wikinerd writes "KDE 3.4 has reached its beta testing phase. The KDE 3.4beta1 is codenamed 'Krokodile' and pre-compiled packages are already available for Slackware, but if you need to compile it by yourself first check its compilation requirements."

Hack Jandy writes "For those of you with a little extra time this afternoon, check out Sudhian's primer to all things concerning audio compression. The article details everything from DRM to CRC matrixes (with a healthy dosage of Ogg)."

datadriven writes "Bluefish 1.0 was released this week. I've been using it for about a year and a half and find it to be about the closest thing I've found to Homesite, which I used before switching to Linux. According to the website the new version features 'A new, very extended manual, better gnome and kde integration, much improved bookmarks, many performance improvements.'"

T ony Merc Mobily writes "Free Software Magazine is a new magazine entirely dedicated to free software. It contains quality articles relating to both technical and non-technical issues. The magazine's goal is to publish good articles which are then released under a free license after publication. The magazine obviously needs subscribers - the more, the better!" It's nice to be able to download magazines as PDF files, too.

wikinerd asks: "I am sure all of you know what PHP is and many of you may even use it on your websites, like me. Some of you may have read a this article from Linux.com article that gives some examples on how to use PHP to automate your server administration tasks (or to say it with one word: administrivia). I wonder whether there are any Slashdot users that have already used PHP in their administrivia, and what the results are. Is PHP appropriate for this task? If you have written useful PHP scripts, would you consider to publish their source code here? I am sure that posting your scripts can be beneficial to many new (and old) admins, so let's share our work!"

wikinerd writes "The MozillaWiki maintains a number of pages on Mozilla 2.0 which reveals lots of possible new features of the popular browser. What does your wishlist include about Mozilla 2.0, and how has the release of Firefox affected your use of Mozilla?"

Bates writes "The latest issue of The GNOME Journal has just been published. This regularly published online magazine features original content and commentary for and by the GNOME Community. This second issue covers some technical articles, including CD/DVD creation, connecting to remote resources, and how to get help from the GNOME community. Also, will GNOME pass the Liberal Arts major test? Developer topics are also covered, as Seth Nickell takes at look at the 'Experimental Culture' surrounding GNOME development and Christian Hammond sheds light on the concept of desktop presence."

An anonymous reader writes "Bram Cohen just announced the CodeCon 2005 program. This follows a recent Seattle Times story about Bram, which mentions his work on CodeCon in addition to BitTorrent. The program has a number of projects that should be familiar to Slashdot readers, such as OTR and RPOW, as well as new projects like SciTools, a free bioinformatics toolkit. CodeCon, co-founded by Bram Cohen and Len Sassaman to fix their frustration with the lack of affordable, high-quality tech conferences, has delivered interesting projects each year, and its fourth year looks to be no exception. The conference is once again in San Francisco, the weekend before the RSA Security conference, February 11-13th. Admission is a mere $80 at the door for three days. In addition to being one of the highest-content tech conferences around, Google has thrown a conference party at the W Hotel each year that makes the conference more than worth the admission. (Last year, surprise 'crasher' Donald Knuth even made an appearance.)"

prostoalex writes "Eugene Blanchard made his Introduction to Data Communications (also known as Introduction to Networking) available for free. The book covers a broad variety of topics such as RS-232, Ethernet, RF, TCP/IP and many other topics in its 63 chapters. This is a valuable reference and read for those just starting to understand networking and data communications as well as seasoned professionals in the field."

An anonymous reader writes "According to a couple articles, Microsoft has announced an intent to pick up some of the PeopleSoft customers currently fleeing from possible support contract increases and an uncertain future. What does it mean for the landscape of the ERP market if Microsoft starts being more competitive with its Axapta product?"

An anonymous reader writes "The following articles highlight major enhancements to the core Rational software solutions. These solutions, code-named Atlantic, help unify development team members on the open Eclipse framework and more tightly link business, development, and operations organizations."

An anonymous reader writes "The Corporation recently posted a four-part series asking a few well known MMOG developers their opinions of the past year in the genre. Participants include Richard Garriott, creator of the Ultima series and Tabula Rasa, Walter Yarbrough, Content Producer for Dark Ages of Camelot, Damion Schubert, former Lead Designer for Meridian59, the cancelled UO2, and presently the Lead Designer for Shadowbane, and Raph Koster, former Lead Designer for Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies, and present Creative Director for Sony Online Entertainment."

aendeuryu asks: "So I've been getting the programming bug again, and I started up a Sourceforge project for a game I'm trying to write. Development is going really well so far, but I've quickly realized that programming in my own personal vaccuum for my own personal pleasure is completely different from programming for the community at large. Things I never needed to worry about -- applying patches, writing documentation, license requirements, creating autoconf files for Linux compatibility -- are suddenly my responsibility. Now, I'm trained in programming in several languages, using databases and specialized libraries, etc. but when it comes to deployment for, and interacting with, the Open Source community at large, I know just about nothing. So, to all the veterans out there, where is a good place to go to get your feet wet on this? Is there any good advice for people who are getting started in OS project management?"

danielread writes "Programmer abuse has been a popular topic recently, especially within the gaming industry. However, excessive overtime and overwork are not new problems for software professionals. Twenty years ago, acclaimed author Gerald Weinberg wrote an essay called 'Personal Chemistry and the Healthy Body,' which is as relevant for programmers today as it was two decades ago. Given this topic's recent resurgence, Mr. Weinberg was generous enough to let developer.* Magazine reprint this classic essay."

blacklily8 writes "What is the future of free software development for games? Is it possible? Will the games ever equal or surpass their proprietary competitors? Why should we care? After thoroughly researching the free and open source software model, and interviewing both indie and free software game developers, author Matt Barton decided that the future is indeed very bright. Stallman is quoted here saying that game engines should be free, but approves of the notion that graphics, music, and stories could all be separate and treated differently (i.e., "Non-Free.")"

comforteagle writes "One of the greatest hurdles for people wishing to 'switch' to FOSS and Linux is finding a good replacement tool for what they are accustomed to using. In Open Source Alternatives to Dreamweaver Templating Mark Stosberg investigates what open source solutions are available to replace Dreamweaver's powerful templating capabilities." Update: 01/09 by J : Hey, just for the record, Template Toolkit, which provides the solution Mr. Stosberg settles on, also powers much of Slashdot.

maxofthewell points to the announcement at the top of ""Regretfully, the OBEX hacker's contest for the Motorola v710 was unsuccessful. As of the contest's deadline (January 3, 2005) nobody has stepped forward to claim the prize. Many useful inventions and modifications came out of this effort." Full report here."

brlcad writes "After 20 years of active development under a proprietary government license agreement, the BRL-CAD solid modeling suite has just been released as Open Source software. BRL-CAD is one of the many legacies of the late Michael Muuss, author of ping. The package began on the PDP-11 and VAX 11/780--before the emergence of ANSI/ISO C language standards--and boasts one of the first parallel Ray tracers in existence. Today BRL-CAD has over 750,000 lines of source code. It incorporates both 3D modeling and rendering capabilities, and supports an API for user-developed geometric analysis applications. It continues to be developed and maintained by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory and its partners. Various portions of the package are distributed under the GPL, LGPL, GFDL, and BSD licenses."

fsck! writes "Jake Moilanen provided a series of four patches against the 2.6.9 Linux kernel that introduce a simple genetic algorithm used for automatic tuning. The patches update the anticipatory IO scheduler and the zaphod CPU scheduler to both use the new in-kernel library, theoretically allowing them to automatically tune themselves for the best possible performance for any given workload. Jake says, 'using these patches, there are small gains (1-3%) in Unixbench & SpecJBB. I am hoping a scheduler guru will able to rework them to give higher gains.'"

ivar writes "The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has open sourced (Apache License 2.0) the code used to build ZeD.cbc.ca. The corresponding TV show (typically consisting of content uploaded by the community) aired the announcement last night (Jan 6_, along with the Canadian broadcast premiere of Revolution OS. It's always heartening to see cool things come from a state run corporation..."