ACMQueue has four interesting articles on developer's collaboration and distributed development: "Building Collaboration into IDEs", "Culture Surprises in Remote Software Development Teams", "The Sun Never Sets on Distributed Development" and "Distributed Development Lessons Learned".

After 13 years with Borland, Hejlsberg joined Microsoft in 1996, where he initially worked as an architect of Visual J++ and the Windows Foundation Classes (WFC). Then, Hejlsberg was chief designer of C# and a key participant in the creation of the Microsoft .NET Framework. Today, he leads the ongoing development of the C# programming language. On July 30, 2003, Bruce Eckel, author of Thinking in C++ and Thinking in Java, and Bill Venners, editor-in-chief of Artima.com, met with Anders Hejlsberg in his office at Microsoft. Check out the entire eight-part interview here.

Reasons why the Firebird database is a viable option for your next project. In the open-source world, much has been made about the need for a full-featured, robust and reliable database that can handle substantial loads and yet be able to play well with such open-source tools as Perl and PHP. The two main contenders are PostgreSQL and MySQL, but a new arrival in this arena is the Firebird RDBMS.

"Software innovation is dead. All that's left is compatibility fixes, security patches, and minor-version-number incremental improvements. The problem isn't a lack of ideas; it's a lack of motivated developers. The next generation of software engineers, who will be producing software in the next twenty-odd years, are simply not able to produce innovative software. Thirty years ago, programming was a niche area, an art, under constant evolution and requiring intellect and ability. New software was really just that -- completely new." Read the editorial at NewsForge.

Following the previous benchmarking article between the two classic virtual machines, Hernán Di Pietro wrote the 2nd part of the article, where WinXP is used as a guest. Check out the new results.

One contributing factor to Mandrake's minimal presence in the enterprise is its unusual business model. After legions of Linux salespeople have educated corporate buyers into the open-source methodology -- buying low-cost software, but expecting to pay for services -- Mandrake persists in taking the opposite approach. Read the article at Enterprise-Linux-IT.

LinuxDevices.com has published an article by veteran Linux author William von Hagen about changes to the configuration process in the 2.6 Linux kernel. The article is the first in a series of articles that will discuss using the Linux kernel and device drivers, etc., in embedded devices. However, the article is generally relevant to servers and desktops, too. Be aware, the author did not mention on the "migration from kernel 2.4" section of the article that you will need to download the latest module-init-tools (and the new 'udev', 'hotplug' packages if you were using these too) in order to fully & correctly migrate to 2.6.

This guide mainly focuses prime issues that are involved in writing professional code, which is very efficient both in terms of space & time as well as be easily ported to other systems with small changes.

yellowTAB has announced that they are expanding internationally. They will be opening offices in Canada and Italy, in order to reach users and markets around the world. yellowTAB North America will be opening it's own store, Zelect.com. In other yellowTAB news, recently an educational edition of Zeta RC2 was released.

Sun Microsystems is experimenting (as we have reported in the past) with a three-dimensional desktop interface that could alter the way users see their screens--without the dorky glasses. First demonstrated at LinuxWorld in January, the "Project Looking Glass" initiative is a 3D Java-based, open source desktop that runs on Linux.

According to recently-released market data, retail software sales have decreased by 4%, or by 10% by units sold. That difference in numbers is a telling fact. Though demand is slackening, prices are rising. And this does not include mail order or download sales. Should it be any surprise that people are not buying software at their local Wal-Marts anymore? And the growing disaffection with the upgrade treadmill and the increasing availablity of free alternatives may be having an effect too.

The Robotic Operating System, or ROS (download), is intended to operate at the center of behavior-based robotics systems. ROS is an operating system within an operating system, running as a normal program on UNIX-like systems and acting as an operating system for a set of other normal UNIX programs and scripts. ROS is used only to start, stop, and provide other services to behaviors, but without behaviors would perform no function. While a behavior might, technically, run without ROS, it would not fit into a system of behaviors and so would not be useful.

Stefan has released an alpha version of his GNUstep port of WebCore, the KHTML-based renderer used by Apple's Safari web browser. The code includes a simple browser program.

Mandrake has applied to come out of the French equivalent of bankruptcy protection: 'declaration de cessation des paiements'. Some of the new features of Mandrake 10 that MandrakeSoft will be pinning their hopes on to make succeeding quarters more profitable. "There will be many new features in Mandrake 10.0, but it's a bit early to say more. There will be new improvements on the ergonomy side, the integration of a groupware solution, and of course the inclusion of Linux 2.6.x kernel as default which provides better performance."