt pop-ups, the software maker will make changes in Windows Vista RC1.

"The Fedora Unity Project is proud to announce the release of DVD ISO Re-Spins of Fedora Core. These ISOs are based upon Fedora Core and contain all updates released as of the Re-Spin date. They are available for i386 and x86_64 architectures as of Wednesday, May 31st, 2006 via BitTorrent. The x86_64 Re-Spin is currently available for testing only."

Vista and Office 2007 have many new fonts. NeoSmart takes a look at the ten most popular Vista and/or Office 12 fonts with screenshots, sample usages, and a critique of each font, one-by-one. These 10 fonts are the latin-based scripts that ship with Vista and/or Office 2007. My take: Microsoft has created some very beautiful fonts here. I especially like Segoe UI; it looks stunning when in use in Vista.

"Red Hat today announced the completion of its acquisition of JBoss. By acquiring JBoss Red Hat is now positioned to accelerate the shift to service-oriented architectures and enable the next generation of web-enabled applications running on a low-cost, secure open source platform."

Protothreads are an extremely lightweight, stackless, thread-like programming abstraction designed for severely memory constrained embedded systems that may have as little as a few hundred bytes of RAM. Protothreads are designed to replace event-driven C code with sequential programming but without the memory overhead of full multithreading - a protothread requires only two bytes of RAM. Protothreads are implemented in ANSI C, does not require any machine code, and is therefore highly portable. Version 1.3 adds the possibility to determine if a protothread is blocked, has yielded or has ended, and can be downloaded here. Also be sure to read how protothreads work, under the hood.

Objective-C/Cocoa is the dominant language/API for Apple's OS X. Java is the dominant language for Web portals and other Internet services. So wouldn't it make sense for these two technologies to talk to each other? Marcus Zarra walks you through a simple solution to get these two technologies communicating.

How do you elicit high-quality information from information sources that are subject to deletion, distortion and generalization? According to Jim Arlow, the answer is generative analysis, which is a new approach to learning object oriented analysis that teaches you how to deal with these and other real-world human issues of software engineering. Also, Mike Kelly examines a recent testing experience that should have worked: plenty of scripted test cases, plenty of time developing and testing the scripts. So what went wrong? Plenty.