morcheeba writes "According to an EETimes article, IBM is planning on releasing the full specifications and software libraries for the powerful processor that will be in the Playstation 3. The goal is to stimulate open-source development for other applications of the chip. The article doesn't mention if there will be some affordable development systems for all these programmers -- I'm hoping for a ps3 devkit." From the article: "IBM is eager to find other opportunities for Cell, but it's going to take a lot of software work...Going to the open-source community makes sense, because they could attract a lot of pretty smart programmers who could spin out software and applications for Cell."

samuel4242 writes "Javascript may have been with us since the beginning of the browser, but it's going through a renaissance as companies like Google create Javascript-enabled tools like Google Maps . There's even a nice, newly coined acronym , AJAX for "Asynchronous Javascript and XML". A nice survey article from Infoworld interviews Javascript creator, Brendan Eich, who says that this is what he and Marc Andreessen planned from the beginning. Perhaps AJAX will finally deliver what Java promised. Perhaps it will really provide a solid way to distribute software seamlessly."

An anonymous reader writes "Interested in tuning your C/C++ applications for Linux on POWER? This article compares the optimization options for both Linux on POWER C/C++ compilers: GCC and IBM XL C/C++. This paper also reviews tactics, such as Interprocedural Analysis, Profile Directed Feedback, and High Order Transformations, which are used by one or both of the compilers to extract higher performance from the Power architecture."

Jacco de Leeuw writes "Windows Mobile developers have enjoyed free development tools like the eMbedded Visual Tools and that in turn has helped popularize Windows Mobile devices and a number of free or cheap applications. But now the SDK for the upcoming Windows Mobile 5.0 has a number of 'technical (not political) dependencies' on Visual Studio 2005, which starts at $299. Is it time for an open source Windows Mobile toolchain?"

An anonymous reader writes "It looks like the first KDE 4 application is running. Click the link for screenshots." In short, "Kate now kind of works."

gooru writes "The MATLAB programming contest winner has been announced. It is a semi-annual programming contest organized by the MathWorks. What makes the contest truly interesting is the final phase is open source. Contestants may submit as many entries as they want and can tweak other entries."

putko writes "As previously reported, OpenBSD 3.7 is released. Here's some interviews with the people behind the release about the new features, including information about which companies are complying with requests for documentation and permission to freely distribute required firmware, and which are not. Ralink Tech and Realtek 'GOOD,'Intel 'BAD.' The next time I build/buy a wireless product, I'll want Realtek or Ralink Tech inside -- because getting software to work with it will be easier. Ralink Tech and Realtek are Taiwanese, by the way."

thesamet writes "The Python Challenge is a set of riddles that require a little bit of Python programming to be solved. The purpose of the riddles is to provide an entertaining way to explore the Python programming language. The challenge was started late in April this year and it is starting to gain popularity in the Python community. What people love most about the challenge is that it makes them poke in Python's module library and discover new things. It truly demonstrates the great power of Python's included 'batteries.' The riddles are designed to be solvable by Python beginners, but yet are challenging even to experienced Python programmers. The first few riddles are very easy, but it gradually becomes more and more challenging. Many people reported that playing the challenge is highly addictive and it is great fun. The site also features discussion forums where users can ask for hints. Additionally, after solving a riddle, its solution is available in a wiki form."

JamesD_UK writes "mod_perl 2.0.0 has been officially released into CPAN. Enhancements over mod_perl 1 include threads support and a perl interface to the Apache Portable Runtime. More details on the release can be found on CPAN."

njcoder writes "Netbeans 4.1 was released a few days ago. Though it is only a short time since 4.0 was released and only a minor version number increase, the new Netbeans 4.1 contains a number of significant enhancements. New features include enhanced support for J2ME (mobile) projects, a new Navigator component, enhancements to the Ant based project system, ability to define multiple source roots, enhanced support for J2EE applications including EJB support for creating Session, Entity and Message Driven Beans, bundled J2EE application server, bundled Tomcat server upgraded to the 5.5 series, Web Services support, Eclipse project import tool, and more. The days of a slow and ugly Netbeans seem to be over. Using the new Metal look and feel in Java 5 brightens things up a bit as well. More information can be found in the release info and go here to download the new version. Java boutique has a review, with screenshots, of the new released titled IDE Wars: Has NetBeans 4.1 Eclipsed Eclipse?."

Anil Kandangath writes "Last year, Computer Associates open sourced their Ingres DMBS and they also announced a $1mn bounty for open source conversion toolkits from other databases to Ingres. Well, the toolkits are up on SourceForge and the bounty has been won by three teams, two from India and one from New York. More details and links to the projects on the CA news page. This is one of the greatest bounties for open source software and will hopefully serve as a model for other companies taking this path of cheaper development and better code."

An anonymous reader writes "Java-based open source development has come a long way since the early days of developers sharing GUI libraries. Geronimo is a large-scale project attempting to create a certified J2EE 1.4 server based on existing open source components. Take a tour through the Geronimo maze with Sing Li as your guide. Gluecode Software CTO and principal Geronimo contributor Jeremy Boynes shares his perspective on Geronimo and go here to learn how to use the new Eclipse plug-in for Apache Geronimo."

Flaming Foobar writes "Tom Eastep has announced that he is quitting all development and support of my favorite iptables front-end, Shorewall. In his e-mail to the Shorewall Users mailing list he states that 'just cannot deal with the support and documentation frustration any more -- support, the documentation and the web site consume an order of magnitude more of my time than does Shorewall development.' I can't help but wonder if this could happen to more OSS projects in the future - will people get tired of donating huge chunks of their life to free software?"

tbspit writes "The STIX fonts project has announced that version 1.0 of the STIX fonts should be released in September 2005. The comprehensive font set is to include mathematical symbols and alphabets, and is intended to serve the scientific and engineering community for electronic and print publication. The STIX fonts should be available as fully hinted Type 1 and True Type fonts. The STIX project will also create a TeX implementation. Progress towards release can be monitored here."

jsuda (John Suda) writes "It seems as if everyone and his brother is writing books supporting standards-compliant Web design with XHTML and CSS. I have read and reviewed a half dozen this year alone. People are obviously trying to tell us something - plain HTML has to go! Web Designers' Reference: An Integrated Approach to Web Design with XHTML and CSS, by Craig Grannell, is the latest of these pronouncements." Read on for the rest of Suda's review.

Eugenia writes "After five years of development, Free Pascal 2.0 is ready and it includes support for many architectures and OSes. It now has threading support, interfaces, widestring and better Delphi support among many other new features. OSNews posted an article introducing the updated GPL compiler." petermgreen adds a list of some of the major changes since the last stable release: "Much better support for Delphi language features (especailly method pointers); more supported CPUs (AMD64, SPARC, PPC (32 bit), ARM) and platforms (Mac OS classic, Mac OS X, MorphOS, Novell Netware); a new and better structured Unix RTL Threading support; and a large number of internal changes including rewriting large parts of the compiler to make it more maintainable and easier to port to new architectures," and notes that "Visual parts of Delphi are being handled by a seperate project known as lazarus, which has not yet reached 1.0 but should do so fairly soon."

synopsis5 writes "The Lightning project (tight calendar integration into Mozilla Thunderbird) is one of the hottest things to come in the Mozilla world. In this interview Lightning lead developer Mike Shaver responds to questions from the Mozilla user community."

Bruce Byfield points out his NewsForge (part of OSTG) article about something good coming out of the conflict over Java in OpenOffice.org. It begins "A dispute between the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and OpenOffice.org (OOo) over the increased use of Java in the upcoming version 2.0 release of OOo is over -- at least for now. The two groups have found a short-term solution, and are working together on ways to keep the dispute from happening again." The story provides a decent background on why it matters, and shows a surprisingly conciliatory attitude on both sides.

N3wsByt3 writes "Many will have heard about the anonymous P2P-system Freenet. What many probably don't know is, that a big change is at hand: the Freenet developers have decided to drop all support for the 0.5x version, to skip version 0.6 and to completely revamp the 0.7 build into some kind of poorly described, presumably scalable darknet. The main coder even threatened to quit if such a darknet would be rejected. So, is it finally going the right way with the development of Freenet? Maybe not, since they seem reluctant to provide real data and rather rely on security through obfuscation, and then there is still the problem of their general inability in regard to pooling human resources, which, for any OSS project, is of the utmost importance." Obviously, the article submitter has his own feelings on Freenet, but notwithstanding that, what's the latest scuttlebutt from within the Freenet crowd?

plasticmillion writes "Greasemonkey is a revolutionary Firefox extension that many feel has enormous implications for the future evolution of the web. By making it easy to write client-side scripts that modify webpages as you surf, it shifts the balance of power from content creators to content consumers. Since its inception, it has given rise to an impressive array of scripts for everything from enhancing Gmail with one-click delete functionality to preventing Hotmail from spawning new windows when you click on external links. In recent Greasemonkey news, Mark Pilgrim just published a comprehensive primer called 'Dive Into Greasemonkey', a must-read for those who want to try their hand at writing their own scripts. It should be noted that Greasemonkey is not without controversy, but this has done nothing to reduce its popularity among web programmers. Even Opera has jumped on the bandwagon with their own version of user scripts. To illustrate the principle to /.ers, I whipped up a handy little script called 'Slashdot Live Comment Tree', which lets you expand and collapse entire threads in an article's comments."