Samyem Tuladhar writes "After 2 years in development, the Firebird Project today officially releases the much-anticipated version 2.0 of its open source Firebird relational database software during the opening session of the fourth international Firebird Conference in Prague, Czech Republic."

H. writes "Following the success of GPU Gems and GPU Gems 2, NVIDIA has decided to produce a third GPU Gems volume to showcase the best new ideas and techniques for the latest programmable GPUs. If you would like to contribute to the GPU Gems series, please read the submission guidelines. The deadline for proposal submissions is Monday, December 11, 2006. If your proposal is accepted, you will receive additional time to complete the chapter." (Here are the participation guidelines.)

* * Beatles-Beatles writes "Dartmouth professor Hany Farid already devised software tools to detect when someone has tampered with digital photos. His next challenge: determining whether video or audio files have been retouched. "

VonSnouty writes "We've heard a lot about how Valve's Portal was originally a Digipen student project, and Microsoft is also looking to tap the amateur scene by opening up its dev environment, XNA. But creating a prototype for a DS game? That's ambitious. A team of students in Scotland has just won a prestigious competition doing exactly that though, albeit using a Wacom tablet and a PC. The gameplay is an innovative mix of Pikmin, Pic Pax and Mario, and sounds pretty cool."

d.3.l.t.r.3.3 writes "The long awaited XNA Game Studio Express public Beta is finally here. Despite some high claims by Microsoft, the Game Studio remains a code-only experience, with a more coherent and less fragmented feature set than the old DirectX 9 SDK. As I describe in this review, XNA has successfully streamlined many dull tasks of game development (helped a bit by the new game-supportive features of Windows Vista). It's also, unfortunately, kept too many frustrating pieces and bugs (especially when it comes to cross platform input handling and audio) to be successfully considered a real multi-platform game developing tool."

Yellowcake writes "After a successful first year IBM is back with their second iteration of the Student Mainframe Contest. Participants are exposed to a range of mainframe technologies and programming languages such as JCL, REXX, COBOL, and Java. The contest is divided into sections of increasing difficulty, building upon the first, which states "No Experience Necessary"."

drDugan asks: "There is a resurgence in interest lately in information-based systems and websites for data sharing, structured data, and enabling communities to work together better. I'm working a contract for a new business that is trying to build a community to support people who write software. What communities are you a part of now that help you write and develop software? I mean this question in a general way, including both online communities and offline interactions (your office, LUGs, etc.) -- where do you find connection with other people to get information, answers, and inspiration?"

amartel asks: "Four years ago, Ask Slashdot asked if anyone was using a Model-Driven Architecture. The number of MDA tools are now almost overwhelming, and I strongly believe that comments to the same questions would be rather different nowadays. What are the drawbacks, difficulties and limitations of MDA? What percentage of code can actually be generated? I would like to add a few more: is it realistic to create a custom GUI rather than CRUD operations with these tools? Finally, what about Microsoft, the new competitor on the scene, and their DSL Tools?"

segphault writes "Andy Bakun has written an excellent 20 page guide to game development with SDL_Perl for Ars Technica. The tutorial, which includes extensive code examples and plenty of screenshots, walks readers through the process of building a clone of the original Atari Kaboom! game." From the article: "One of the biggest benefits of using SDL is that it allows portable media applications to be written without having to be concerned with specific implementations of media libraries for each target platform. Bringing Perl into the picture takes the portability one step further, allowing media-rich applications to be written in a high-level language that can be targeted to a number of platforms. While programming using SDL requires knowledge of C and access to a C compiler, using SDL_perl does not. This greatly decreases the amount of time it takes to get something up on the screen and working."

Deven writes "Computerworld is reporting that Oracle has just acquired Sleepycat Software (makers of the open-source Berkeley DB embedded database) for an undisclosed sum. Having previously acquired Innobase, Oracle is certainly taking a look at diversity."

Cocteaustin writes "Today Yahoo! released the Yahoo! User Interface Library. This library is comprised of a number of dynamic HTML utilities and controls for building rich web UIs and Ajax applications. They are made available under an open-source license. In addition, Yahoo! released the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library. This collection of design patterns for Web interaction is intended to provide Web designers prescriptive guidance to help solve common design problems on the Web. Both are free in both senses of the word."

Michael J. Ross writes "Given the remarkable popularity of PHP for developing dynamic Web sites, as well as the ever-increasing need for security on those same sites, one would think that there would be great demand for — and comparable supply of — books that explain how to create secure sites using PHP. However, such is not the case, and even the most extensive general purpose PHP books may only devote a single chapter to this critical topic, if that much. Essential PHP Security, written by PHP expert Chris Shiflett, aims to fill the gap." Read the rest of Michael's review.

CowboyRobot writes "FreeBSD's Kirk McKusick has a long interview with Enron's former SysAdmin, Jarod Jenson, where he describes the nuts and bolts of working in and managing such a large-scale operation." From the article: "EnronOnline was a Web-based trading application. We had several hundred, even thousands of commodities that we would price in realtime, the same way that equities are priced. We were trying to push realtime pricing information out to clients who could do instantaneous transactions on them. People who are familiar with financial markets--the commodity markets--would recognize EnronOnline as sort of the same thing. We had a lot of the same issues that the markets had trying to push out realtime data--not only within our local network but also to the customers--as quickly as we could globally, and trying to make sure that what every trader saw on the screen matched what every company in the world had on theirs."

tfritsch writes "According to a story at News.com it looks like Oracle's shopping spree is to continue. The JBoss acquisition could be big - what does it mean for the future of the JBoss Application Server?" From the article: "Oracle makes the majority of its revenue from its database and applications business. And it has its own line of Java middleware, which competes with JBoss' software, and a set of Java developer tools. However, Oracle has been warming up to open-source products, including Zend's PHP development tools, over the past year because its corporate customers are increasingly using open source software, according to company executives. "

soundofthemoon writes "Just nine months ago, Apple started the WebKit Open Source Project. In that time, contributors have added some significant improvements to WebKit (and thus Apple's Safari browser). Today Apple gave their open source contributors a big thank-you, including rewarding the top contributors with some nifty goodies: 'As a thank you, we are giving MacBook Pro computers to twelve of our top contributors. We've also invited five of them to attend Apple's Worldwide Developer's Conference 2006 on Apple's dime.' Looks like donating your time isn't a thankless job anymore."

Andy Updegrove writes "Microsoft's submission of its XML Reference Schema to Ecma has gotten lots of attention in recent months, because Microsoft offered it to Ecma to try to neutralize Massachusetts' adoption of the OpenDocument Format (ODF) standard. But last week it's earlier submission of C++/CLI to Ecma was in the limelight when the U.K. representatives to ISO cried foul over (of all things) its name, which they said was confusingly, and inappropriately, similar to C++. Some think that there may be more afoot, including the potential for Microsoft to add proprietary extensions after ISO finally adopts the new standard under a different name. Either way, the C++/CLI experience represents an interesting dry run for what to expect as Microsoft pushes the XML Reference Schema throught the same process."

taskforce writes "IBM announced on Wednesday that it would be putting versions of its Cell processor inside its increasingly popular low-power blade servers by this summer. From the article: 'For Cell to gain wide acceptance, IBM needs to spur outside programmers to write software that takes advantage of Cell's prowess. That could prove more challenging than usual because Cell's architecture is so different. IBM hopes this summer's release of the Cell-based servers kick-starts work by third-party programmers.'" Also covered in a PCPro article.

RMX asks: "In our company, we're currently going through the debate of standardizing on a computer language for our next set of products. The pro-standardization guys say that a single language (like Java) will save everyone time. The anti-standardization guys are advocating a mixed environment (of languages like Python, Ruby, and C#), and argue that the whole discussion is as silly as a manufacturing firm standardizing on screwdrivers for all their screw/nail/glue fastening needs. Have any of your companies standardized on a language? How well did it go?"

duncan bayne asks: "I'm attempting to debug a complicated telephony application, written in C#, that's almost entirely event driven. This is the first time I've debugged a large asynchronous application that isn't a GUI, and I'm curious to know what advice the Slashdot crowd has to share - have you any recommended tools, best practices, or common pitfalls to avoid?"

ShinyBrowncoat writes "Borland recently announced they are putting their IDE business up for sale (JBuilder, Delphi, etc.)." This move comes at the same time Borland announced they would be aggressively pushing forward with their Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) business by purchasing Segue Software Inc.