An anonymous reader writes "Unexpectedly, Microsoft has released a beta of Windows CE 6, at its mobile developer's conference (MEDC) this week. CE is the real-time OS that underpins Windows Mobile and Microsoft's other device software stacks for phones, PDAs, set-top boxes, and the like. CE 6 looks to be a major rewrite, featuring the capability to support several orders of magnitude more concurrent processes and virtual memory. Also new is support for MS's .NET IDE. Together, these new capabilities seem calculated to morph CE from a closed-box, off-the-shelf OS into a more customizable OS."

gduranceau writes "Help! My program deadlocks! I got several concurrent threads that write the same variable! Everything goes well on my mono processor but becomes an incredible mess on that 16 CPU monster! And of course, as soon as I add traces, problems disappear... Don't panic! Calm down and take a deep breath. "

Anonymous Coward writes "Robert X Cringely is postulating today that as bandwidth applications grow, the data centers will never be ready to serve 30 million concurrent streams of data. Akamai, with its tens of thousands of servers spread in an intelligent topology, still can't serve more than 150,000 concurrent streams, which is never going to impress the TV network exec used to audiences in the millions. Cringely choruses that secure P2P is the solution to delivering not only high quality video but also to audiences that scale in the millions. BitTorrent seems to have worn out it's welcome with the MPAA recently, so maybe the future holds P2P networks owned and managed by Hollywood?"

CCP Games' Massive Title, Eve Online, now boasts 100,000 subscribers. Though there are many games with more users Eve Online is a very different title, set inside ships in the depths of space. They currently hold the record for most concurrent users, set at 23,178 simultaneous users on a single server. From the article: "To help accommodate its growing population, CCP will complete a hardware overhaul, allowing the game to handle more users, expand its universe, and run smoother." Ethic, over at Kill Ten Rats, has been writing about Eve a lot lately. His posts cover intergalactic war and courier missions, and might give you a sense of what gameplay is like. If you're interested in that sort of thing.

turboflux asks: "I'm currently in the process of replacing an aging file server with something more robust. Company-wide, there will be about 100 people who could be using this server, but I don't imagine there being more than 50 concurrent users. Right now, I'm torn between spending alot on SCSI hardware, much like our other servers, or spending less, but getting more space, with SATA II drives. Whatever I decide, the server will be setup with a RAID 1+0 array for the numerous benefits it offers. Does Slashdot have opinions or suggestions on performance, reliability, and stability?"

Terra Nova has an interesting discussion going, talking about what really matters when we talk about a virtual world's population. Total registered accounts? Accounts logged in since last month? Concurrent users? Interesting stuff. From the article: "In a similar vein we discussed Second Life's 100K+ members, a figure which I and others have questioned here on TN. Cory Ondrejka said that SL's 'concurrency numbers are rapidly approaching 4500, about 17,000 residents were in SL in the last 24 hours, and 50,000 in the last 30 days... If you go back even 90 days you get about 90% of the accounts having logged in.'"

Sterling D. Allan writes "Some reflections and projections: The year 2005 saw large wind power installments come into a price range where they are now competitive with traditional grid prices. 2006 could see several solar designs do the same. Cold fusion was boosted with two, concurrent and independent sonofusion breakthroughs, though the stigma in the name is still deeply seated. 2006 could see floating wind turbines arrive on the commercial scene -- floating in the water like oil rigs, or floating high in the air, courtesy of helium. 2006 will see at least three companies offering after-market kits for adding Brown's gas (H and O from electrolysis, common ducted) to the air intake of vehicles for enhanced mileage and performance. Many other fuel economizing systems are slated to mature in the marketplace. Climate change evidence will continue to mount. It will yet be years before we harness lightning, but stable tornado systems prototypes that tap waste heat from power plants could arrive this coming year. Will 2006 be the year that clean energy becomes more the vogue than cool computer gadgets?"

An anonymous reader writes "The old silo method of chip development, with hardware and firmware developers barely interacting with each other, won't cut it in today's fast-moving industry. IBM DeveloperWorks has the third in a series of articles about system-on-a-chip design. The author, Sam Siewert, displays the development tools and processes that speed system on a chip design and get all your developers working together effectively."

m3lt writes "Business Wire is reporting that Concurrent announced today that Lockheed Martin Space Systems has selected RedHawk(TM) Linux as the operating system for their United States Army Theater High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) program." From the article: "Lockheed Martin selected RedHawk for the THAAD program due to the precision and guaranteed response time of Concurrent's RedHawk Linux real-time operating system. Only RedHawk Linux was able to ensure the high frame rates required in their HIL simulation without frame overruns, thereby ensuring the highest quality of system test."

norburym writes "Mark G. Sobell is well known for several comprehensive and well-written volumes: A Practical Guide to Solaris; A Practical Guide to Red Hat Linux: Fedora Core and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (2nd ed.); and A Practical Guide to the Unix System (3rd ed.). It seems only natural for the author to follow these exceptional examples with yet another excellent book entitled A Practical Guide to Linux Commands, Editors, and Shell Programming . Read on for Norburyms' review.

Gamasutra is running an article about the Massively Multiplayer Game Eve Online. Information from senior producer Nathan Richardsson gives a look into the development of the largest concurrent MMO on the market. From the article: "Power to the players. Nothing compares to a player that is enabled to affect the universe. We create tools for players to create content. For example, a massive alliance of corporations - our versions of guilds - with real, legendary players, leading them, controlling large areas of space and building up infrastructure is truly awesome content. We can never create that, but we can create the environment and tools enabling to happen. We're also very iterative in our work and keep continuous feedback cycles on the features we do, then regularly improve them based on that feedback. The community is an incredible source for how to improve the game and what they do within the game gives us constant inspiration for what we should implement next. Being so open-ended means the players do what they want and we try to keep up and add support and tools to take emerging behavior further. Embrace and evolve are the keywords here."

angel'o'sphere asks: "I'm working on a contract where the customer wants a automated, Internet-based check-for-updates, update and install system. So far we've considered a Subversion based solution. The numbers are: a typical upgrade is about 10MB in size. Usually it's about 30 to 50 new files (which have an average size of about 200kB) and 2 database files (which can be anywhere from 500MB to 2GB) that change regularly. Upgrades are released about every 3 months, and this will probably become more frequent as the system matures. The big files are the problem as we estimate about 100-300 changes in every file. The total user base is currently 2000 users, creeping up to probably 5000 over the next year, and might be finally end up at some 30,000 users. Any suggestions from the crowd about setting up a meaningful test environment? How about calculating the estimated throughput of our server farm? Does anyone know of projects that have tried something similar using an RCS or a configuration management system?"

OSCON 2005 was held in a convention center this year, instead of a hotel, because it just got too big (2000+ people). Too big, in fact, for pudge and myself to cover more than a fraction of the talks and the ideas flitting around the hallways. But here's some of what I found cool last week. And if you attended or presented at OSCON and want to tell us about all the neat stuff we missed, please, share your thoughts in the comments, or submit a fact-rich writeup and we'll maybe do a followup story later.

datemenatalie writes "While the war between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray continues over who will be the direct successor to DVD, the Video Software Dealers Association (VSDA) has issued a strong statement to Hollywood and the consumer electronics industry regarding the looming HD format war. The statement, which supports a single high-definition disc format, also offers advice on dimensions, packaging, features and even how marketing materials should be designed. The statement argues, "two formats, each capable of storing high definition movies on DVD, are planned for release into the market. Retailers uniformly agree that the concurrent distribution of more than one format is likely unsustainable, and that the launch of a single format is preferable to a format war which could confuse the public and lead to reluctance to embrace either format." This comes just weeks after early indications that HD-DVD will only allow playback of full 1080 resolution video signals through HDMI connectors, leaving consumers with older HDTVs (pre-HDMI) out of luck."

Jack Tanner asks: "Is there such a thing as a high-quality Open Source conference management software in active development? I'm helping run a web site for an academic conference, and it seems like there's no good software to organize the meeting and facilitate peer review. The state of the FLOSS art is seems to be that there's a reasonably modern LAMP application called Open Conference Systems, but the developers have announced that it's discontinued. There are also several apps that are claim to be open source, but aren't, once one reads the license. At the same time, large academic conferences play musical chairs switching from one half-baked free or commercial service to another every year, or write their own apps from scratch, repeating the same errors and wasting hard-earned grants. What's a conference organizer on a budget to do?"

Slashback is back from vacation with updates on the Apple switch to Intel,a now-fixed glitch in the recent release of Debian 3.1, a hyper-efficient Honda, and the real numbers on online music networks. Read on for the details.

norburym (Mary Norbury-Glaser )writes "Carla Schroder's Linux Cookbook (O'Reilly) is an extremely dense volume packed with valuable information. The author writes with precision and detail and with a conversational style that handles the topic with a wry humor making this book a pleasure to read. The Linux Cookbook is command-line based so some familiarity with a Linux system, the inherent power of using the command-line and the dangers of using root are necessary." Read on for the rest of Norbury-Glaser's review.

charliedickinson writes "Web Design on a Shoestring offers the premise that modest budgets for Web development can pay off in focused, uncluttered, appealing Web sites. Author Carrie Bickner, who took on Web development with a professional background as a librarian (she is now Assistant Director for Digital Information and System Design at The New York Public Library), eschews the nuts-and-bolts mechanics of Web page crafting for a comprehensive overview of 'project management, usability, design, copywriting, hosting, and post-launch maintenance.'" Read on for the rest of Dickinson's review.

r3lody ((Raymond Lodato) writes "Java was developed to be a cross-platform language. In other words, it shouldn't matter what processor or operating system you used, just the language itself. Write Once, Run Anywhere is the slogan, and an admirable ideal to attempt to reach. So when I first saw the title of the book Java Application Development on Linux, I expected to find descriptions of some idiosyncrasies in the Linux environment that affected the Run Anywhere part of the equation. What I got was a lot more." Read on for the rest of Lodato's review.

Fahrenheit 450 (William D. Neumann) writes "Developing Applications With Objective Caml was originally published in French by O'Reilly, and later translated into English by a group of volunteers (note that the reviewer was a volunteer proofreader during the translation effort), and graciously made available online as HTML or PDF at the Caml website. For those not familiar with Objective Caml (or OCaml, as it is commonly called), it is a strongly, statically typed (but don't be thinking about Pascal-style typing), eagerly evaluated language with a functional core that also offers many imperative programming features. OCaml also has full support for object-oriented programming that fits in completely with OCaml's strong type system. On top of that, OCaml code can be interpreted for simple scripting, compiled to bytecode for portability, or compiled to native code for speed and resource utilization that rival even that of Intel's C++ compiler. Intrigued?" If so, read on for the rest of Neumann's review.