If the competition is really hot, they might even be willing to lose money, with a low-ball "bid to win." In this case, the customer gets the lowest possible price and a contract that guarantees the completion of the project to the spec. During the project, nobody on the customer side will have to think. They can just measure. What's not to like?

Australian and New Zealand software companies were honoured in Sydney at the 12th annual Consensus Software Awards.

The growth in freelance jobs for the Android mobile platform is outpacing the venerable iPhone and iPad, and HTML5 demand is snowballing at more than 30 per cent, according to skills marketplace Freelancer.com.

The University of Sydney is once again calling for entries for its 2011 National Computer Science School Programming Challenge, which aims to encourage high school students to pursue careers in software development.

The second annual Devops Down Under conference will be held in Melbourne next month with attendees representing Australia’s largest online businesses and a few international speakers thrown in for good measure.

Some early programmer names are familiar to even the most novice of software developers. You may never have seen a line of code written by Bill Gates, or written any application in BASIC (much less for the Altair). But you know Gates' name, and the names of a few others.

People all over the world spend a total of eight billion minutes a day on Facebook. Some 3.5 billion pieces of content are shared every week, 400 billion Web pages are viewed every month and the site logs a staggering 25TB of data every day. David Recordon, senior open programs manager at Facebook, talks about how the social networking giant uses open source tools to achieve its massive app scalablilty.

In last week's post, I discussed why dev/test can be a good first use of cloud computing. Without rehashing the entire post, it's clear that dev/test is often hampered in its activities by the difficulty of getting enough computing resources to its job.

Just how lucrative is the iPhone App Store for a business in application development? Is it easy to achieve success or is money on app development better spent elsewhere? The top Australian iPhone app developers speak exclusively to Computerworld about success in the iPhone App store.

Your new computer has a 64-bit processor, but your software probably is still 32-bit. Why haven't software developers done more about it?