It's easy to argue that Ubuntu's success is because there's an unlimited supply of investment from its super-rich parent company, Canonical. But Linux isn't like any ordinary software stack.

A Linux developer has published a new kernel patch that provides a workaround to avoid Microsoft's patents on the FAT filesystem. The patch, which has undergone extensive legal review by patent lawyers, could make it possible to use FAT on Linux without having to pay licensing fees to Microsoft.

On a technical level this means Moblin is built for the Atom x86 chip found in many netbooks, while on a practical level it means Moblin is an Internet- and multimedia-focused operating system. Moblin is less about knocking-up spreadsheets on the move and more about twittering, updating your Facebook account, and watching movies on the go.

ThoughtWorks started using Ruby for production projects in 2006, from then till the end of 2008 we had done 41 ruby projects. In preparation for a talk at QCon I surveyed these projects to examine what lessons we can draw from the experience. I describe our thoughts so far on common questions about Ruby's productivity, speed and maintainability. So far our conclusions are that Ruby is a viable platform that should be seriously considered for many forms of applications - in particular web applications using Ruby on Rails. I also go through some technical lessons, including some thoughts on testing with Active Record.

When you get a new job, you can breathe a sigh of relief, but not for long. You have an offer letter in your hand, and it is easy to miss one of the most important opportunities of your life – the starting salary. Here’s the tale of two programmers. When getting a job, Goofus didn’t negotiate. Gallant asked and got an extra $2500. They both get yearly raises of 3%

Some of you will remember my rant about open source, and how I couldn't find time to do it and didn't know how anyone could. That post caused a big backlash, lots of people wanted to know how I could say that without ever trying it. Many more shared their personal experiences getting involved in open source and loving it. They explained that it was something you MADE time for. So, to see if they were right I did make time. Let me just tell you, totally worth it.

Making a webapp for the iPhone is a lot like making a normal web site, but with a few quirks to abide by. In this article, I'll give you a wide variety of tips, covering things such as: "must-haves", usability guidelines, testing/debugging, pitfalls, and performance issues. I hope you enjoy it!

A discription of what was in marina and what can be included in next iteration.

After the Vista fiasco, Microsoft owes its long-suffering customers more than a “screaming deal.” They’re owed an apology from Steve Ballmer - and a free copy of Vista SP3 Windows 7.

To deliver value, IT departments must keep a tight rein on how they use their budget - and that includes development efforts. Justin James cites some of the most common areas where IT throws its development bucks down the drain.

You've probably been told over the years how great JVMs are. How well they've scaled, perform under a variety of different loads. How its doing its part to take advantage of the processing power of multi-core systems now that cranking the clock rate is almost wrung dry. The automatic memory management provided by the JVM's garbage collector is one of the most important aspects of scaling the JVM. There are many different kinds - as this great primer shows.

I don’t want to hear about Firefox advances! Not until I know IE has caught up! Slow down FF!

Linux rarely needs to be rebooted. But when it does, it's often slow to boot. Fortunately, there are ways to speed things up. Some of these methods are not terribly difficult (although some, unfortunately, are). Let's take a look.

A year ago, Mozilla entered the Guinness Book with a little over 8 M Firefox 3 downloads in 24 hours. Today, still in the first day, Firefox 3.5 has an average of about 50 downloads /sec and a total of 3.6 million downloads at July 01 10:30 AM GMT. It won’t probably break its own record, but 3.5 is a worthy update considering the large number of improvements over 3.0 like native video. No need for Flash/Silverlight anymore.

The blogosphere was jerked into excitement when Google gave a sneak preview of its new service, Google Wave. Only the select few have an account, but there’s an 80-minute video about it on YouTube for the rest of us. The service is an HTML 5 app, and so HTML 5 has gone from being too far away to care about to today’s hot topic.

What's the most common programming language in the world? I'm not sure how you could go about measuring this, but one thing you'd need to do is consider what we mean by programming. My candidate answer considers that the most popular programming language is one used widely by people who do not consider themselves as programmers. This language is Excel, or more generally spreadsheets.

Global variables are those variables which can be accessed and modified by any module. They are declared in outermost scope so that they are visible to every inner scope module.

Quite often there is a fear that surrounds open source tools and frameworks. For most shops the deciding factor against open source software is the apparent "risk" that is associated with a framework/tool that is not attached to any business entity.

There are many aspects of creating a website design. Web designers often have to play multiple roles and be very knowledgeable about building effective and usable site layouts.

Richard Stallman (right) of the Free Software Foundation sees C# and Mono as a Microsoft conspiracy and is warning developers away from it. Stallman’s fear is that Microsoft will use its software patents to force open source C# implementations, and applications, underground.

I would not have written this blog in the year 2000 and by now i am highly opiniated towards Google, of course in a good way. During my graduation years (1996-2000), i highly used Rediff and Yahoo search for my college projects, and ACM seminars. In the year 1996/1998, Google was known but to very few people. At the present day Google is not just a Internet search company but a World Wide phenomenon which changed the way everyone things. Google virtually got implanted in today’s life of everyone. I was quite amazed with the following news from Yahoo CEO in the annual share holder meeting.

NetBeans seems to be really lagging behind Eclipse and IntelliJ when it comes to test execution ...

Have you struggled with this, perhaps as a young developer? How did you overcome it? Can anyone offer general advice on winding down after a long programming session?

When I recently received this message from a frustrated reader: After hours and hours of slamming my head into the desk it turns out it was the darn "d" in the response. My home computer is on .NET 2.0 and my work computer is on 3.5. Jimminie Christmas!

I believe that I was born to be a computer programmer. Somewhere, deep in my soul, there is a need to organize my thoughts in ways that are both new and interesting, but also foundational and reusable at the same time. I've always felt that there is something atypical about this kind of work, and about the people who have chosen to do it. Not that it is better or worse than any other profession mind you, but that it was very unique, and at the same time both interesting and powerful.