The Contiki team has just released version 2.1 of the open source Contiki operating system for low-power, wireless, memory-constrained networked embedded devices that typically have as little a few kilobytes of RAM. The major highlight of this release is a unique energy profiling mechanism that measures where energy is spent, and how much energy that is consumed. This is extremely important when optimizing for low-power operation: to know where to optimize, one must first know where energy is spent. Other additions to the 2.1 release are low-power radio protocols that increase system lifetime from days to years, and improved data collection routing protocols.

For the last several years, Red Hat has been pushing forward the development of real-time enhancements for Linux. Yet the company has made no formal product announcement of how it would attempt to productize its real-time Linux innovations. That changed today, with the announcement of the Red Hat MRG (Messaging, Real Time and Grid) platform. The product is expected to be available as a public beta this month, with a generally available release set for early 2008.

"No one is unhappy with Mac OS X Version 10.4, known as Tiger. OS X is not an application platform that needed repair, speeding up, or exterior renovation. Motivations for major upgrades of competing system software - roll-ups of an unmanageable number of fixes, because the calendar says it's time, or because users are perceived to have version fatigue - don't apply to OS X. People buy Macs because the platform as a whole is perfect, full stop. Leopard is a rung above perfection. It's taken as rote that the Mac blows away PC users' expectations. Leopard blows away Mac users' expectations, and that's saying a great deal."

NetBeans 6.0 has been released. The 6.0 release includes significant enhancements and new features, including a completely rewritten editor infrastructure, support for additional languages, new productivity features, and a simplified installation process that allows you to easily install and configure the IDE to meet your exact needs.

"With all the modern systems using multi-core and multi-processor systems, tapping this new power is an interesting challenge for developers. It also fundamentally starts the shift on how your 'average Joe' interacts with a computer and things that he/she expects to be able to. First, check out the 'Manycore Shift' paper from Microsoft. Second checkout the Parallel Extensions to .NET 3.5 which is a programing model for data and task parallelism. It also helps with coordination on parallel hardware (such as multi-core CPU's) via a common work schedules. There is also a new Parallel Computing Dev Center on MSDN. Before you download the December 2007 CTP, make sure you have the RTM bits of the .NET 3.5 runtime. There are also a number of bugs fixed in this new CTP. If you want a quick introduction then check out a few videos available."

IBM's latest developerWorks article is about creating a very rapid development process using open source tools for grid applications, taking advantage of scripting languages like Perl or Python and deployment environments like Apache. It also covers using Project Zero and PHP to build a simple web application.