jg21 writes "Although this reader-compiled list of software development's giants omits pioneers like George Boole, John Louis von Neumann, and the 'Forgotten Father of the Computer' John Vincent Atanasoff - among others - it does a pretty good job of mapping the Code Masters, from Alan Turing who gave us the algorithm, to Klaus Knopper the one-man band behind Knoppix. They're mostly here - the inventors of C, C++, C#, Java, and Python; example. There are a couple of programmers who have snuck in more for their business acumen than their programming talent, like the former Powersoft/Sybase CEO Mitchell Kertzman but otherwise the 40 nominees seem pretty 'pure' and the overall idea is to narrow the list down to the Top Twenty Software People in the World - a phrase invented by Tim Bray, who blogged that Adam Bosworth would be among them. Be careful what you wish for when blogging - looks like Bray's about to find out who the community thinks the the 19 others are."

JRiddell writes "The KDE 3.4 release cycle has started with the first alpha release. 'Please test this out over the holidays and add your contributions. We welcome code patches, translations, documentation, great icons and detailed bug reports. A great way in to helping KDE is by joining one of the KDE Quality Teams. Get it from download.kde.org or try Konstruct.'"

christophw writes "The programmers of SharpDevelop (better known to the /. crowd will be its sibling MonoDevelop) together with the publisher Apress made the book Dissecting a C# Application - Inside SharpDevelop available as a freely downloadable PDF document (no, no registration required). So if you want to judge for yourself if one can build an application of scale with .NET (or Mono for that matter), you now have a 500+ pages book for the holiday reading season (or the virtual bookshelf)."

Jimmy writes "Secunia is reported about a new vulnerability, which affects all browsers. It allows a malicious web site to "hi-jack" pop-up windows, which could have been opened by e.g. a your bank or an online shop. Here is a demonstration of the vulnerability"

Ketchup_blade writes "As RSS is becoming more known to the mainstream users and press, the bandwidth issue reported by many sites (Eweek, CNet, InternetNews) related to feeds is becoming a reality. Stats from sites like Boing Boing are showing a real concern regarding feeds bandwidth usage. Possible solutions to this problem are emerging slowly, like RSScache (feed caching proxy) and KnowNow (even-driven syndication). RSScache seems to offer a realistic solution to the problem, but can this be enough to help RSS as it reaches an even bigger user base in the upcoming year?"

Christopher Diggins writes "The Heron programming language, is a new general-purpose multi-paradigm programming language in the style of C++ which is starting to make waves. The popular Polish software development magazine Software 2.0 is featuring an article on Heron, in its first English version of the magazine slated to appear in February 2005. A preview of the Heron article is available."

PaaChhaa writes "The GNOME Foundation membership and elections committee has announced the preliminary results of this year's elections for the board of directors. There are a few new faces this year, and Miguel de Icaza, whose candidacy was rejected last year due to late submission, is back. The run up to this year's election saw a threat of boycott, which ultimately resulted in the online publication of the foundation's financial records. Also, a heated discussion followed the posting of the list of ten questions, and the opinions of the candidates and other foundation members on these issues can be found in the foundation-list archives for the months of November and December. A notable exclusion from this year's board is GNOME's release manager Jeff Waugh. who didn't run at all."

jvm writes "The former game developer Pumpkin Studios has released the source for their 3D real-time strategy game Warzone 2100 under the GNU General Public License. (Direct link to the source archive.) Previously released just for Microsoft Windows and Sony PlayStation, this source release permits this 1999 game to be ported to other platforms, such at GNU/Linux and MacOS. You can join in the developer discussion at the RealTimeStrategies Warzone 2100 Redevelopment Project forum. Note that only the source has been released; an original copy of the game is required to obtain the other parts of the game (graphics, sounds, etc.)"

linhux writes "A reported on Gnuheter (in Swedish) and elsewhere, OpenOffice.org has been translated to Swahili in a joint collaboration effort of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Dar es Salaam (UDSM) and a company called IT+46, and funded by the university and Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency. Neither Microsoft Office nor Windows supports Swahili. Currently, only the Tanzanian dialect has been completed, but Kenyan, Congo and Ugandan dialects are on their way. It's called Jambo OpenOffice and is part of the Kilinux Open Swahili Localization Project."

MROD writes "The KDE Project has announced the release of KDE 3.3.2 with what looks like lots of fixes for the HTML engine and kmail. So, it looks like the Sun SPARC machines at work will be chewing on the source for the next week or so to get a running version."

latroM writes "Finally, after many years of waiting, the Hurd has got support for partitions larger than 2GB. The patch is told to be very stable and its development was started about a year and a half ago. Michael Bank writes: 'I hacked the Debian package so far that I make it build a statically compiled ext2fs with Ogi's patch (20041029) for partitions > 2GB. For now, I decided to just copy libpager, libdiskfs and ext2fs to libpager-ogi, libdiskfs-ogi and ext2fs-ogi, apply his patch and dump the result as a new patch. Another patch modifies the Makefiles accordingly.' I did some basic tests with those packages and they work fine for me so far. Any comments on how they work for people and how to possibly improve the packaging and integration of the patch are very welcome."

cellulama writes "Is virtual reality back? A commercial vendor has started developing for Croquet, which is an open-source tool for collaborating and sharing data, with an emphasis on 3D visualization. The system was developed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for research and "co-creativity," but a company named 3Dsolve is looking for military applications. What's next -- open-source America's Army?"

Effugas writes "I've completed an applied security analysis (pdf) of MD5 given Xiaoyun Wang et al's collision attack (covered here and here). From an applied perspective, the attack itself is pretty limited -- essentially, we can create 'doppelganger' blocks (my term) anywhere inside a file that may be swapped out, one for another, without altering the final MD5 hash. This lets us create any number of binary-inequal files with the same md5sum. But MD5 uses an appendable cascade construction -- in other words, if you happen to find yourself with two files that MD5 to the same hash, an arbitrary payload can be applied to both files and they'll still have the same hash. Wang released the two files needed (but not the collision finder itself). A tool, Stripwire, demonstrates the use of colliding datasets to create two executable packages with wildly different behavior but the same MD5 hash. The faults discovered are problematic but not yet fatal; developers (particularly of P2P software) who claim they'd like advance notice that their systems will fail should take note."

mAriuZ writes "In many ways, it seems like Python and Parrot are from different planets. In Python, the general approach seems to be to reduce everything possible to a canonical form as early as possible, and then deal with everything consistently. In Parrot, the general approach seems to be to leave everything in its original form as long as possible, and then deal with everything separately."

An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0 is now available for download on Mozilla's FTP server." Here is the press release announcing the release. Virtual folders and RSS integration, coupled with the recent hype surrounding Firefox, might give this sucker some serious momentum.

prostoalex (Alex Moskalyuk) writes "After the Presidential election process and U.S. foreign policy directions, outsourcing is a topic guaranteed to stir up heated debate. Bill Blunden's Offshoring IT is not a 'how-to' guide, as one might expect from the title. It's a collection of stats, figures and opinions on outsourcing information technology to foreign providers." Read on for the rest of Moskalyuk's review; watch out too for my upcoming review of N. Sivakumar's Debugging Indian Computer Programmers: Dude, did I steal your job?.

Uberhacker.Com writes "HP has given up on trying to bring key parts of Compaq/DEC's Tru64 operating system into HP-UX. They had once planned for the Tru64 goodies to arrive this year and made a big deal of this quick turnaround when it first acquired Compaq. Ironically, HP also announced today that it is expanding its Alpha RetainTrust program for Tru64 UNIX customers." The linked article also notes that HP has decided that it will proceed forward with purchasing some of the technology from Veritas.

Amit Upadhyay writes "KDE's award winning integrated development environment KDevelop, has integrated support for Ruby, an excellent and easy to use object oriented scrpting language. If you are looking for a good programming tool for quickly developing a professional one off application, Ruby (with KDE bindings) maybe just the thing for you. There is a quick tutorial and an online book to get you started. You may also want to read a quite informative comparison of Python with Ruby. If you are web developer or write enterprise applications with JAVA etc, take a look at Ruby on Rails(api), they have a nice blog too. KDevelop provides a GUI builder and Debugger for rapid application development(RAD) with Ruby, which is getting better. There is a nice tutorial on using KDE libraries with Ruby. And if you have lots of code in C/C++, extending Ruby to use them is easy.
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Jeferey Bakins writes "In an effort, by Jean-Francois Brousseau (jfb@openbsd.org), to rid the OpenBSD CVS tree of GPL'ed licensed code, OpenCVS is now officially part of the OpenBSD project. For more details, see the OpenCVS homepage; http://www.openbsd.org/opencvs/"

CowboyRobot writes "ACM Queue has an interview by Steve Bourne with Bruce Lindsay, responsible for a lot of the SQL and RDBMS we use today, in which they discuss error detection and recovery. My favorite part other than the photos is the definition of Heisenbugs - those problems that disappear only when you explicitly look for them."