Rob Westervelt writes "In this Q&A, a top CA executive outlines CA's plans to take on Oracle, MySQL and others with the newly open sourced Ingres database. The status of CA's Million Dollar Challenge to open source developers is also explained."

Shell writes "If they want to send spam, make them pay a price. Built on the widely available SHA-1 algorithm, hashcash is a clever system that requires a parameterizable amount of work on the part of a requester while staying "cheap" for an evaluator to check. In other words, the sender has to do real work to put something into your inbox. You can certainly use hashcash in preventing spam, but it has other applications as well, including keeping spam off of Wikis and speeding the work of distributed parallel applications." If you're specifically interested in hashcash for your mail server, Camram has some interesting ideas -- their Frequently Raised Objections page may be illuminating.

Steve Litt writes "Fun With Prime Numbers contains a series of prime number finding algorithms starting with the most brute force imaginable, and working up to a paged algorithm capable of finding the first 1,716,050,469 primes in an hour and a half on a commodity machine. There are faster algorithms on the net, but these algorithms are within the reach of mere mortals and are fully explained."

neillm78 writes "As part of the development team, we're announcing PVFS2 version 1.0 here in Pittsburgh at the SC2004 conference! PVFS2 is a GPL/LGPL based parallel file system for cluster-based applications. It logically groups any number of storage servers into a coherent file system for use by client nodes, specifically tailored to handle efficient access to large shared files. PVFS2 supports access via an MPI-IO interface for high-performance parallel applications, but you can still mount it like a regular GNU/Linux file system for traditional serial applications and managment. The PVFS2 project is conducted jointly between The Parallel Architecture Research Laboratory at Clemson University and The Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory. Please feel free to give it a try!"

SimonB writes "gbadev.org is hosting its yearly game development competition (for the GameBoy Advance), with a deadline in just under a month from now. What is different (and exciting!) about this competition is the fact that the winning entries will be made into a multi-game compilation and 500 cartridges will be manufactured complete with cartridge label, full color box, and manual. The finalized game will be sold to break-even and the aim is for the game to cost just under $14US with shipping included. Visit 2004mbit.gbadev.org for more information."

Langly writes "The IOCCC have finally released their source code for 2004. My thoughts goes out to the poor guys that actually wrote this code. Reader discretion is advised." Every time I see an obfuscated code contest, I wonder if 'Winner' is the right word to describe the victor ;)

An anonymous reader writes "In 2001 two Italians released the first beta version of ettercap, a network protocol analyzer. Ettercap is now covered in most security books. It's number 9 in the Top 75 Security Tools list of the Nmap Hackers mailing list. This summer they released ettercap-NG, which was completely rewritten from scratch with better, modular code, making it easier to add new features and write and submit patches. NewsForge recently caught up with its authors for an Interview."

An anonymous reader writes "Perl 6 is finally coming within reach. This article gives you a tour of the grammars and regular expressions of the Perl 6 language, comparing them with the currently available Parse::RecDescent module for Perl 5. Find out what will be new with Perl 6 regular expressions and how to make use of the new, powerful incarnation of the Perl scripting language."

digitalsurgeon writes "SD Times has a story by Jeff Duntemann where he explains the 'Software monoculture' and why Microsoft's products are known for security problems. Like many Microsoft enthusiasts he claims that it's the popularity and market share of Microsoft's products that are responsible, and he notes that the problem is largely with C/C++ and mostly because of the buffer overflow problems."

gollum123 writes "Yahoo reports that about 3,000 students from 75 countries registered for the 2004 IBM Linux Scholar Challenge before registration closed Oct. 31, the largest turnout in the competition's history. This year's winners will be revealed in January at LinuxWorld in Boston. Each entry consists of a 1,200-word essay that can describe the solution to one of 29 Linux-related challenges IBM poses as part of the competition. Entrants, who must be enrolled full time at an accredited university, aren't limited to these challenges and can suggest and solve their own problems. The IBM-provided challenges include asking entrants to identify deficiencies in Linux and propose solutions, describe how to build a high-availability application that would provide failover capability across multiple IBM servers, and improve boot time on a Linux-based IBM ThinkPad."

tj8 writes "The Zope 3 development team has announced Zope X3 3.0.0 final. After almost three years of development it has finally arrived!"

wolrahnaes writes "It's finally available to the public. According to a post on The Valve ERC Collective, the tools needed to create maps and mods for Half-Life 2, Counter-Strike: Source, and other Source engine based titles are now available on Steam. Some documentation is available here."

madcowbrit writes "J2SE 5.0 Source code bundles are now available with SCSL and the new and exciting Java Research license! Coders have been asking for Java J2SE source code access under new terms. The new Java Research license gives people more access and options to work with the Java J2SE source code."

Jaroslaw Zachwieja writes "The Druantia Virtual Trip to Mars Project has made access to MOLA data simplier than ever. The data is served as 16bit PNG files. A bash script and interpolation program is available to automate the retrieving process. Druantia project (still a little baby in need of developers) aims to allow anyone with decent graphic card and broadband internet connection to explore Mars and interact with other participants connected. The data served is the highest publicly available set with one pixel for approx. 460 meters and (uncompressed) takes 2GB of disk space. Meet you at Olympus Mons? :)"

cerberusss writes "TOra is a GPL'ed, QT-based Oracle/PostgreSQL client, one of the most full-featured for many years. The lead developer Henrik Johnson was hired by Quest Software to work further on TOra. After some time of inactivity, Henrik has put a request on the developer list, saying: 'I'm sorry for not being able to spend that much time on TOra as I should. I am now working full time on future versions of TOAD by Quest. (...) I am wondering if someone on this mailing list is willing to step up as a new maintainer of this project.' Also interesting is that the GPL'ed code base compiles for both Windows and Linux, but compiling for Windows is not allowed anymore because of the license of Trolltech's QT."

jg21 writes "This article on "Penguin-Driven" JVMs takes a look the performance of Java GUI applications based on the JFC/Swing API, and contends that the JIT-powered JVMs can't match a JVM with an ahead-of-time compiler ported to the Linux/x86 platform. With AOT compilation, says the CTO who has written this piece, real-world Swing applications performed perceivably faster. One is left wondering, will we now see the 'microbenchmark war' carried into the Linux camp?"

islandroots writes "Arlo Rose, developer of the popular Konfabulator widget, is moving his application from Mac OS X to Windows. Back when Apple unveiled their next OS, Mac OS X Tiger with Dashboard, Arlo Rose accused Apple of copying his application. 'We're all diehard Macintosh developers here, but we recognize that Windows is the dominant platform,' Rose said in a statement. 'When you have a great idea, you want more than 2 percent of the global market to have access to it.'"

orkz writes "The BBC reports that Canada's Inuit can now publish to the web in their native language of Inuktitut, as well as more easily view websites that contain their syllabic font, thanks to a system a developed by a unique ASP, Web Networks that provides services to socially committed organizations."

MacBrave writes "The AP has an interesting story about how the programming staff at an Ohio company are holding funerals for retired or 'killed' programs. I dunno, this sounds a little TOO geeky for my tastes......."

Richard Rodger writes with a review of Godfrey Nolan's Decompiling Java. "I've just put this book down after reading it right through non-stop for four days. I haven't done that with a technical book since Learning Perl. Most techie book these days are quickie grab-bags, and you end up paying for a lot of dead trees that you aren't interested in." Read on for the rest of his review.