David Adams Archive

Badly designed software is costing businesses millions of dollars annually because it's difficult to use, requires extensive training and support, and is so frustrating that many end users underutilize applications, say IT officials at companies such as The Boeing Co. and Fidelity Investments. Despite those problems, most CIOs remain unaware of a 3-year-old standard designed to help IT managers compare the usability of software products.

Analysts of the software industry often point out that the majority of software written in the world is not commercially released, but used in-house. Computerworld has an interesting profile of a well-known company that writes virtually all of its software in-house. It discusses some of the challenges they face, the temptations to use more off-the-shelf software, and some available apps and tools that they do use, that have proved to be useful.

Celtix, a collaboration between Iona and ObjectWeb, is a low-end, freely available back-end integration tool that adheres to Java standards. It's an enterprise service bus (ESB) -- a standards-based integration server, which use messages to carry data between different programs.

The U.S. software industry lost 16 percent of its jobs from March 2001 to March 2004, the Washington-based Economic Policy Institute found. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that information technology industries laid off more than 7,000 American workers in the first quarter of 2005.

Danny Thorpe is the chief scientist at Borland Software, and was part of the original team that developed Delphi. In this interview Thorpe talks about Delphi, Kylix, and the future of working with the Mono project.

With "only a little Java code and a third-party product," Bob Reselman was able to make Windows pay attention to the goings-on of a Macintosh server. Here's how he did it.

Proc: Manipulating all manners of runtime state information by using file-level system calls and commands. Read more at LinuxJournal.

With the backdrop of the OSX/x86 brouhaha, a story at Low End Mac reminds us of the secret Novell/Apple project to port MacOS to IBM compatible PCs. The team of engineers responsible for the project were successful in porting Mac OS, QuickTime and portions of QuickDraw GX until Apple canned the project and reallocated resources to PowerMacintosh.

GNU/DOS version 2005 was released today. GNU/DOS is a FreeDOS distribution for desktops which includes some FreeDOS utilities, much of the DJGPP suite including many GNU utilities, vim, Arachne, and OpenGEM. All code used in GNU/DOS is open-source or public domain with source. ISO images are currently available, and there are plans to produce commercial CDs very soon. Installation is currently difficult due to the lack of an open-source CD-ROM driver. For more information, go here.

TipMonkies has an article highlighting some of the major distros and their derivatives. The article discusses some history and the advantages and disadvantages of each distro. If you have not been keeping up with Linux developments, or have yet to try a distro, it may be a good place to start.

The royalty-free license under which Microsoft plans to make its upcoming new Office Open XML Formats widely available is incompatible with the GNU General Public License and will thus prevent many free and open-source software projects from using the formats, community officials say.

Wondering what's up with OpenSolaris after its launch? Well, we have spotted what seems to be the first public distro of OpenSolaris on the wild. Joerg Schilling has released SchilliX, an OpenSolaris-based UNIX Live CD and distribution for X86, AMD64 and EMT64. It is based on Solaris 11 (Nevada) Build 17+.

GTK+ 2.6.8 is released with many bugfixes, mainly in the filechooser.

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.