“In 1975, Frederick Brooks wrote a classic book on software project management called The Mythical Man-Month. In the book, he famously argued that adding more people to a development project will hinder rather than help to get things done faster. The reason is that having more people working on the project introduces a non-linear overhead in communication.” – Source
“It has been over four months since Dell started shipping computers preloaded with Ubuntu GNU/Linux to home consumers in the United States. Lets take a moment to look at the progress that has been made so far. John Hull, manager of the Linux Engineering team in Austin was kind enough to let me interview him by e-mail. Besides commenting on the current state of affairs with Ubuntu on Dell machines, he also offers some insight in how the Linux team at Dell works and opens a small window into the future of Linux at Dell.” – Source
There is a new contributor to this blog. My brother, and all around uber-geek, is going to be covering some of the neglected topics on this blog. Specifically he will cover hardware, video/computer games, and anything else he sees fit. Welcome aboard.
” This really can’t be a case of “we told you so”, but when Amazon is selling music for 89 cents a track and DRM-free tracks seem suddenly to be fashionable as they were before the heady early days of Napster, it only makes sense. Apple is dropping the price of its DRM-free iTunes Plus music downloads to 99 cents apiece. Until now, the Plus tracks cost $1.29.” – Source
“Now that a handful of lucky folks have gotten their hands on Windows XP Service Pack 3, we’re starting to think you might not want to upgrade to Windows Vista anytime soon. Okay, we already kind of thought that, but it turns out SP3 includes a ton of security updates, some Vista code, and a couple of brand spanking new features for Windows XP:” – Source
“How does the current version of OpenOffice.org (OOo) compare with Microsoft Office in its ability to produce slide presentations? The last time I tried to answer that question, two years ago, both OOo Impress and Microsoft PowerPoint had features that the other lacked. To see how the two programs compare now, I installed Microsoft Office 2007 and OpenOffice.org 2.3, and went through the process of designing a slide show from start to finish. To my surprise, the results were more decisive than in my last comparison. They’re not enough to award a knockout victory, but, even based on points, the winner is clear.” – Article
“After 3 months, Linus has released Linux 2.6.23. This version includes the new and shiny CFS process scheduler, a simpler read-ahead mechanism, the lguest ‘Linux-on-Linux’ paravirtualization hypervisor, XEN guest support, KVM smp guest support, and variable process argument length. SLUB is now the default slab allocator, there’s SELinux protection for exploiting null dereferences using mmap, XFS and ext4 improvements, PPP over L2TP support. Also the ‘lumpy’ reclaim algorithm, a userspace driver framework, the O_CLOEXEC file descriptor flag, splice improvements, a new fallocate() syscall, lock statistics, support for multiqueue network devices, various new drivers, and many other minor features and fixes. See the changelog for details.” – Source
The new Foo Fighters, Incubus, and Kayne West albums are amazingly good. Easily the best albums I have purchased in a long time. They are all worth the price and more. I bought the Kayne album from the new Amazon MP3 download store. It was pretty simple, light weight client program, $8.99 for the album, and DRM FREE! I will definitely be shopping there first before i check iTunes.
“October marks 10 friggin years of Slashdot, and nobody is more surprised about any of this than me. Throughout the month we’ll be running a series of navel gazing meta news articles about our history, infrastructure and plans for the future. We’re also going to give away 500 t-shirts and ThinkGeek gift certificates to people willing to organize and attend their own local Slashdot parties. One lucky winner will get a cool grand to blow at ThinkGeek! I’m going to attend “official” gatherings in Ann Arbor, MI on Oct 20 and in Palo Alto, CA on Oct 25. But you can read on for details about party organization and how you can win the grand prize.” – Source
