Kjella writes "A Califorian bill introduced last week would, if passed, expose file-swapping software developers to fines of up to $2,500 per charge, or a year in jail, if they don't take 'reasonable care' to prevent their software from being used to commit crime. C|Net has the story, as well as a link to the actual bill. By the overly broad definition of P2P software, almost any piece of internet software could be liable. This browser is certainly able to download and upload files ('Save as ...' and upload forms). Are Microsoft, Opera and Mozilla.org taking 'reasonable care' to prevent me from exchanging anything illegal? Of course, I never go there, but a friend of my uncle's third cousin's brother told me warez download sites work just fine ..."

DavidNWelton writes "An interesting and well thought-out call for Wifi manufacturers to open up their specs, at least partially, written by The Economist. 'So it is hard to see what the problem is beyond a dog-in-the-mangerish desire not to give anything away. Time to open it up, boys.'"

gManZboy writes "Programming writer and instructor Greg Wilson is proposing that the next generation of programming languages will use XML to store not only such things as formatting (so you can see indentation your way, and I can see it my way, via XSLT) but even programmatic entities -- like: <invoke-expr method="myMethod"><evaluate>record</evaluate></invoke-expr>. Wacky, but perhaps wacky enough to be possible?"

An anonymous reader asks: "My company wants to increase creativity and innovation, we our thinking of implementing a Google like policy of 20% of your time for independent projects but I can't find any details on how Google actually implements this. I am curious how they divvy up their time (1 day a week or 1 week a month)? How do you keep your real project from impacting it? At what point are the projects reviewed? Has anybody experienced other successful ways to stimulate creativity at their workplace?"

Twintop asks: "The company I'm working for has asked me to take over administration of their CVS server for a decent sized project. The current setup of the CVS server needs to be wiped clean and started fresh. The only times I've ever used CVS (and used it poorly at that) was with a few SourceForge.net (An OSTG Site) projects. What are some suggestions on reference materials for a newbie to CVS (but not to Linux) and methods of administration that have worked for you in the past?"

David Gerard writes "Asa Dotzler from the Mozilla Foundation invited questions on his blog on the Mozilla release process. The answers are up."

Ant writes "Useit.com's Durability of Usability Guidelines article says about 90% of usability guidelines from 1986 are still valid. However, several guidelines are less important because they relate to design elements that are rarely used today... The 944 guidelines related to military command and control systems built in the 1970s and early 1980s; most used mainframe technology. You might think that these old findings would be completely irrelevant to today's user interface designers. If so, you'd be wrong."

Juanvaldes writes "Apple has put online more developer-oriented information about Tiger. There are also detailed articles about Spotlight, Dashboard, 64-bit apps and Automator."

spectre_be writes "Davyd Madeley wrote a Sneak Peek at Gnome 2.10, scheduled for release on the March 9, 2005. Looks like the new release-policy is starting to pay of, as several existing utilities get enhancements and a couple of new ones are added. Also (finally) a mozilla-stylee type-ahead find has been implemented in Gnome's Open/Save dialog. Together with OpenOffice.org 2.0's scheduled release and Novell's Mono coming up to speed, will 2005 prove to be the year of Gnome?" Update: 01/18 01:40 GMT by T : Oops - the "2-point" got chopped off in the headline; still a while until GNOME 10.

eclecticgeek asks: "I've recently finished a CS/SD degree at uni and the interviews are starting to come thick and fast. I've yet to have a skills test for any of them, and it's only a matter of time before I do. I'm hoping to do one this week and I will get the choice of language. The position is quite broad and they're more after competent programmers in general, rather than any one specific language. So I'm wondering, have you done a developer skills test? What type of things did you get asked?"

Obiwan Kenobi writes "Brian Hook of id software fame got around to developing on ActiveX and found some minor grievances, particularly in the security department. To quote: "I've been doing some ActiveX coding on the side for a couple days, stuff I'm not familiar with, and I'm just flat out _appalled_ at how bad that entire API and design is. I can make an OCX that basically formats your hard drive, stick it on a Web page with a tag, and if your security settings are set low enough, you'll start formatting your hard drive the minute you visit my Web page.""

An anonymous reader writes "The site Cubehacker.com, a GC development page, is hosting a 60 day development competition. The goal of this competition is to boost interest in developing homebrew applications and games for this powerful little console."

An anonymous reader writes "In the latest posting on the Xen developer list, IBM pledges to make Xen more secure by porting its secure hypervisor (sHype) architecture to it. In their posting, IBM discusses an SELinux like access control frame work, resource control and monitoring and trusted computing support for Xen. It appears that a lot is happening on the Xen front (for example, the announcement of XenSource Inc. and Intel's code drop in the xeno-unstable.bk tree for their super secret VT CPU)."

someonewhois writes "MySQL's CEO, Marten Mickos, says 'Open source & MySQL will rise, legal foes will fall', in a bold prediction that legal issues will continue to be ignored as a threat towards open source, and that software patents will harm the industry (well, duh)."

A reader writes:"252 MIT students are spending the month of January writing Java programs to control virtual robots in a videogame environment called Robocraft. These virtual robots will battle each other for cash prizes in a tournament to see who can write the best Robocraft player. The competition is being sponsored by top tech companies including Bank of America, Electronic Arts, BBN, Schlumberger, Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Oracle. Only MIT students are eligible to compete, but anyone can read the specs, download the software, and program their own virtual robot using the Robocraft API."

CliffH writes "For those that want to play with a preview release of Avalon (the November Community Technology Preview) and the SDK, head on over to this page and download to your heart's delight. It is 261MB+ and is already going slow so be warned."

garethw asks: "I'm working on a project where the lead developer, following a suggestion by our tool vendor, wants to get rid of the header files and directly #include source code. The language is a somewhat specialized language, but for all intents and purposes, you can assume it's Java or C. The conventional argument I recall for using header files, and incremental compilation, is that it's faster to use a makefile and conditionally build only those files that have changed. However, it turns out that the brute force of invoking the compiler once on the top-level does actually compile much faster. I feel that there is something about #include'ing source files directly, compiling only the top-level file, just doesn't 'feel' right and I'm at a loss to really give a solid argument as to why. Has anyone actually used this approach? Does anyone have any thoughts on any advantages or drawbacks?"

sebFlyte writes "One of XML's founders says 'If I were world dictator, I'd put a kibosh on binary XML' in this interesting look at what can be done to make XML better, faster and stronger."

Elonka writes "The Online Games SIG of the IGDA has released the latest in a series of White Papers on the online computer gaming industry. The 2004 Persistent Worlds White Paper (80-page, 457K pdf) had several contributors from across the industry, and gives general "developer to developer" advice, covering everything from a quick overview of major products, to design considerations on multiplayer gameplay and dealing with online communities, to technical considerations, to some stats about the international marketplace, including the rapidly-growing Asian market. Editors included Daniel James of Three Rings Design, makers of Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates, and Gordon Walton, VP and Executive Producer at Sony Online and presenter of the Ten Reasons You Don't Want to Make a Massively Multiplayer Game talk at the 2003 Game Developers Conference."

prostoalex writes "Mike Hall from Microsoft asks the audience why they would choose Linux over Microsoft for embedded projects. He provides a point-by-point description of benefits of Microsoft's products (Windows CE and Windows XP Embedded) and points out that starting out on Windows-based embedded platform might save development and testing time."