In just seven years, Google Inc. has morphed from a bare-bones online search engine into a technological octopus that seems to sprout another intriguing tentacle every other week.

In about six weeks time developers from all over the world will convene in Prague for the 2005 edition of the Firebird Conference. This year's conference has an even greater abundance of speakers and topics than the previous editions of the event. The various tracks on the conference will cover Firebird itself, development languages and solution stacks, development tools and issues and applications. And, of course, it is a great opportunity to meet the community.

Mark Shuttleworth just posted an Ubuntu FAQ on his wiki page. In this FAQ, he addresses some of the more controversial subjects surrounding Ubuntu, including the fork (non-) issue, whether or not Ubuntu will ever go commercial, the brown desktop color, and much more.

"Today, I want to take you on a journey. A journey that starts back into the cold recesses of the mid-1980s, back into the days of EGA and serial port mice and the MS-DOS Executive. Microsoft Word 1.0 for Windows shipped in 1989 after a long development cycle and was designed to run on Windows 386. There's not much more to the program than what you see here, but it gives you an idea of how far Word's come."

Tim Bray, the director of Web technologies at Sun, said at the OpenOffice.org conference in Slovenia late last week that the file format developed by standards body OASIS has the potential to transform the world as much as the World Wide Web did.

In a conversation that began as a request to include the SAS Transport Layer in the mainline Linux kernel, there was an interesting thread regarding specifications. Linux creator Linus Torvalds began the discussion saying, "a 'spec' is close to useless. I have _never_ seen a spec that was both big enough to be useful _and_ accurate. And I have seen _lots_ of total crap work that was based on specs. It's _the_ single worst way to write software, because it by definition means that the software was written to match theory, not reality."

"You probably don't visit /var/log every day, or take care to ensure its contents - program log files - are safe. Most people see log files as a record of events: something that has to do with the past rather than something with an impact on the present or the future. In reality, effective log file management is critical for high system availability."

The next beta version of Microsoft's operating system is expected in November. The new beta version of Vista will have its graphic component a little bit readier than before as it's already time to start working on a user interface and the gaming part of the API.

It is evident open-source software has and will continue to impact the software industry and the business models of new and existing companies, as both start-ups and large entrenched players vie to keep ahead of open-source projects. For instance, Marc Fleury's JBoss came out of the blocks as a poster child for the open-source movement.

This series of articles teaches you about creating applications using Java technology, Eclipse, and the SWT and JFace libraries. In SWT and JFace Part 3 find out how to use tabular tree, canvas, styled text, slider, spinner, scale and other controls, as well as stack layouts. You might want to look at previous articles in this series. In SWT and JFace Part 1 learn how to to create simple SWT GUIs using Eclipse, Java, basic JFace controls and layouts. In SWT and JFace Part 2, learn how to use combo, list, table, and tree controls, as well as form layouts and reusable helper methods.

The Scrum methodology can pose a challenge for software testers who are used to more traditional waterfall-inspired development processes. Jonathan Kohl relates his experiences working on Scrum teams who found some clear advantages in changing their methods.

Ravindra Okade explores three different approaches to creating a .NET service: a timer-based service, a service using a single worker thread, and a service using multiple worker threads.

"Well, they've done it again. In prime-time. With malice aforethought. The duplicitous droogs, the denizens of deep-doodoo, I'm talking about Bill Gates' Microsoft: caught in a bald-faced lie about HD DVD-ROM discs. This is news? Not any more than the fact it's hot in Texas this summer or that Katrina caused a lot of damage. It is, after all, the Microsoft way: dishonesty in all things."

Another pre-release build of Mac OS X 10.4.3 was among the software seeds reportedly released by . Now at build 8F31, the third maintenance release to Tiger is is approaching 110MB in size and includes well over 500 minor fixes and enhancements. The frequency in which Apple has released new builds of the update indicates that a release is on tap for the first half of October.