I asked what she did for a living. She said she was a software engineer working with SOA. I did not think about my plane ride much until I arrived in San Francisco to attend the SOA World Conference & Expo this past Monday and Tuesday. The first day of the conference as I walked into the hotel, guess who I saw? My friend who I met on the Turkish Airlines flight from Istanbul. What a small world, isn't it? Her company was one of the sponsors of the event.

Specialists in Linux data center automation, Levanta marries virtualization technology with comprehensive Linux life-cycle management. With the release of Levanta 6.0, Levanta adds end-to-end automation capabilities to its existing line of Intrepid Linux life-cycle management solutions.

OpenVZ for Linux 2.6.22 includes new Process ID namespace code that replaces the implementation that was previously in OpenVZ. The code is expected to be adopted in an upcoming release of the Linux kernel and was contributed to the Linux kernel by the OpenVZ project with additional contributions from IBM, plus requests, reviews and comments from other parties.

Ajax4jsf has turned one and what a year it has been. It was an amazing ride for all of us here at Exadel. The popularity of Ajax4jsf is evidenced by the size of the community, available resources, examples, blog entries, and articles. Also, a significant number of organizations today use Ajax4jsf in production. Ajax4jsf is an open source extension to JavaServer Faces (JSF) that adds AJAX capability to JSF applications without requiring the writing of any JavaScript. So, after wishing Ajax4jsf and those who have worked on it a heartfelt 'Happy Birthday,' let's take the time to reflect on this whirlwind of a year.

Real-time 3D is emerging as a first-class media type for the Web. Network bandwidth and graphics hardware processing power are now sufficiently advanced to enable compelling Web-based 3D experiences, including games, online virtual worlds, simulations, education, and training. Commercial developers are expressing increasing interest in exploiting real-time 3D in Web applications to enhance production values, create engaging immersive experiences, and deliver information in a more meaningful way.

The Oracle move is strategically brilliant. Oracle gains an almost-instant, solid foothold in open source, which is one of the fastest-growing software market segments in the world, and which has extremely broad appeal to users in every geographical and industry market. Oracle also gains commercially-leveragable access to a wealth of leading-edge technology and users without significant capital investment. It needs to train and deploy/redeploy its technical services resources to support Red Hat Linux, of course, but resource software training and deployment is typically considered a cost of doing business among enterprise software vendors.

The Apache Tomcat team is proud to announce the immediate availability of Tomcat 4.1.36 stable. This build contains numerous library updates, a small number of bug fixes and two important security fixes.

Red Hat, which is about to put Xen in its operating system, expanded its alliance with VMware Wednesday, promising interoperability and certification. They're supposed to collaborate on virtual machine disk formats, paravirtualization and management APIs.

Modern development environments bring multiple integrated tools to developers' fingertips. Integration of editors and compilers for multiple languages, database browsers, framework-specific development tools, and more are commonplace and considered by many to be entry-level features: the minimum support required to be taken seriously. But modern development environments miss out when it comes to integrating the most important part: the developer.

The Eclipse platform is an open source, integrated system of application development tools that you implement and extend using a plug-in interface. The Eclipse Business Intelligence Reporting Tool (BIRT) is a set of plug-in extensions that enable a developer to add reporting functionality to an application. BIRT provides a Report Engine API that a developer can use to create a customized report generator application. The org.eclipse.birt.repo rt.engine.api package contains a set of interfaces and implementation classes that supports integrating the runtime part of BIRT into an application.

I have spent a good part of the last year trying to 'wrap' COM servers in Java for a content management organization. It had an array of syndication servers supported by an integrated messaging platform developed using COM.

Open source projects have had a significant impact in areas such as operating systems (Linux), databases (MySQL), web applications (Apache), and development tools (Eclipse). However, they have been slower in reaching other areas where open standards and community involvement can make an equally positive impact. Given the new focus on automation for enterprise network infrastructures, network inventory and configuration management is one such area ripe for hosting a vibrant open source community.

Customers have high expectations that their software solutions have been stress-tested thoroughly in advance for every conceivable combination of events that might occur in production and that vendors who put out buggy products are exposed quickly.

For the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (UNCC), using technology to further the education of its 21,000 graduate and undergraduate students is nothing new. In 1983, UNCC became the first U.S. university to electronically categorize its library, and for the past 10 years the school has offered numerous degree programs online.

The other day I was driving down the highway when I passed an American classic, a 1965 Ford Mustang. As I waxed nostalgic, I realized that there will never be another era in history where we will appreciate automobiles like those produced in the 1950s and 1960s. No matter what their merits, I don't foresee automobile aficionados 50 years from now tooling around in a Toyota Prius, Honda minivan, or any of today's plastic-covered modes of transit.

At first glance, it may sound like an impossible prospect for .NET developers to engage in cross-platform, open source development in the enterprise. Such a reality would be unfortunate, because many development teams enjoy the productivity inherent in using Visual Studio .NET and its wealth of tools for rapidly producing high-quality code. However, they would also like the ability to deploy on platforms other than Windows.

When obstacles such as poverty, lack of education or disabilities keep people from finding jobs, Goodwill is there to help. We do that by selling your donations of clothing and household goods in local Goodwill stores and using the revenue to fund our job-training programs in your community. Last year, more than 846,000 people benefited from Goodwill's career services - we helped someone find a job every 57 seconds of every business day.

A job search can be one of the most daunting challenges one faces in his lifetime. Fortunately, the current economy offers a plentiful supply of opportunities. Even with that said, a number of factors always come into play like which company should I choose, and should I relocate for an exciting opportunity, or what opportunity is best for my career, and does the opportunity give me the chance to work with the technology I'm interested in? It's imperative that you discuss these factors openly so you aren't misdirecting people or wasting their time.

Penguin Computing, an AMD Platinum Solution Provider, has announced the Altus 600 server, specifically designed for the needs of high performance computing (HPC).

MultiGen-Paradigm, Inc., providing real-time, 3D visual simulation solutions, and Concurrent, a provider of time-critical Linux operating systems and integrated computer solutions for mission-critical applications, has jointly announced that Lockheed Martin has selected their integrated 3D software and IG (image generator) solution for the U.S. Air Force Air Education and Training Command.

In the past, using open source databases meant running UNIX (or Linux) servers and open source development environments. Today however, the two most popular open source database packages - MySQL and PostgreSQL - have full featured Windows installations, and can be run on most Windows platforms. This allows Windows developers to easily utilize open source databases in their applications.

At the end of each year, when SYS-CON informally polls its globe-girdling network of software developers, industry executives, commentators, investors, writers, and editors, our question is always the same: where's the industry going next year?

Novell has announced that the Novell edition of the OpenOffice.org office productivity suite will now support the Office Open XML format, increasing interoperability between OpenOffice.org and the next generation of Microsoft Office. Novell is cooperating with Microsoft and others on a project to create bi-directional open source translators for word processing, spreadsheets and presentations between OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office, with the word processing translator to be available first, by the end of January 2007.

IBM, currently number three in clusters behind HP and Dell, is determined to be number one by the end of 2008, according to Wendy McGee, program director of its Cluster Solutions Brand & Business Unit. Bearing down on its mark, IBM has been growing at 29%.

Advances in clustering technology have redefined the price-to-performance curve for many High Performance Computing (HPC) application areas. The use of specialized high-speed interconnects and fast commodity processors have pushed the envelope to where it is today.

When integrating various components of a Linux stack, ensuring that all components work together properly prior to set up will save your organization headaches, time and money. Many solution providers are stepping up to the plate to alleviate the stress of selecting and configuring a Linux stack by providing pre-tested, validated and supported architectures.

This article presents a simple and inexpensive methodology for predicting the performance of a client/server application over a wide area network. A network emulator, placed between the client and server, is used to vary key network properties, such as latency, bandwidth and packet loss. This method is not meant to replace extensive network modeling tools such as OPNET or Load Runner, however, it can provide developers with a simple way to explore the behavior of applications over a wide area network before deployment. For example, developers will be able to determine performance over a dial-up line or low-speed frame relay circuit.

OSDL is going to dip into that Fellowship Fund it set up in March and bestow a one-year grant on someone to write Linux kernel documentation. OSDL got the money from Google and HP. It's looking for more pledges.

Scali, the Linux clusterer, has gotten another $3.5 million in funding and a new CEO. Bjorn Skare has been replaced by Jack Kay, the president and CEO of BIOS house Phoenix Technologies during the 90s when its market share spiraled from 18% to 75%.

UK-based Zeus Technology has unwrapped a new version of its flagship traffic management technology that operates as a virtual appliance in virtualized data centers.

Appro has delivered the first of four Infiniband-connected Linux supercomputing clusters to Lawrence Livermore National Labs. The thing is called Rhea, after the Greek version of the Great Mother Goddess, and consists of 576 four-way Opteron Socket F nodes that reportedly peaks out at 22 teraFLOPS.

Newly arrived Panasas chief marketing officer Len Rosenthal, fresh from PathScale, which he co-founded and sold to QLogic, says Panasas' days of playing to the 'lunatic fringe' are waning. Its value proposition makes it mission-critical, he says, especially as HPC, the company's specialty, goes enterprise.

Adobe has teamed up with the open source Mozilla Foundation in what can only be described as a browser platform play. Adobe is giving Mozilla and its Firefox browser the source code for its ActionScript Virtual Machine, the standards-based scripting language engine in the Flash Player, which Adobe got when it acquired Macromedia a while back.

There is a market from which a history of computers began - a market of numerical simulations for scientific and engineering applications. Note that these applications usually deal with a high number of mathematical calculations that are impossible without a computer. Historically, this was what provoked the computer's invention. Also, the main purpose of software for this market is to provide results in a reasonable amount of time. Despite a long history, this market is alive and well, and it will be for the foreseeable future. Consider, for instance, the following fields of numerical simulations: steam turbines (which are core elements of most conventional and nuclear power plants that supply electricity), so-called 'green energy' (wind, waves and solar energy) facilities, blood flow in the human body, elementary particles of which our universe consists, the universe itself, environmental issues (including pollution simulations and simulations of ecosystems), etc.

Clustering is a way to create a system where computers gain access to each others' data and resources. In principle, this adds more computing power and redundancy to the system; however, practical implementations often consume more resources due to the overhead associated with synchronization of facilities in different computers.

With an estimated 850 million PCs installed worldwide, it's not surprising the mantra continues for displacing Windows with a Linux desktop. But is this a commendable objective anymore? Microsoft undertook a lot of dismal software engineering and even legal run-ins with the antitrust police to establish 90% desktop penetration. Linux application developers have better things to do than build a desktop that personal computer OEMs would never adopt anyway. Furthermore, even Windows is arguably not viable as a future desktop platform for Microsoft. Microsoft cannot afford another five-year release cycle like the one it took to launch Vista.

Mention the state of Maine, and most people envision things like lobsters, lighthouses, and lumber mills; 'publishing shop' probably wouldn't spring to mind. Yet in the sleepy hamlet of Surry, along a picturesque inlet not far from Bar Harbor, The Borealis Press greeting card and gift business thrives. Content to be far removed from the publishing centers of New York and other metropolises, The Borealis Press produces unique and humorous cards for holidays and special events as well as related journals, refrigerator magnets, note cards, and other specialty gift items. The company's products are found in numerous bookstores, gift shops, stationery stores, and boutiques around North America and beyond. It operates from a former general store built in the 1890s, with overflow storage in off-site warehouses.

Novell has signed deals with four white box merchants to bundle SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 on their PCs and notebooks. The four include European houses ETegro Technologies, Maxdata and Transtec and US shop R Cubed. Novell says other desktop agreements with major hardware vendors are in the works. Lenovo is selling a ThinkPad with SUSE.

Parasoft, a leading provider of Automated Error Prevention (AEP) software solutions, recently had the opportunity to work closely with leading game development organizations. Since game development differs from 'standard' development, we worked with game development organizations to develop technical and process improvement strategies to suit the industry's unique development needs. This article explores the challenges of developing software for the game development industry, and describes the strategies used to overcome them. The challenges and strategies discussed apply not only to game development, but also to most high-resolution graphic development, which is increasingly being performed on Linux.

It has become something of a cliché that Linux has reached a critical point in its development and adoption. However, this is especially true now when we look at what events are lined up to occur in the near future, and particularly in the desktop area.