JavaSoft has announced a PersonalJava programming contest with the grand prize winner receiving $5000, and another $5000 to be split equally among the five runners-up. All submissions must pass JavaCheck, which will check the code for compliance to the PersonalJava APIs. Judges will use several criteria in evaluating the entries. They will consider each entry's applicability to PersonalJava-enabled devices as well as footprint (the smaller the better), functionality, style, and end-user appeal. All entries must be received by September 30, 1998. Contest winners will be announced during Embedded Systems West Conference, November 1998. For more information, see http://developer.java .sun.com/developer/pjava/contest/.
-- Jonathan Erickson
The only things of which we can be certain are death and the Year 2000 problem. Unfortunately, people born earlier this century were unaware of the latter. The practice of etching gravestones before one's death has created a different kind of Year 2000 problem. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, many forward-thinking people born in the early 1900s have etched "19" into their gravestones, expecting to die before the new century. But fate has kept them alive, and, unless they manage to die in the next two years, correcting the problem may be costly. Removing the "19" and replacing it with "20" should cost less than $200, according to some sandblasters, although the date will likely be off-centered and there is no certainty how those repairs will hold up over time. Raised dates and shared headstones further complicate the problem.
-- Eugene Eric Kim
Free UNIX and a retrospective on UNIX past were the major themes of the 1998 USENIX Annual Technical Conference held in New Orleans, Louisiana, in June 1998. This year marked the debut of the FREENIX track, a technical track devoted to the different free UNIXes.
While the FREENIX track symbolized the increasing importance of free UNIXes in the software community, Dennis Ritchie announced in his keynote speech, "Looking Back at the UNIX Paper," that John Lion's classic Lions' Commentary on UNIX 6th Edition, with Source Code is now widely available. Previously only available as bootleg because of license problems, Lion's 20-year old book, which also contained the complete source code for the UNIX Version 6 kernel, is now available from Peer-to-Peer Communications (http://www.peer-to-peer.com/) thanks to the lobbying efforts of Ritchie, Ken Thompson, and Peter Salus.
Also at the conference, Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, was awarded the USENIX 1998 Lifetime Achievement Award. Tcl/Tk's creator, John Ousterhout, received the Software Tools User Group (STUG) 1998 Annual Award.
-- Eugene Eric Kim
Clusters have been around for a long time, and they make a lot of sense for certain types of problems. For example, scientific data processing often requires that the same tasks be performed for many independent sets of data. Similarly, movie special effects typically involve working on many independent frames. Clusters also provide redundancy for web and file servers.
The fact that PCs are being used for such tasks is a testament to the growing power of commodity PC hardware. But clustering is about much more than CPU cycles. Clustering reduces the risks of machine failure; if one machine out of 200 fails, you still have 199 left to do the work. Perhaps most importantly, clustering boosts the total disk throughput far beyond what any single machine can manage. This is especially important for tasks that involve very large data sets, and explains why some clustered systems deliberately do not use dual-processor motherboards.
-- Tim Kientzle
On the second day of a jury trial in Chicago, Microsoft quietly settled a lawsuit by paying SyNet $5 million for the right to use the name "Internet Explorer." Although SyNet had applied for state and federal trademarks for the term "Internet Explorer" prior to the release of Microsoft's browser, Microsoft used the name anyway -- contending "Internet Explorer" was too generic to deserve trademarking (see "News & Views, DDJ, January 1998). Alas, SyNet founder Dhiren Rana says he will not see any of the money, which will go to lawyers and creditors, because his company was forced into Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in part due to his legal battles with Microsoft.
-- Jonathan Erickson
This year's Vintage Computer Festival will be held on September 26-27, 1998, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, California. Organized by Sam Ismail and cosponsored this year by Dr. Dobb's Journal, there will be plenty of old computers, old timers, and general nostalgia. This year's speakers include David Rutland, who worked on the Standards Western Automatic Computer (SWAC), and Ray Holt, the designer of the JOLT kit series, who will talk about the history of microprocessors. Admission is $10 for adults, and free for everyone under 17. More information is available at http://www .siconic.com/vcf/.
-- Eugene Eric Kim
In an effort to find and keep top-flight software developers, Revenue Systems, an Alpharetta, Georgia, software company, is offering free three-year BMW car leases to all its employees. RSI also plans on using the BMWs in its career recruiting advertisements.
-- Jonathan Erickson
One of the highlights of the June 1998 Linux Expo in Durham, North Carolina, was "Extreme Linux," which covers a number of different efforts to obtain supercomputer-class performance from networks of cheap PCs running Linux. Potential applications of such technology include:
-- Tim Kientzle