An anonymous reader writes "Multithreading and concurrency are nothing new, but one of the innovations of the Java language design was that it was the first mainstream programming language to incorporate a cross-platform threading model and formal memory model directly into the language specification. While this simplifies the development of platform-independent concurrent classes, it by no means makes writing concurrent classes trivial -- just easier."

bhima asks: "Recently I have inherited an embedded project which developed and maintained by a recently acquired company. The 'technology transfer' consisted of me traveling to their facility for two weeks of special high intensity training and returning with a couple of hard drive, equivalent DVD-ROMS, 200 kilograms of paper and a stack of tape backups. These contain a lot of interesting and important data but it is in every conceivable format: hundreds of megabytes of Outlook PST files, Adobe PageMaker & Illustrator (4 different versions for Mac & PC), Gerber files, Microsoft Office files (every version ever), Visio Files, Tiffs, Jpegs, AutoDesk Files, Pro-E files. To top it all off they used no concurrent versioning system for their firmware so I have hundreds of tar.gz files that are snapshots of code, plus the resultant binary record for version represented by the tar file. We have a student translating all of the CAD data to our system, but that's only part of the story. Is there an easy way to get the firmware in to CVS or subversion? What's the best way to organize all of this data so that it's actually usable?"

Slashdot readers both contributed and helped moderate questions for the New Voters Project Presidential Youth Debate. You can read the answers below, but if you'd like to see an expanded introduction, thumbnails of the candidates, and different formatting, go to the Youth Debate page. And that's not all: We're supposed to get candidates' rebuttals on or about October 17, so don't touch that dial!

Thanks to simon for the heads up that casual online game BNB has a record of 700,000 concurrent users. The Chinese game is a casual online experience where families pit themselves against other families. For comparison the game Eve Online regularly has 10,000 concurrent users.

hjf asks: "Three years ago, when I got DSL, I set up a 486 box, with 8 megs and a floppy drive to run FloppyFW. It has been through a couple hardware upgrades: 16Mb RAM for running the 2.4 kernel and a 100MBit PCI NIC for the internal network. It has a little UPS which lasts for over 60 minutes. The only downtime it has is when there's a thunderstorm and I unplug it. Besides that, it has been running flawlessly since I set it up. Lately I have been kind of seduced with this product from 3Com, and other similar to it. I know it says it can handle 253 simultaneous users and all that. My home network has 4 users, but most of us run eMule and other P2P, and as many of you know, those P2P programs can beat the crap out of your router."

Brainsur quotes a story saying " Linux kernel 2.6 introduces improved IO scheduling that can increase speed -- "sometimes by 1,000 percent or more, [more] often by 2x" -- for standard desktop workloads, and by as much as 15 percent on many database workloads, according to Andrew Morton of Open Source Development Labs. This increased speed is accomplished by minimizing the disk head movement during concurrent reads. "

Thanks to EvilAvatar for linking to a ChinaDaily.com article discussing the further rise of online gaming in China. According to the story, "the All China Sports Federation recently recognised video gaming as a sanctioned sport", and it's also noted that "the China Center of Information Industry Development (CCID) estimates that there were 19 million online gamers in China at the end of 2003. This year the number of users is predicted to explode to 32 million and will continue growing to 48 million by 2005." Notably, it's also revealed that China's leading MMO title, "The Legend of Mir II has an estimated 250,000 to 300,000 ACUs [Average Concurrent Users], attracting some 650,000 simultaneous users during peak times. The [Chinese distribution] firm's owner, Chen Tianqiao, is listed as China's second richest IT entrepreneur, with a cool RMB 4 billion [$500 million] in the bank."

jarich (Jared Richardson) writes "Many people will remember Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas's The Pragmatic Programmer (Slashdot review) as one of the better books on real-world best practices. It was a watershed book for many developers. However, The Pragmatic Programmer assumed a certain level of familiarity with some of the basic tools of the trade. For many readers, this simply wasn't a valid assumption, so Andy and Dave have started on a set of prequels to PragProg, called Starter Kits." Richardson reviews below that series' introduction to the Concurrent Versioning System, better known as CVS.

Thanks to InsertCredit for pointing to a 4Gamer.net story including pictures of Coca-Cola cans featuring characters from PC MMORPG Lineage II. The promotion, due to start in South Korea next week, shows how relatively mainstream Lineage 2 and its prequel have become in that country, with a previous story noting "in [Lineage 2's] first five days in release, publisher NCsoft has tallied more than 130,000 paid users." The original Lineage's success in Asia, with "more than three million subscribers and more than three hundred thousand concurrent users", has enabled the company to expand into the U.S., where they are funding Richard Garriott's mysterious new MMO Tabula Rasa (of which there's previously unseen concept art available), as well as the superhero MMO title City Of Heroes and non-subscription MMO Guild Wars. The official Lineage II FAQ notes that "development on a North American version of the game is nearing beta testing stage", and the Unreal-engine title is likely to launch some time early in 2004.

Martin Berger writes "Turing Award (1991) winner Robin Milner is one of the most influential computer scientists. He may not be as well-known as he deserves to be, but his research contributions are ubiquitous: he developed the first mathematically sound yet practical tool for machine assisted proof construction. This research has been continued successfully and led to many useful proof assistants such as HOL, Coq or Isabelle that are being used heavily for verification purposes today." Read on for more information about Milner, and a link to Berger's excellent interview with him.

newbroom asks: "The company I work for runs a large, high-profile web site with users all across the world and delivers them large amounts of streaming media content plus textual stories. You might guess therefore that this is a news website, frequently updated throughout the day, and delivering content 24x365. No names, or course, for obvious reasons. We have a big, custom, Java content management system (based on a framework from a proprietary vendor as it happens, but could just as well be EJB/J2EE for all that it matters in the context of this argument) and for deployment we run our website using Java app servers on Solaris behind Apache." If you were going to take such a site from 1000 users, to 10,000 users, would you be able to do it using this kind of setup?

swordfish asks: "Does anyone have first hand experience with scaling .NET to support 100+ concurrent requests on a decent 2-4 CPU box with web services? I'm not talking a cluster of 10 dual CPU systems, but a single system. the obvious answer is 'buy more systems', but what if your customer says I only have 20K budgeted for the year. No matter what Slashdot readers say about buying more boxes, try telling that to your client, who can't afford anything more. I'm sure some of you will think, 'what are you smoking?' But the reality of current economics means 50K on a server for small companies is a huge investment. One could argue 5 cheap systems for 3K each could support that kind of load, but I haven't seen it, so inquiring minds want to know!"

A Parser's Baggage queries: "For the last couple of years I've been working with XML based protocols and one thing that keeps coming up is the amount of CPU power needed to handle 10, 20, 30 or 40 concurrent requests. I've ran benchmarks on both Java and C#, and my results show that on a 2ghz CPU, the upper boundary for concurrent clients is around 20, regardless of the platform. How have other developers dealt with these issues and what kinds of argument do you use to make the performance concerns know to the execs. I'm in favor of using XML for it's flexibility, but for performance sensitive applications, the weight is simply too big. This is especially true when some executive expects and demands that it handle 1000 requests/second on a 1 or 2 cpu server. Things like stream/pull parsers help for SOAP, but when you're reading and using the entire message, pull parsing doesn't buy you any advantages."

Admiral Akbar writes "It seems today is the release date of the best damn free IDE available today for Linux,EiffelStudio version 5.3, they have both a free and Enterprise version available. Why Eiffel's not classed as a mainstream language is beyond me, goodies include full concurrent engineering, amazing debugging, browsing and documentation facilities that even your dog would find easy use, plus a Mac OS X version is in the works with a beta available for download soon. Design by Contract here I come!"

cpfeifer writes "Performance has been the albatross around Java's neck for a long time. It's a popular subject when developers get together "Don't use Vector, use ArrayList, it's more efficient." "Don't concatenate Strings, use a StringBuffer, it's more efficient." It's a chance for the experienced developers to sit around the design campfire and tell ghost stories of previous projects where they implemented their own basic data structures {String, Linked List...} that was anywhere from 10-50% faster than the JDK implementation (and in the grand oral tradition of tall tales, it gets a little more efficient every time they tell it)." Want to kill the albatross? Read on for the rest of cpfeifer's review of O'Reilly's Java Performance Tuning, now in its 2nd edition.

Frank Krasicki writes "The Adventures of Kavalier & Clay has already won numerous prizes for literature including the Nobel prize for fiction in 2001. As imposing as that may sound, this is an entirely accessible and enjoyable read." It's also set in the world of comics; read on for the rest of Krasicki's review to find out why he considers it an "entirely pleasant and entertaining book." Update: 03/07 16:39 GMT by T : That's Pulitzer prize, not Nobel.

mvw writes "Wanna go beyond Java, Perl, or Python? Joe Armstrong has published a nice tutorial on implementing robust servers in the functional concurrent Erlang language. Here is the link."

blackcoot asks: "I've just spent a couple very frustrating days trying to figure out what 'unexpected async reply' means and fixing it. The problem is a result of the fact that X11 simply isn't designed to handle events from more than one thread at a time. Why? Given that more and more often, people are writing multi-threaded GUI applications, are there fundamental design decisions in X11 that make dealing with receiving events from multiple threads simultaneously, impossible? Or was the protocol never designed to handle concurrent updates? More to the point, is there an easy way in Qt (short of deriving a new widget for every widget and overriding it's paintEvent to lock the library first, paint, then unlock as Trolltech's docs seem to suggest) to make this problem go away?" I'm not sure if things have been done in recent revisions of XFree to fix this problem, but this message, from February of last year, might help some of you out that are suffering from this problem. Any ideas if this problem has been fixed in recent versions of XFree?

sbombay writes "I just came back from Broadband Plus (formerly the Western Cable Show) and was disappointed to find that cable companies despise PVRs. In his keynote speech, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts said that the PVR amounts to 'the Napster of the future.' Cable World has a story about the speech and quotes from other cable execs bashing the PVR. The cable industry's opposition to the PVR boils down to two things -- PVRs help satellite companies (Dish and DirecTV) provide services like Video On Demand (VOD) and a PVR in a cable home cuts into VOD revenue. Any of the sessions at the show that touched the topic of PVRs were an opportunity for the cable industry to slam the PVR. The strongest attack came from Gary Lauder, a venture capitalist who has funded many cable related companies. During his 15-minute presentation, Lauder slammed his Replay box, 'it's too hot,' 'my wife doesn't know how to use it,' and he even tried to fry an egg on his PVR. He also openly called on the cable companies and Hollywood to sue the PVR companies for copyright infringement. If you love your PVR, the cable industry is not your friend." Update: 12/09 18:33 GMT by T : Gary Lauder wrote to say that this account misquotes and misinterprets his speech on certain points. Read below for his reaction.

detroitindustrial writes "The Register reports on a backroom deal that screws small webcasters. The Voice of Webcasters, working with the RIAA, negotiated a deal that Congress is trying to make into a law. These rates give big discounts to the largest webcasters, while leaving around 96% of the smaller webcasters to suffer and die under the CARP rate. This is being done through the bill H.R. 5469, the Small Webcaster Amendment Act of 2002. It was originally a one paragraph bill to delay the CARP rates for 6 months, and was widely supported in its original form by the webcasting community. After the RIAA rewrote it, it turned into 30-page monstrosity that had no relation to the original bill. It has already passed in the House. Ann Gabriel, who was on the International Webcasting Associaion legislative committee, recently resigned in disgust over this sell out." It appears that the Register article misrepresents a few of the issues. Rusty Hodge, of SomaFM, has more on the actual effects of HR 5469...