skaterperson writes "I just read about Downhill Battle's new open source video platform - a publishing tool based off of BattleTorrent and a video player written in Python. They've started a whole new organization to sponsor the project. They say "TV channels" will be made out of RSS feeds and anybody can subscribe to another user's content channel. The system is being designed for the express purpose of putting broadcasting in the hands of individuals. I like this idea of using recent advances in filesharing and syndication to allow aggregated content to be delivered to your desktop. There is a radio show on the project available at echoradio." The project is just getting underway, with a (hopeful) launch date sometime in June of this year.

An anonymous reader writes "The phrase 'de facto standard' can denote anything from proprietary tyranny to a healthy, vibrant, market. What makes a standard viable without the formal blessing of a standards organization? Should you use such informal standards, or ignore them?"

Rollie Hawk writes "Open Source Initiative (OSI) and Computer Associates (CA) may agree that some housework is needed with open source licensing, but they may not be able to reconcile their views on the best solution. CA has a couple of possible solutions in mind for its proposed Template License. This license will likely be based on either Sun's Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) its own Trusted Open Source License. OSI, which does not favor corporate-centered licensing, opposes such moves on a number of grounds. Specifically, they point out that CDDL is not GPL-compatible. While acknowledging the problems with license proliferation, OSI prefers a solution involving stricter criteria (including that approved licenses must me non-duplicative, clear and understandable, and reusable) and is proposing a "three-tier system in which licenses are classified as preferred, approved or deprecated." While there is no legal requirement for any open-source license to be approved by OSI, it is currently common practice for developers to get their license blessing from it."

naylor83 writes "Four weeks ago, Opera's CTO Håkan Lie put forward the Acid2 challenge to the IE developers at Microsoft. The Web Standards Project has now silently published the promised browser test. Somewhat surprisingly, both Opera and Firefox fail to correctly render the test page. Obviously though, they're no where near as lousy as Internet Explorer. More screenshots are available at my blog, as well as at other people's."

Potato the Lizard writes "The Debian project have announced the results of this year's Debian Project Leader election. The winner is Branden Robinson. Branden's candidate platform may be found here."

An anonymous reader writes "The MSN Encarta program manager announced that readers of Microsoft's encyclopedia articles can now edit articles in a Wikipedia-like fashion. Once submitted, edits are reviewed by Encarta staff members for accuracy, readability, and proofreading before being incorporated into the article." From the post: "To support this program, we've hired some new research editors. Their job will be to help you out with things like fact-checking, syntax, and editorial style. Every writer can use a good editor, and we see no reason that community contributors deserve any less." J adds: This won't be a big surprise, but "Your submissions to Encarta must be your own work" and "you grant Microsoft permission to use, copy, distribute, transmit, publicly display, publicly perform, reproduce, edit, modify, translate and reformat your Submission."

morcheeba writes "Retro Redux was a 24-hour video game programming contest held last weekend in New York. Nine teams worked through the night to produce new Atari 2600 compatible games. Awards were given for the most innovative game, best visuals, and best sound. The best game overall was "Ninja Garden," and it will be featured in a future version of the Atari® Flashback(TM) Game Console. The New York Times was there with event coverage."

mathinator writes "The 29th ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest World Finals, hosted by China's Shanghai Jiao Tong University, are now over and the results are in. Congratulations to the top 4 teams who will be walking away with gold medals. They are Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Moscow State University, St. Petersburg Institute of Optics and Mechanics, and Canada's University of Waterloo (coming in at 1, 2, 3, 4 respectively. The top 4 get gold medals). Regional champions are: University of Waterloo, Canada (North America); Moscow State University, Russia (Europe); University of Cape Town, South Africa, (Africa and the Middle East); Instituto Tecnologico de Aeronautica, Brazil (Latin America); Shanghai Jiaotong University, China (Asia); and University of New South Wales, Australia (South Pacific)."

Simon P. Chappell writes with a review of the Addison Wesley-published Hibernate - A J2EE Developers Guide. "To quote the project website: 'Hibernate is a powerful, ultra-high performance object/relational persistence and query service for Java.' To quote the back cover of the book: 'Now there's a practical, hands-on guide to using Hibernate's flexible, fast object/relational persistence and query services.' Phew! What a lot of spin packed into two sentences. Let's take a look and see if it delivers." Read on for the rest of Chappell's review.

An anonymous reader writes "KernelTrap has a lengthy article detailing BitMover's recent decision to drop support for its free version of BitKeeper. Linus Torvalds began using BitKeeper back in February of 2002, a decision that has resulted in frequent flamefests, but also in increased kernel development productivity. Evidently the recent decision was due to OSDL's decision to keep paying a developer who was working on reverse engineering BitKeeper... What tool Linus will move to is still being determined."

An anonymous reader writes "Sun have announced the OpenSolaris community advisory board, chaired by Roy Felding (co founder and director of the Apache Foundatation), two community appointed people, Rich Teer and Al Hooper (both members of the infamous gang of six that helped to get Sun to restart Solaris x86) and two sun employees - well known open source evangelist Simon Phipps and kernel engineer Casper Dik. No date for the code release as of yet, but it can't be far off now."

acomj writes "Developer resource site CodeZoo launched today. An archive of Java code pieces, which plans to do for Java what cpan did for Perl, according to an announcement from O'Reilly." From the announcement: "We're not focused on hosting developer projects, like SourceForge, nor on comprehensively listing all open source Java code. Instead, we've hand-selected a list of the components we think will be the easiest and best to use in your development projects -- whether you are an open source or commercial developer."

nazarijo (Jose Nazario) writes "As a biochemist by training, Jeff Augen's Bioinformatics in the Post-Genomic Era was very interesting to me. Though I left the field some years ago, I was using the bioinformatics tools that are covered in the book daily and still look in from time to time. Naturally I was curious to see a larger perspective, as well as any progressions, that have occurred in the past few years. Augen's book gave me part of the larger picture, but it could have done more." Read on for the rest of Nazario's review.

ls129 writes "KHR-1, the Japanese Robo-One humanoid robot kit from Kondo (previously mentioned here), is finally open for creative software development. The first unofficial implementation of the PC-controller API has just been posted. Using the SDK, the 17 servos that give the robot its mobility can be remote controlled by the PC via WiFi or bluetooth, and their current position can be retrieved several times per second. This unique feature will allow robot fans to go beyond simple performance of motion sequences or low-level gyro-based motion correction and develop algorithms that involve feedback control and AI." Update: 04/05 16:59 GMT by T : As originally posted, I erroneously changed the robot's nationality from Japanese to Korean; that was a boo-boo; the linked site with an English translation is Korean, but the robot itself is Japanese. Apologies to the submitter, who had it right.

goose69 asks: "I was looking at the various options available to migrate Visual Basic applications on to GNU/Linux , as usual the choices were many from Free Solutions like wxWindows, Gambas, vb2py, to proprietary ones like Phoenix, and so on. Unfortunately, Mono was too much with its multiple licenses. I want to know if anyone out there has done a successful migrations from Visual Basic on Windows to any application framework on GNU/Linux."

Paradox writes "Java developer Justin Gehtland recently tried re-implementing one of his web applications in Ruby on Rails instead of his normal Java Spring/Hibernate setup. His analysis of overall performance and application size was startling, to say the least. The Java app's configuration alone was nearly the size of the entire Rails codebase, and Rails application was significantly (15%-30%) faster! At the same time, the Ruby community is abuzz because Ruby is getting a new optimized bytecode compiler for its upcoming 2.0 release. Will Ruby on Rails become even faster as a result?"

shortscruffydave writes "The Register is running a piece Open source databases - a sword that cuts both ways? which mentions one of the potential pitfalls of open source databases: "Open source is just another licensing model: the more accepted it becomes, the more it is adopted at a strategic level, the more it plays back into the hands of the traditional behemoths that dominate the industry". " I couldn't disagree more with the author of this piece, since I think the success of Postgres & MySQL are already contra-proof positive, but the piece is still an interesting read.

neutron_p writes "A group of researchers, led by Carnegie Mellon researchers, have developed a new set of software tools that may revolutionize the way computer code is written. They said they have created a new breed of software called "SPIRAL" that automatically generates code for signal-processing applications - applications that help make computers run faster and cheaper. "What SPIRAL does is permit users to develop high quality code for new and old applications automatically, say in 10 minutes or less, saving time, money and aggravation for end users""

GamingNexus writes "GamingNexus is running an interview with Chris Satchell from Microsoft on their upcoming XNA Studio developer suite for game developers. It talks about the differences between the XNA Studio and the upcoming version of Visual Studio 2005 (which it's based on) as well as how it will support all phases of the gaming development lifecycle (including artists and project managers."

PDA_Monkey writes "Neuros Audio, makers of the Neuros Digital Audio Computer and the Neuros MPEG-4 Recorder, have announced on their open development blog that they will pay $1,000 USD to the first developer to enable sending and receiving podcasts from/to the Neuros."