Mortin writes "The largest IRC network in the world, EFNet, has set another world-record max user count after breaking an astonishing 100,000 concurrent users earlier tonight!"

David Kennedy writes "Applied Java Patterns is an adequate Design Patterns reference for those who must have a Java version of the classic Gamma et al (aka Gang of Four, or GoF) Design Patterns, but it's only adequate. If C++ or Smalltalk hold little fear for you, stick with the original sources: 'This isn't the definitive Java Design Patterns book we're looking for -- move along.'" Read on for the rest of David's review.

sg_oneill writes "The Australian Electronic Frontiers foundation report that the Australian Government is looking at introducing changes to the Telecomunications Interception Act giving Government Agencies (NOT just police!) the power to intercept email, voice mail and SMS messages without a warrant. Considering the concurrent proposals to introduce legislation to allow banning of organisations suspected of terrorist links, am I the only one suspecting Australia is about to have a whole lot less political parties?" I think our most recent Australia spying story was about the Australian government spying to win elections.

Last week, you posted your questions to SomaFM's General Manger, Rusty, and today he delivers. In this interview: answers about CARP (which was wisely rejected by the Library of Congress, this week), the RIAA, the workings of an internet radio station, and of course, Big URL.

An Anonymous Coward queries: "I work on a fairly large-sized project with at least a dozen developers. Advanced tools like CVS and ClearCase allow concurrent development, and provide merging tools to merge in different changes to the same file. This can be a significant productivity gain, particularly with files that are unavoidably common to several developers (C header files, most notoriously). During crunch times, such as before delivery deadlines, we often find that we are checking in changes to the same file several times a day, often hourly. The problem does not seem to be with conflicting changes to the same lines of code, but rather with developers knowing the sequence in which concurrent changes will be checked in. It is not possible to always be aware of who is checking in what and when, so programmers submitting patches to the baseline often have to redo those patches multiple times in a day in order to have them applied. Have other programming projects developed solutions for dealing with this problem?" The submitter proposes another solution, below, how well would it work?

WrinkledShirt contributed this review of a Professional Linux Programming, a tome he says can "bend light" by its sheer size -- 1155 pages of multi-author, multi-language instruction and examples. Read on for his thoughts on the book's shortcomings as well as its strengths, and remember, lift with your knees, not with your back.

viking099 writes "File swapping programs such as Morpheus, Grokster, and Kazaa (all based on the same software from FastTrak) have grown over 480% in the past 4 months, and are set to break the 1.57 million concurrent connection record that Napster set." So who exactly is surprised by this?

bakunin writes: "Tonight (Halloween) at midnight Pacific U.S. Time, /dev/null's third Annual NetHack Tournament opens. As with past years, the Tournament is open to anyone who'd like to play. We're also open to anyone who'd like to volunteer to run a game server, since (though we have a T1 hosting the main game server) play can be slow across the transoceanic links." /dev/null is calling for volunteers to run a server; you only need a modest machine but must have good bandwidth. See below for more information.

friedmud wrote in to tell us about a comment from a Maxis developer, Don Hopkins, who did a partial linux port of "The Sims". You can find his post here (3rd one down, comment from Don Hopkins titled "Reality check from a game developer") in a LinuxGames.com forum. I don't know if I agree with his assertion that Wine is the best way to have games happen on Linux but his comments on the economics of Linux games development and especially the costs of keeping versions concurrent on multiple platforms are insightful.

jonabbey writes: "After five and a half years of development, we have just released Ganymede 1.0. Ganymede is a GPL'ed metadirectory system, that allows you to put an NDS or Active Directory style concurrent GUI in front of your network's NIS, LDAP, Windows NT PDC, Samba, and even DNS directory services. Ganymede 1.0 comes with a userKit to support password synchronization to UNIX, Windows NT, and Samba. The Ganymede clients work anywhere Java does, and have been tested on Linux, BSD, Solaris, Windows NT, Mac OS, and OS/2."

An Anonymous Coward writes: "Linux 2.4.3 now holds the world record by performance with IBM's DB2 in TPC-H. TPC-H is a decision support benchmark consisting of a suite of business oriented and ad-hoc queries and concurrent data modifications. This is way cool as the world record was held by SQL Server 2000 on Windows 2000 before." Caveats: this is only in the 100GB (smallest) category, and all but 2 of the other entries are several months old. Even so;)

Adventurous reader Duncan Lawie, throwing himself in the way of the books being hurled at you by well-meaning bookstores, wrote this review of Mission of Gravity. If your taste in Science Fiction runs to the adventurous and thoughtful, Duncan may just turn you on to a work he says is "elegant and simple."

quakeaddict wrote to us with the news that Open Source Development Lab has gotten two (initial) new projects approved. The first is dedicated to increasing Linux TCP/IP concurrent support from 20,000 to more than 40,000 connections, while the second is focused on scaling Linux to support applications running on 16- and 64-way systems. The wire story is out now with more details.

Traffic is a blistering movie with a timely message: our drug policies are a disaster. Steven Soderbergh drives this home in an innovative movie (told in three cinematically different but concurrent parts, with 129 speaking roles). One of the best of the year. WARNING: As always, I talk about plot, but don't give away endings. (Read more).

With a planned move to San Francisco next summer, last week saw San Jose's last Linux World Expo, at least for now. The future as always is stubbornly uncertain, but it's impressive that the serendipitous combination of Free tools (from GNU) and a Free kernel (from Linus) has inspired enough interest and prosperity to excite a larger group of people each year. If you've not had the chance to attend one of these expositions, we hope this article will give you a flavor of what it's like. Note: Here are a few pictures from the floor (Day 1 & Day 2) contributed by Sensei^); do you have any cool shots to link to in comments?

John asks: "I'm designing a system where 10,000 applet based clients can view prices for a bunch of products. A requirement is that when a price changes, the clients see the new price within a few seconds. Basically, I'd like to push content to them. But a lot of them are behind firewalls, so a socket-based solution won't always work. OTOH, if they poll the server every couple of seconds using HTTP, that's 5,000 requests per second, which will require a server farm and multiple T1 lines. Does anyone know a more elegant way? I considered using HTTP requests that block in the server until a response is ready, but then I need to support 10,000 blocked threads and concurrent connections - another server farm. There's got to be a better way..."

In our third and final part of the 'Making Music with Linux' trilogy, we try to make sense of the alphabet soup of the Linux sound world by exploring OSS and ALSA, and we investigate musical notation systems and software available for Linux.

A.M. Kuchling is back again, this time with a review of Richard Jones and Rafael Lins' oddly named Garbage Collection. This book is not actually about Waste Management Inc, but is "A highly detailed survey of garbage collection algorithms, and the research literature surrounding them. Interesting, if at times very dry.". Click below for more information.

ehovland writes "There is an interesting article about the BSD variants in the latest SunWorld. Nothing new for the experienced reader but lots of good info on what makes them different for those with no experience with them. What is especially scathing is the paragraph which compares the cdrom archive with Microsoft's suggestions for a good ftp server cluster:" In contrast to Microsoft's 6 GB of downloads per day, however, it routinely transfers more than 700 GB of data a day for to up to 3,600 concurrent users." " I think we need a generic BSD icon.

Veteran reviewer SEGV has sent in his latest literary exploit, a review of Doug Lea's book Concurrent Programming in Java: Design Principles and Patterns. Not exactly a book for the beginning, this is design for those of you who know their way around Java, and are looking to firm up your theory base. Given the recent lawsuit end, it appears that a lot more attention is being focused on Java again. Let's trya nd get some real programming done for it.