Chabil Ha' writes "Heard the rumors that the much-maligned Windows 7 Starter Edition would be able to run more than three concurrent applications? Today, the Windows team made it official: 'Based on the feedback we've received from partners and customers asking us to enable a richer small notebook PC experience with Windows 7 Starter, we've decided to enable Windows 7 Starter customers the ability to run as many applications simultaneously as they would like, instead of being constricted to the 3 application limit that the previous Starter editions included. We believe these changes will make Windows 7 Starter an even more attractive option for customers who want a small notebook PC for very basic tasks, like browsing the web, checking email and personal productivity.' Small consolation, of course, if you want to watch a DVD natively, but I'm sure this won't stop the Slashdot crowd from enabling it."

zokier writes "Microsoft has released a new programming language called Axum, previously known as Maestro and based on the actor model. It's meant to ease development of concurrent applications and thus making better use of multi-core processors. Axum does not have capabilities to define classes, but as it runs on the .NET platform, Axum can use classes made with C#. Microsoft has not committed to shipping Axum since it is still in an incubation phase of development so feedback from developers is certainly welcome."

Barence writes "Microsoft's decision to limit Windows 7 Starter Edition to running only three concurrent applications could force up the price of netbooks as many manufacturers opt for the more expensive Home Premium. The three-app rule includes applications running in the background but excludes antivirus, and the company claims most users wouldn't be affected by the limit. 'We ran a study which suggested that the average consumer has open just over two applications [at any time]. We would expect the limit of three applications wouldn't affect very many people.' However, Microsoft told journalists at last year's Professional Developers Conference that 70% of Windows users have between eight and 15 windows open at any one time."

Got Game recently announced the launch of an in-game web browser called Rogue, designed for concurrent use with modern games for those who don't care to to switch back and forth. Their aim is to make it so gamers can more easily keep themselves entertained during downtime in games, and to streamline information retrieval without missing any of the action. An anonymous reader writes with related news from Gamasutra: "This article details the practical steps for game developers to add a video recording feature to a game, encode gameplay footage in the Theora video format, and share the recording on YouTube. Spore's Creature Creator, PixelJunk Eden, and Mainichi Issho already support YouTube, but not only commercial games benefit. By hosting the videos, YouTube puts this feature in reach of indie game developers who might otherwise not be able to afford the server resources."

Massively takes an interesting look at the server model used by EVE Online. It's unusual for a MMOG because it doesn't divide the player load among different servers or "shards." Instead, the same cluster handles the entire EVE universe and all 300,000 subscribers (total; record concurrent load is around 40,000). The EVE Dev Blog recently announced some upgrades to keep things running smoothly and allow for battles involving over 1,000 ships. They call the technology StacklessIO.

Cory Foy writes "As developers, system admins, and a variety of other roles in IT, we have to deal with code on a daily basis. Sometimes it's just one-off scripts we never have to see again. Sometimes we stare at something that, for the life of us, we can't understand how it came out of a human mind (or, as the book puts it, has a high WTF/minute count). But there is a time when you find code that is a joy to use, to read and to understand. Clean Code sets out to help developers write that third kind of code through a series of essay-type chapters on a variety of topics. But does it really help?" Read below to find out.

snydeq writes "Consuming twice as much RAM as Firefox and saturating the CPU with nearly six times as many execution threads, Microsoft's latest beta release of Internet Explorer 8 is in fact more demanding on your PC than Windows XP itself, research firm Devil Mountain Software found in performance tests. According to the firm, which operates a community-based testing network, IE8 Beta 2 consumed 380MB of RAM and spawned 171 concurrent threads during a multi-tab browsing test of popular Web destinations. InfoWorld's Randall Kennedy speculates that Microsoft may be designing IE8 for the multicore future. But until your machine sports four or eight discrete processing cores, IE8 will remain 'porcine,' Devil Mountain's Craig Barth says."

Delchanat points out a blog entry which notes, "The two biggest computing-providers of today, Amazon and Google, are building their concurrent offerings on top of really concurrent programming languages and systems. Not only because they want to, but because they need to. If you want to build computing into a utility, you need large real-time systems running as efficiently as possible. You need your technology to be able to scale in a similar way as other, comparable utilities or large real-time systems are scaling — utilities like telephony and electricity. Erlang is a language that has all the right properties and mechanisms in place to do what utility computing requires. Amazon SimpleDB is built upon Erlang. IMDB (owned by Amazon) is switching from Perl to Erlang. Google Gears is using Erlang-style concurrency, and the list goes on."

An anonymous reader writes "InfoQ has an interesting writeup of Dr. Cliff Click's work on developing highly concurrent data structures for use on the Azul hardware (which is in production with 768 cores), supporting 700+ hardware threads in Java. The basic idea is to use a new coding style that involves a large array to hold the data (allowing scalable parallel access), atomic update on those array words, and a finite-state machine built from the atomic update and logically replicated per array word. The end result is a coding style that has allowed Click to build 2.5 lock-free data structures that also scale remarkably well."

Via_Patrino writes "While having to distribute load between several servers, round robin, or any other technique that balances load equally, is the most common approach because of its simplicity. But a recent study shows that trying to accumulate load on some servers can improve energy efficiency because the other servers will be mostly unused during off-peak periods and then able to make better use of power saving methods. Specially, where load involves lots of concurrent power-consuming TCP connections, which was the case in the study, a new load-balancing algorithm resulted in an overall 30% power savings. Here's the paper (PDF)."

Frequent Slashdot Contributor Bennett Haselton writes with his latest which starts "If I were writing laws such that I wanted everybody to agree on how to interpret them, I would use the software development life cycle: First, have lawmakers (analogous to "developers") write drafts of the laws. Then a second group (the "test case writers") would try to come up with situations that would be interpreted ambiguously under the law. Then a third group, the "testers", would read the proposed law, read the test case situations, and try to determine how the law should be applied to those cases, without communicating with the law writers, the test case writers, or each other. If there's too much disagreement in the third group on how the law should be applied, then it's too vague to be a proper law. The only laws which made it through this process would be ones such that when they were finally passed, most citizens (the "users") could agree on how to interpret them, in cases sufficiently similar to the ones the test case writers could come up with."

Earlier this week we covered the Xbox Live outages over the holidays. Several users have pointed out that Microsoft has acknowledged its lack of performance, and is now offering a free game to compensate its users. Unfortunately for Microsoft, disgruntled patrons have already filed a class action lawsuit over the recent difficulties. Quoting the PC World article: "Xbox Live general manager Marc Whitten said that the problems with Xbox Live downtime were caused by an influx of new users who had gotten an Xbox 360 over the holidays. It's been a record-setting season for Xbox Live. 'This included our largest sign-up of new members to Xbox LIVE in our 5 year history and just yesterday you broke the record for the single biggest day of concurrent members ever on the service,' said Whitten."

gnalre writes "Every day it seems there is a new publication of a book on perl/python/ruby. Some languages however do not seem to get that sort of attention. One of those under-represented languages is Erlang, however for the first time in 10 years a new Erlang book has been published. As someone who had a brief flirtation with Erlang long ago, I was interested to see how the language had evolved in the intervening decade. I was also curious to re-evaluate Erlang to see what solutions it offered to the present day issues of writing reliable distributed applications." Read on for the rest of Tony's review.

fmoidu writes "I am a developer for a mid-size company, and I work primarily on internal applications. The users of our apps are business professionals who are forced to use them, so they are are more tolerant of access times being a second or two slower than they could be. Our apps' total potential user base is about 60,000 people, although we normally experience only 60-90 concurrent users during peak usage. The type of work being done is generally straightforward reads or updates that typically hit two or three DB tables per transaction. So this isn't a complicated site and the usage is pretty low. The types of problems we address are typically related to maintainability and dealing with fickle users. From what I have read in industry papers and from conversations with friends, the apps I have worked on just don't address scaling issues. Our maximum load during typical usage is far below the maximum potential load of the system, so we never spend time considering what would happen when there is an extreme load on the system. What papers or projects are available for an engineer who wants to learn to work in a high-availability environment but isn't in one?"

An anonymous reader writes that earlier this month, Sony received word of a lawsuit from a Newport Beach company called Parallel Processing. They've filed against the electronics giant alleging that the Cell processor, used in the PlayStation 3, infringes on a patent they own. They've made the somewhat outrageous demand that every infringing chip (and console) be 'impounded and destroyed'. From the article at Next Generation: "The patent, 'Synchronized Parallel Processing with Shared Memory' was issued in October 1991. It describes a high-speed computer that breaks down a program 'into smaller concurrent processes running in different parallel processors' and resynchronizes the program for faster processing times ... Parallel Processing said that Sony's alleged actions have caused 'irreparable harm and monetary damage' to the company."

armb writes with a link to a Wired Blog entry about irregularities found in Diebold databases from the state of Ohio. The election in question here is November 2006, and the corruption of the entries may raise doubts about accurate tabulations. "Vote totals in two separate databases that should have been identical had different totals. Although Diebold explained that this was part of the system design for separate vote tables to get updated at different times during the tabulation process, the team questioned the wisdom of a design that creates non-identical vote totals. Tables in the database contained elements that were missing date and time stamps that would indicate when information was entered. Entries that did have date/time stamps showed a January 1, 1970 date. The database is built from Microsoft's Jet database engine. The engine, according to Microsoft, is vulnerable to corruption when a lot of concurrent activity is happening with the database, such as what occurs on an election night when results are uploaded and various servers are interacting with the database simultaneously."

Simon P. Chappell writes "These days, Brazil is no longer just on the map for its fine coffee and martial arts. They have a few other reasons and one of them is called Lua. Lua is an open-source scripting language that was originally designed for small size and excellent portability to support its use in embedded systems. Like anything good, it didn't take long for it to be discovered by others looking for a small and efficient scripting language."

David Halprin writes with a review of a new (and mighty odd sounding) mathematics book: "In my humble opinion, we have an unjustified polemic in the world of mathematics, yet again. My background is tertiary level mathematics and concomitant research in specialised areas, so when a friend e-mailed me the link to this book, I was so excited after reading the author's hype, that I ordered a pre-publication copy. My expectations have not been met, unfortunately, hence my analysis precipitated this review." Read on for Halprin's idiosyncractic take on Norman John Wildberger's Divine Proportions: Rational Trigonometry to Universal Geometry.

An anonymous reader writes "From the beginning, Eclipse included tight integration with the Concurrent Versions System (CVS) in order to provide access to change-management capabilities. Now, many projects -- notably those run by the Apache Software Foundation -- are using a different change-management system: Subversion. This article demonstrates how to add Subversion support to Eclipse and how to perform basic version-control activities from the IDE."

SirBruce writes "Mmogchart.com has been updated to Version 20.0! This is a major update, with updated numbers for many games, most notably World of Warcraft, Eve Online, RuneScape, and most of NCSoft's titles. I've also added three new MMOGs to the tracking data: Tibia, The Matrix Online, and Dungeons & Dragons Online. I've also removed the old subscriber data for Ragnarok Online in Japan, and unified the various total subscriptions charts. Also new to this update is preliminary market data for Asian MMOGs (including Ragnarok Online) that are commonly reported in terms of Peak Concurrent Users and Average Concurrent Users. Given the differences in pricing models, many of these games are not subscription-based, so a direct comparison with subscription MMOGs cannot be made. My thanks to everyone who helped with this update, and thanks to those of you who waited patiently for this update!"