Mother Nature likes object-oriented development! C++ programmers often can't afford the luxury of creating a universe of objects; our platforms are intrinsically limited. However, the flyweight design pattern provides an elegant means of sharing objects, with a small price in terms of storage and retrieval. Stephen Morris describes C++ code that uses the flyweight design pattern to solve a knotty problem in networking. Also on the same web site, "Mastering the Requirements Process".

In this, the 60th anniversary year of the computer, it may be interesting to look back at a couple of key events in the evolution of this very important market. This is a market now amounting to extraordinary numbers of machines. In 2010, the last year for which we have numbers, there were no less than 10 million machines shipped! This growth and penetration is unparalled in the history of industrial products in the last 100 years, and is an amazing success. However, to get to this stage, the industry had to make its way through some issues and decision points. There are generally agreed to have been key turning points. What would have happened if they had gone differently?

"Lately I've been blogging quite a bit on the state of on-line journalism. One aspect of that topic that I haven't touched on for awhile is the way in which a story breaks, builds, morphs and spreads electronically. The recent announcement of the Backdoor.Ginwui virus provides an interesting opportunity to do this once again, in order to see who addressed the story and how (including by me), and what, if anything, it all means." OSNews did not report on this Backdoor.Ginwui virus.

"In a decision that could set the tone for journalism in the digital age, a California appeals court ruled Friday that bloggers, like traditional reporters, have the right to keep their sources confidential. A panel of three judges said in a 69-page decision that a group of bloggers did not have to divulge their sources to Apple, contending that the same laws that protect traditional journalists, the First Amendment, and California's Shield Law, also apply to bloggers." My take: You already know how I feel about this, but I still need to say it, and I do not care if I get flamed for saying it: this is a clear-cut victory for the freedom of speech and press in the US (I live in The Netherlands, though), and you should all be happy Apple did not win this case. Update: Ars has an analysis and history of the case.

GNU-Darwin has gotten support for AMD's Opteron processors. "Mac OS X users are welcome to give free software a try now. I finally got a chance to try GNU-Darwin-1.1 on an Opteron machine with Darwin-7.2. Testing with glxgears confirms that the MesaGL is performing about twice as fast as on a comparable 32-bit CPU, although some other tasks are clearly not yet optimized. The machines are otherwise roughly identical. Here is a screenshot."

This guide explains how to expand Damn Small Linux to fit your needs. "For those unfamiliar with the Distro, DSL is a severely stripped down version of Debian/Knoppix. The distribution aims to include as many useful applications as possible while remaining under 50MB. It uses a 2.4 series kernel, busybox, a tiny little Xserver, Fluxbox as the default WM, and a host of other microscopic office, media and Internet applications. It is designed to be easily expandable by via a system called 'MyDSL'."

Dell and Google have struck a deal, Google's CEO confirmed on May 25. Speaking at an investor conference in Las Vegas, Google CEO Eric Schmidt acknowledged that Dell and Google have reached an agreement. Schmidt provided few details of the agreement that earlier speculation had placed in the $1 billion range. So far a co-branded Web site is the most visible aspect of the collaboration, but the cracks that occurred in the Microsoft/Dell/Intel troika when Dell allowed AMD to come to its party, have now reached the earthquake stage.

The server market was slapped and dropped on its head during the first quarter of 2006. We haven't seen anything quite like it since 2000. What's the big shocker? Well, Sun Microsystems actually enjoyed one of the stronger runs during the first quarter by most metrics, while Dell proved one of the worst performers. Beyond the server vendor rumbles, AMD continued to gain gobs of share on Intel in the x86 processor market.

A gaping security flaw in the latest versions of Symantec's anti-virus software suite could put millions of users at risk of a debilitating worm attack, Internet security experts warned May 25. Researchers at eEye Digital Security, the company that discovered the flaw, said it could be exploited by remote hackers to take complete control of the target machine "without any user action".

"At PC World, we spend most of our time talking about products that make your life easier or your work more productive. But it's the lousy ones that linger in our memory long after their shrinkwrap has shriveled, and that make tech editors cry out, 'What have I done to deserve this?' Still, even the worst products deserve recognition (or deprecation). So as we put together our list of World Class winners for 2006, we decided also to spotlight the 25 worst tech products that have been released since PC World began publishing nearly a quarter-century ago."

Remote Python Call (RPyC) is a python library providing transparent and symmetric IPC/RPC and distributed computing. It supports both synchronous and asynchronous operations. It works by giving you transparent control over a remote python interpreter: you can import remote modules, access remote classes, functions, and instances, just as you would do locally. Typical use cases are remote administration, distributed testing, resource sharing, and tunneling. Version 2.60 was released last week, adding supports for secure (TLS) connections.

With the first Origami devices out the door, Microsoft is setting its sights on the next generation of tiny tablet PCs - products known within the company as "Vistagami" devices. The new minitablets are likely to resemble the first of the ultramobile PCs, though they will run Windows Vista, rather than XP.

Some Friday fun: OSDir has some sweet screencaps of Ubuntu 6.06 RC, Kubuntu 6.06 RC, Xubuntu 6.06 RC, and Edubuntu 6.06 RC. Along with Fedora Core 5 and SuSE 10.1, this generation of desktop Linux distros has really stepped up the polish. Updated by AS: Added Xubuntu and Edubuntu links.

"The NetBSD Project is proud to announce the list of projects accepted for this year's Summer of Code. While the list of proposals was impressive and of particularly high quality, a choice of eight applications had to be made Details about each project will be posted to the NetBSD SoC SourceForge website."