An anonymous reader writes "CPU magazine has written a very straight-to-the-point editorial on the lack of quality and innovation in software for the mainstream OS. They compare it to the Mac, which is found in a much different light. Where has all the innovation gone?" From the article: "There's too much coal and not enough diamonds within the sphere of downloads. The greatest pieces of software are plagued by unintelligent design, and very few rise to the level of ubiquity. Windows users don't have a strong sense of belonging; there's no user community rallying around the platform. We use the computer, certainly, or is the computer using us?"

jpkunst writes "In a lengthy interview with Eric S. Raymond by Federico Biancuzzi at O'Reilly's onlamp.com, ESR defends his position that 'Open source would be succeeding faster if the GPL didn't make lots of people nervous about adopting it.'" From the article: "I don't think the GPL is the principal reason for Linux's success. Rather, I believe it's because in 1991 Linus was the first person to find the right social architecture for distributed software development. It wasn't possible much before then because it required cheap internet; and after Linux, most people who might otherwise have founded OS projects found that the minimum-energy route to what they wanted was to improve Linux. The GPL helped, but I think mainly as a sort of social signal rather than as a legal document with teeth."

prostoalex writes "It's been ten years since the official introduction of Java - a programming language combined with virtual machine and a class library. ZDNet published an interview with James Gosling, the creator of Java, who talks about the project's past, present and future."

Chip Salzenberg writes "In April of this year, Health Market Science of King of Prussia, PA, told police that they feared I was misappropriating trade secrets. That very afternoon, police raided my house with a search warrant to seize every computer in the house, paper files, CDs, and DVDs... even my wireless router and cable modem!" Chip was the pumpking for perl's 5.004 release. Keep reading for his description of his current legal troubles, and for a shortcut into what he says prompted his former company's actions, read his letter warning about abuse of open proxies.

Michael J. Ross writes "When it comes to creating a dynamic Web site with data store capabilities, the site developer can choose from many technologies, including PHP and MySQL. The combination of the two is rapidly emerging as a favorite, partly because they work well together, and partly because they are both available under open-source licenses. As a result, technical book publishers are cranking out a growing number of high-priced tomes that try to cover all of the details of either technology, or both. But for the developer just getting started in either one, there is a new title that could prove more accessible: Vikram Vaswani's How to Do Everything with PHP and MySQL, published by McGraw-Hill/Osborne." Read on for the rest of Ross's review.

Via Gamasutra, the news that Valve has opened a Developer Community Wiki. From the post: "The system is intended to be a pool of knowledge that mod authors can contribute to, as well as consult for advice on how to use the robust Source engine. The Community is built using MediaWiki, an open-source GNU tool for allowing entries and posts to be edited and refined by anyone with an account. The same technology powers the popular Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia."

Elyscape writes "The Google Blog announced today the release of an API for Google Maps. While the use of the API requires a key that limits the owner to 50K pageviews a day, which is similar to but far more generous than Google's Web Search API, Google notes that they are willing to work something out with website owners who expect to breach that large barrier. This release definitely opens the door for (or, at least, eases the creation of) more advanced Google-Maps-based applications. On the negative side, it broke several current Google-Maps-based sites, such as ChicagoCrime.org. So get started! Go to the Google Maps API home, sign up for a key, and go wild! (Note: going wild may entail fixing broken sites. It does not necessarily entail actually visiting the wild.)

An anonymous reader writes "Version 1.0 of Nvu has been released. Nvu is a standalone WYSIWYG HTML editor and a continuation of Mozilla Composer. As one would expect for a Mozilla-based product, it is fully Web standards-compliant and all the code will soon be available at mozilla.org. Nvu 1.0 can be downloaded for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. Further details are available at MozillaZine. Slashdot reported on the first beta of Nvu way back in February 2003."

An anonymous reader writes "News.com is announcing that Microsoft has announced plans to release a JavaScript client framework library for use with ASP.NET 2.0 that makes AJAX style browser clients easier to code. Developers who attend Microsoft's PDC conference in September have been promised an early release of the code."

An anonymous reader writes "The Graphics research group at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has posted some interesting benchmarks for a sorting implementation which is done entirely on a GPU. There have been efforts on doing general purpose computation on GPUs before (previous Slashdot article). However, most of them had generally utilized the fragment processing pipeline of the GPUs which is slower then the default high speed rendering pipeline. Apparently, the above implementation is done using "simple texture mapping operations" and "cache efficient memory accesses" only. There also seems to an option to download the distribution for non-commercial use, though the requirements seem pretty hefty (a very decent nVidia graphics card and the latest nVidia drivers)."

Hergio writes "Eclipse 3.1, the popular IDE, has finally been released. There have been a lot of products waiting for Eclipse 3.1 to go final before progressing, so this is great news not only for the developers who use Eclipse directly, but for those who use tools built on top of Eclipse. The site and all its mirrors appear to be getting hammered, so plan on waiting a day or so to get your copy. Do any Slashdotters know of any lesser known mirrors?"

lypanov writes "Trolltech has released Qt 4.0 both under commercial and GPL licenses for X11, Mac OS X and MS Windows. It is the first time that a MS Windows GPL edition is available. To celebrate the release Trolltech employees have created a song and a music video (Bittorrent download, Ogg Theora version). Read the Qt 4 Overview and the online Qt Reference Documentation for more information. You can download Qt from ftp.trolltech.com or from one of its mirrors. Work on KDE 4 has already started with making a development branch of KDE compile and run with Qt 4."

Ivan P. writes "Sun Microsystems's Java technology will be built into Blu-ray DVD players, executives said on Monday during Sun's JavaOne trade show, a development that advances the technology in the consumer electronics market for which Sun originally developed the software. 'Java will be used for control menus, interactive features, network services and games,' said Yasushi Nishimura, director of Panasonic's Research and Development Company of America. 'This means that all Blu-ray Disc player devices will be shipped equipped with Java.'" Next stop, annoying Flash intros.

Jim Holmes writes "I'm new to the .NET environment and have been looking for solid books in the same class as McConnell's Code Complete, 2nd ed., or Kernhigan and Pike's The Practice of Programming. Those books, to me, are must-haves on any serious developer's bookshelf, but while they're terrific books, they're general in nature. Bill Wagner's book Effective C# is a great companion to those books because it's specific to C# and hits hard the implementation details of working in that language. (Disclaimers: 1) I got this book for free from Addison-Wesley as a regular giveaway for our .NET Developers Group. 2) I attempted to get SRT Solutions, the author's consulting company, involved in a software development project several years ago. The project tanked due to customer constraints and other business issues not related in any way to Wagner or his company. End Disclaimers.)" Read on for the rest of Holmes's review.

Jeff Myers writes "Eclipse version 3.1 was just released and is available for download. There are quite a few new and noteworthy features added in this release - including full support for Java 5.0 and improved support for developing rich client applications based on the Eclipse platform." Update: 06/28 21:03 GMT by Z : Denis emailed to request we use mirrors, as they're already getting hammered pretty hard.

Jamesday writes "Monty Widenius accepted a plaque celebrating ten years of MySQL and PHP at LinuxTag. Until the end of June MySQL also has some 10th anniversary MySQL mugs on sale which feature the names of all MySQL employees in April 2005, about 200 people who can personally testify that you can make a living from open source software. Since Slashdot and MySQL share many users in common, I asked the MySQL community manager to give some mugs away to the Slashdot crowd. An arbitrary number of registered Slashdot posters, at least one, whose answers are closest to the exact date when MySQL 1.0 was first released internally will get one. Answers in response to this post, 24 hour time limit; no employees, former employees, their relatives or others we think should be ineligible. Winner(s) will be notified by a reply to their post."

Ritalin16 writes "Sun Microsystems on Monday intends to celebrate the 10th anniversary of its Java programming language by sharing the proprietary source code for several key Java applications used by corporate customers. Sun officials believe that by making the source codes open to developers, they will spur more involvement and use of Java-based applications."

jpkunst writes "As reported on undeadly.org: an interesting interview with OpenBSD developer Marc Espie about the internals of and the philosophy behind the OpenBSD ports and packages system."

ruipaulo writes "When Google announced the "Summer of Code", its program designed to introduce students to the world of open source software development, the NetBSD Project understood the value of this project and entered as a mentoring organization. Over a period of two weeks, students researched the list of possible projects and discussed their proposals on the public mailing lists and in private with developers and other users alike. After evaluating over 100 distinct applications, the NetBSD Foundation is now pleased to announce the list of projects that have been chosen. See the associated press release for all the details."

iseff writes "The ICFP Contest (reported first here) is now underway. There's probably still some time for us slackers to code up something for the first round. This year's problem is similar to the board game Cops and Robbers. What I find cool about this year is the split into two parts -- code the original spec, then wait, get a new spec, and modify. Plus, any language is accepted, even though it's a 'functional programming' contest."