If autonomic computing is the process of making computers behave like living, sentient creatures, then you, as a developer, are the doctor who makes sure your products and systems are performing properly. If there's an area of concern, you must diagnose it and make sure it has what it needs to function properly. The article gives a roadmap to integrate autonomic computing concepts into your products.
Imagine this scenario: you need to run your favorite application under Linux but the application has not been ported to Linux yet and there is no other alternative that would completely suit your needs. Or you need to work with several operating systems.
The XFce Team is pleased to announce the release 4.0.5 of the XFce 4 Desktop Environment and Development Platform. As usual, this is a maintenance release, aimed at bug-fixing; no new features are being added to the 4.0 branch. The main purpose of this release is compatibility with the recent GTK+ 2.4.x release along with other fixes. Download locations can be found on this page, and the changelog is available here.
MyXaml is making available a free designer that generates MyXaml compatible markup. You can lay out controls in the designer, switch to the MyXaml view, edit the markup, switch back to the designer view and see your markup changes. This is an early prototype, so quite a few features are missing, but we're moving forward with a fully functional MyXaml Studio. Our Take: I would also like to see the MyXaml technologies ported to Mono in association with Novell.
The new MenuetOS 0.76 release offers DHCP and NNTP news clients, Improved process and memory management, RT improvements and faster userspace drivers. Screenshots here.
Joe Barr writes: "Here is our promised in-depth look at the latest SUSE 9.1 beta. I found a little more flakiness than I would be comfortable with long-term, but I have been using this near-final version in my day-to-day work for nearly a week now and see no reason to go back to my previous installation."
Great post about what Google is up to by Rich Skrenta. He argues that Google is building a huge computer with a custom operating system that everyone on earth can have an account on. His last few paragraphs are so much more perceptive than anything that's been written about Google by anyone; Skrenta nails the company exactly.
Fans of the C# language will find much to like in Visual C# 2005. Visual Studio 2005 brings a wealth of exciting new features to Visual C# 2005, such as generics, iterators, partial classes, and anonymous methods. While generics is the most talked-about and anticipated feature, especially among C++ developers who are familiar with templates, the other new features are important additions to your Microsoft .NET development arsenal as well. Read more here.
Apple Computer Inc. is seeking Common Criteria evaluation of Mac OS X, which could open government doors wider to open-source software. Apple wants a Common Criteria Evaluated Assurance Level 3, which "costs big bucks," said John Hurley, Apple’s security policy architect. "It's a pain in the neck to spend that money." Elsewhere, C|Net has two more Apple-related articles here and here.
Conectiva Linux, developed by Brazilian vendor Conectiva S.A., is the most popular distribution in South America, so it’s quite surprising that there aren’t more reviews of their products online. This is really quite surprising – while you may not have heard much about Conectiva Linux itself, you almost certainly know quite a lot about three of their most important contributions to the open source community – the Conectiva Crystal icon set, apt-rpm, and Synaptic.
As part of the Lindows-to-Linspire name change promotion, a new ISO image of Linspire 4.5 has been made available for free download, DistroWatch reports.
For the first time, Apple sold more iPods in a quarter than it did Macs--and Apple CEO Steve Jobs is happy about it, MacMinute reports. "We feel great," Jobs told the New York Times. "We sold a lot of Macs, but we've sold more iPods in the quarter than all the Macs put together."
API/ABI-stable bindings for the GNOME 2.6 Development Platform, for C++, Java, and Perl are now released. That means you can seriously consider those programming languages (and others) when developing GNOME-based applications, and you can be confident that your applications will not break when future versions of these bindings are released. OSNews hopes that the Python and GTK# bindings will become part of this great set in the near future too.
I created the Casper project because I needed a way to organize my growing collection of CD-R/RWs which holds a lot of music and images, but there was no such solution available for my OS of choice, the BeOS.
Athene 3.4 is now available for download. The major new feature is backwards compatibility with X11 programs. This is achieved by running a rootless X11 server, the same technique employed by Mac OS X & QNX. The need for a separate window manager has also been eliminated by merging the window management functionality into the server itself. Screenshots demonstrating all this are here and here.
OrangeCrate presented an email interview with James Gosling of Sun Microsystems. Mr. Gosling answered some tough questions and refute some of the analysts’ propositions as to what exactly the Sun Microsystems and Microsoft settlement means for the future of Linux.
And our winner for the $3000 prize worth of the Aspire Swatter (Enterprise Edition with 25 client licenses) competition is Amit Bahree and his soon-to-be-published article "Exception Management in .NET". Amit won amidst 6 more submissions. Congratulations Amit!
Microsoft gives its Java virtual machine technology a three-year reprieve in the wake of its antitrust settlement with Sun Microsystems. But don't expect any new MSJVM enhancements. On other Java news, NetBeans IDE 3.6, which includes two-tier J2EE 1.4 support, became generally available today. NetBeans is a pure Java, open source development environment for Windows, *nix and MacOSX.
A Swedish upstart is challenging Microsoft in the database arena by making use of the same low-end assault tactics that the software giant employed to gain a foothold. MySQL also released clustering software today.
