Version control systems are a tool close to any programmer's heart and a lot has been made of advancements in Subversion, but there is another version control system out there that completely redefines the boundaries of how such a system should work. Tom Lord is the author of the Arch Revision Control System. OSDir interviews Tom on the story behind Arch and just how different it is from what you're likely using today.

Are you thinking of moving from base Rational ClearCase to Unified Change Management (UCM)? Many organizations find it difficult to use ClearCase out of the box. UCM was an effort to identify the most common elements of ClearCase use models, and to create objects and methods that make the application more effective. This article shares some points that you may want to consider when making the decision to move to UCM.

Watson developer Dan Wood has posted an update on Sun's Java version of his popular Mac OS X application. "I am sad to say that it looks like Sun doesn't seem to be focusing on getting the port of Watson released any time soon," writes Wood on his blog.

Java 1.4.2 Update 2 for Mac OS X provides improved behavior for applets in Safari and increased stability for desktop Java applications. It is an accumulative upgrade.

The long awaited 1.0 release of SharpDevelop is here. It is a good replacement to VisualStudio (the .NET framework comes for free, so you can develop for .NET on the cheap). Elsewhere, the twin brother of SharpDevelop, MonoDevelop for the Mono framework released version 0.5.1, a bug fix release.

Two interesting articles/reflections about business in the new economy: one, two.

Trolltech has announced the availability of the second Qt 4 Technical Preview. Key highlights include support for AT-SPI, bringing accessibility to the Unix and Linux desktop for people with disabilities.

After reading Adam Scheinberg's original article "The Paradox of Choice" and Kevin Russo's response, I want to add my personal comments to this discussion. I will quote Adam and Russo several times and pick up their arguments.

Sometimes you just need to show that you are doing something, even if you can't say how long it is going to take. One effective way of illustrating this state is to display a cyclic animation. Building your own progress bar is probably the easiest part of this column; understanding how to use it in your own applications is the real trick. This article describes how to create a visualizer, using the Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1 release, which enables you to customize the way data is displayed when you are debugging through managed code.

This series introduces you to R, a rich statistical environment, released as free software. It includes a programming language, an interactive shell, and extensive graphing capability. What's more, R comes with a spectacular collection of functions for mathematical and statistical manipulations -- with still more capabilities available in optional packages.

Along with the stable maintanance release of Mono 1.0.2, Novell released the first beta of the upcoming Mono 1.2: The Mono JIT has been ported to a new architectures: AMD64, SPARC v9, and S390. In the runtime detection, support for side-by-side execution of applications that require different runtime versions was implemented. Mono now will detect the runtime version that an application requires, and will load the appropriate mscorlib.dll and machine.config.

"Firefox just had its preview release last week and already has been downloaded more than a million times. I reviewed the new version, and found Firefox's simple interface gets you the information you want without distracting you with options." Read the review at NewsForge.

Ever used BugZilla? I'm sure you have. Frustrated? Dropped support for ever? Oh yes, I understand.

Computer Sciences Corp. (CSC) has published a 96-page report on Open Source software and its potential benefits to business and government. This whitepaper provides an introduction to the report and its findings.