The executive committee for Java SE/EE has approved the new JSR-275 to add units/quantities to the Java platform (see JSR-275 results). Although the early specification/implementation of the units package provided by the wide-ranging JScience open-source project has to be simplified significantly according to Google Inc. executive member.

Hyperion Entertainment announced the immediate availability of the final intermediate update of Amiga OS 4.0 prior to its full commercial release later this year. People can testdrive the latest release at the upcoming '20th birhday of Amiga' celebration events in California and Sweden.

There is a new video of the SkyOS IndexFeeder available on the SkyOS website, which consists of two parts that show how to perform queries for file meta data and file content using the viewer, and how the Open/Save dialog makes use of the IndexFeeder in order to find documents very quickly, regardless of where they are stored.

GnomeFiles.org, the software repository for applications using the multi-platform toolkit GTK+, is now one year old. During that time 840 applications were posted and 240,000+ file downloads occured. The site now enjoys about 20,000 pageviews daily on average (which was our initial goal). A few more statistics for the curious: 69% of GnomeFiles' visitors are using Linux and it was a surprise for us that only 1.2% are using a *BSD. Regarding browsers, Firefox dominates with 71% while Gnome's Epiphany scores a 5% with IE barely at 6%. We would like to thank our loyal GnomeFiles visitors for their support. Please leave a comment if you would like to see a new feature on GnomeFiles.org.

The founder and chief architect of the popular Linux distribution Gentoo Daniel Robbins, has taken up a job at Microsoft. He describes his new job as "helping Microsoft to understand Open Source and community-based projects". While in the midst of hastily packing to move to Redmond, Robbins nonetheless managed to find the time to finalize the transfer of Gentoo's intellectual property (essentially copyrights on ebuilds and other software as well as soon-to-be trademarked Gentoo logos) to the not-for-profit Gentoo Foundation, Inc.

Consumers will be able to play graphically rich, high-performance Amiga content on U3 powered USB smart drives. AmigaAnywhere is the digital environment that enables and simplifies access to the same applications from a variety of devices. Amiga lets consumers enjoy rich-media content featuring extraordinary audio-visual quality, high-speed interactive gaming, education and entertainment, all playing on a diverse universe of devices. Click here to read the full article.

Is open source changing the way that software is made? It is at IBM. BetaNews sat down with Doug Heintzman, IBM Software Group's VP of Strategy and Technology, to discuss the adoption of a hybrid development model called Community Source that combines the best elements of the open source model with decades of IBM programming practice - avoiding a top down approach that IBM says could make Microsoft's Longhorn obsolete upon arrival.

I chose Minislack because of the low requirements (running fine on my Pentium II - 400 MHz with 256 Mb RAM, 32 Mb swap, on a 1.5 Gb harddrive partition - I recommend 2 Gb, though).

Fedora Core 4 sponsored by Red Hat and supported by the Fedora community (soon to be Fedora Foundation) has been released with a number of new features including GNOME 2.10, KDE 3.4, Openoffice.org 2.0 (pre release with enhancements), Evince document viewer, , Xen, GFS, GCC 4.0, Enhancements in SELinux, support for the PPC architecture, Free Java stack (using GCJ) including Eclipse and Apache Jakarta among others. Download and install your brand new Fedora.

Joe Barr recently asked Linus Torvalds for his thoughts on the relative strengths and weaknesses of Linux and BSD, and about how much synergy there might be between the Linux kernel and the BSDs.

Microsoft Corp.'s "Longhorn" server will be a far more configurable system than past Windows releases, allowing customers to change the server's setup on the fly by selecting which components to load.

A key component of this development has been Nokia's cooperation with Apple, as the Series 60 browser will use the same open source components, WebCore and JavaScriptCore, that Apple uses in its popular Safari Internet browser. Based on KHTML and KJS from KDE's "Konqueror" open source project, this software has enabled Safari to achieve industry-leading features and performance. Nokia intends to continue its collaboration with Apple and actively participate in the open source community to further develop and enhance these components, contributing Nokia's expertise in mobility.

Performance analysis and bottleneck determination in Linux is not rocket science. It requires some basic knowledge of the hardware and kernel architecture and the use of some standard tools. Using a hands-on approach they’ll walk readers through the different subsystems and the key indicators, to understand which component constitutes the current bottleneck of a system.

The second edition of 'Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change' explains how and why to use XP. But where to start? XP Explained uses the analogy of entering a swimming pool to describe how organizations get started with XP. There are toe dippers, racing divers, cannonballers, and all manner of variations in between. In this paper Kent Beck and Cynthia Andres characterize these styles.