Blue Sky On Mars

I had forgotten about the impending Eclipse 3.0 M6 release. It looks like they’re moving into “smoothing” mode to put the proper polish on the 3.0 release. There was a tantalizing mention of running Eclipse 3.0 under an early access Sun JDK 1.5, but no mention of support for 1.5-specific features. There are a number of nice refinements listed (including full access to the new Java source formatter), so if you’re running 3.0 you’ll probably want to grab it!

Check this out:

The project was scheduled to be completed five years ago, but now isn’t expected to be fully finished until 2005. Since planning started, the cost estimate for the project has ballooned from $2.6 billion to $14.6 billion.

Except for the sheer magnitude of the overage, this could sound like any number of software projects. There has been lots written about why software projects fail (or come in late and over budget). Why can’t writing code be more like assembling things in a factory or doing a construction project? Well, a lot of times the software we’re building is a bit different from anything that’s ever been made before. Usually not a lot different, but enough to provide some uncertainty. It doesn’t help that the customer often doesn’t know exactly what they want until they see it.
Anyhow, for folks who think that software estimation should be more like that of construction projects, maybe you can take Boston’s Big Dig as a cautionary tale that maybe things aren’t so bad in the software world. At least with software, you can be agile.

I just had to link to this excellent letter by Bruce Perens regarding GUI selection for UserLinux. Different Linux vendors/distributions have had different target audiences and goals. This letter shows the kind of thought that is going into UserLinux, and the kind of decision made in this letter is exactly what it will take to get Linux on to corporate desktops.

The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe is going to be filmed in New Zealand. I’m a big fantasy buff. With all of the hubbub around fantasy these days (Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings have each banked about $1.8 billion in box office receipts), it would sure be nice if someone would make movies from the first six DragonLance books.

The previous item that I posted about the RIAA losing an Appeals Court ruling linked to My Way, which I had never heard of before. MyWay is very similar to My Yahoo!, but one big difference is that they’ve taken the Google approach to revenue generation: unobtrusive text ads. No banners or popups (I’m using Moz so popups are a thing of the past anyhow). Very interesting. They claim to have been profitable from the get-go. I wonder if they’ll be able to make it last.

A federal appeals court rules that the RIAA cannot subpoena an ISP for information about its users based upon the provision in the DMCA. In other good news, the Dutch Supreme Court has ruled that Kazaa is not responsible for the actions of its users, paving the way for individual Dutch folk to get sued, just like they are here in the states!

Found via Carlos’ list of open source automated test tools: The GUITAR Project is designed to generate, run and report on tests that exercise a GUI (and it looks like it supports both Java and Windows GUIs). Reports include coverage information. The website for this tool definitely has the “research” sort of look to it, so I don’t know if anyone applies this to “real” apps. Anything that can help automate GUI testing is a boon, though.

LiberalOasis has a transcript of part of Diane Sawyer’s interview with Bush. Clearly, you know what kind of slant a site like “LiberalOasis” would have. Anyhow, it’s interesting to read what Bush does when being dogged about the lack of evidence of actual weapons of mass destruction.

The court ruled that Congress could order such detentions, but that the President’s power does not extend to detaining US citizens on US soil.

Federal prosecutors have argued Padilla should not have access to attorneys because they said he posed a threat to national security and defense lawyers would interfere with his interrogation. They also believe defense lawyers could unwittingly be used to pass messages to al Qaeda operatives.

Due process is an exceedingly important part of the Bill of Rights, and I’m glad that the court is inserting at least some barriers to dictatorship.

I may have been a little skeptical when it was first launched, but Apple has had a great first year with the iTunes Music Store (iTMS). No other music service has come close in sales. Since the launch in April, Apple has sold 25 million songs. AdAge picked Apple as Marketer of the Year. Time named iTMS Invention of the Year. Fortune called iTMS Product of the Year.

Wow. That’s quite a year. I think that iTMS is a great product, but I agree with the criticisms about Apple’s “closed system”: iTMS songs only work on iPod and songs from other stores don’t work on the iPod. I’m guessing that Apple is playing this smart, though. Despite being cool, iTMS is not a money maker; the iPod is. They’re going to hold on to their big market share as long as they can. Will they open up if market pressures force them to? Hard to say. They’ve been clinging on to single-digit percentages of the desktop market share for a long time… maybe they’ll be happy with a small slice of the pie as the pie grows.