rimberg writes "Richard M. Stallman has a article on NewsForge talking about ways to fight software patents. It mentions the Public Patent Foundation (and why it's a good idea), but argues that fighting patents one by one will never eliminate the danger of software patents, any more than swatting mosquitoes will eliminate malaria." (Newsforge, like Slashdot, is part of OSTG.)

Sivar writes "Ars Technica reports that not only has the Gecko engine been ported to Konqueror, but the developers were able to finish the port in only four days during the week-long Akademy conference. With this port, Konqueror users now have a choice between two mature, powerful rendering engines."

gbjbaanb writes "It's not often I post about a website, but this one is different. It is Cooking For Engineers. No big deal, you'd think - a web site about recipes and cooking. But go look at how he's presented it. Most recipes are designed for women, and their funny way of looking at the world. These are very different and instantly understandable for tech geeks like us. Oh yes, although he's been affected by firefox, he blames Microsoft. :)"

fons writes "These guys have ported the Theora codec to Java. This means that ANY Java-capable browser can now be used to watch video streams on the net (clients don't have to download a player!). You can watch a demo showing some boring guys sitting in the office. At least the music is ok :) On their site you can find a link to an interesting interview with the boss, and it looks like more cool stuff is coming soon."

Karma Sucks writes "In an interesting debate with a Microsoft employee, Miguel points out some crucial flaws in Microsoft's Avalon strategy. Perhaps the most shocking revelation is the absolutely horrendous inheritence hierarchy exposed by the Avalon API. Miguel himself is clearly not amused, saying 'We do not want to waste our time with dead-end APIs as we are vastly under-resourced, so we must choose carefully.'"

berny@work writes "OpenGL has finally released version 2.0. The benefits include Programable Shaders, in particular: Shader Objects, Shader Programs, OpenGL Shading Language and changes to the Shader API. If you are interested take a look at the tutorials and the case studies that are linked to from the OpenGL site."

Tassach writes "Sybase announced today that they are releasing a free (as in beer) version of their flagship database for Linux. The free version is limited to 1 CPU, 2GB of RAM, and 5GB of data, which is more than adequate for all but the most demanding applications. This release provides a very attractive alternative to Microsoft SQL Server, and gives developers and DBAs an extremely powerful argument to use against the adoption of Microsoft-based solutions. For those who are unfamiliar with the product, Microsoft's version of Transact-SQL is nearly identical to Sybases's. This high degree of similarity makes porting applications between the two platforms very easy. Sybase is supported by numerous open-source projects, including sqsh (SQL shell), FreeTDS, and SybPerl."

AccordionGuy writes "If you've ever spent an afternoon in the "Computers" section of a bookstore going through the programming language books, you've probably noticed that most of them seem to exist only to boost a publishing company's fortunes by capitalizing on the hot new programming language of the moment. These books -- essentially glorified bookends -- seem to follow the same format, cover the same subjects and aside from the tiny flourishes that are part of each author's particular writing style, are indistinguishable from each other. Reading them, one gets the feeling that its primary purpose is to allow the author to make some payments on a car or mortgage. I have a few of these books and they're gathering dust on the bookshelf farthest away from my desk." For deVilla's review of Dive Into Python, a book that inhabits a completely different category, read on below.

An anonymous reader writes "Ok, so the game is old and there was a really poor web version some years back, but some guys at Bytonic Software in Germany have done a full source port of the Quake2 engine from C to Java. It's cross platform, performs just about as fast as C and has room for further improvements according to the developer. Also, there was another game engine that ran Q3 maps that was shown recently at JavaOne. Are first generation Java games that far behind?"

kormoc writes "The developers of X.org have just release the long-desired version 6.8.0. This release brings real translucency and allows one to set values on different windows. Also, nifty drop shadows as well as XDamage, an extention that limits redrawing of windows to only the areas that were damaged. The Xcomposite extention is still not stable, but it works well for some people. Why not give it a shot?"

Mr. Christmas Lights writes "sudo has been free software for over 20 years and 'allows a system administrator to give certain users (or groups of users) the ability to run some (or all) commands as root or another user while logging the commands and arguments.' (Previous /. stories include how you can use it to distribute root access and also how Microsoft patents sudo - ummmm, have they heard of prior art?!?) While it will continue to be freely available, Todd Miller (the sudo maintainer for the last 10+ years) has decided to offer commercial support. For those thousands of Sysadmins out there who have benefited from sudo, here's your chance to thank Todd for a wonderful tool and also help support further development of sudo."

bluFox writes "Paul Graham, has just published a new article on the English literature and role of Essays. It is not connected to lisp or languages or hackers for a change, but still feels like a continuation of his earlier articles."

Kardamon writes "Fabian Pascal reacts on the recent Slashdot discussion about SQL, XML, and the Relational Database Model, both on DBAzine and on his own web site Database Debunkings. An Open Source implementation of his ideas and those of C.J. Date and Hugh Darwen is REL."

mAriuZ writes "From Jim Starkey: "September 4th is the 20th anniversary of what is now Firebird. I quit my job at DEC in August, took a three day end-of-summer holiday, and began work on September 4, 1984 in my new career as a software entrepreneur. As best as I can reconstruct, the first two files were cpre.c and cpre.h (C preprocessor), later changed to gpre.c and gpre.h. The files were created on a loaner DEC Pro/350, a PDP-11 personal computer that went exactly nowhere, running XENIX. Gpre was my first C program, XENIX was my first experience with Unix, and the Pro/350 was my very last (but not lamented) experience with PDP-11s.""

bernfast writes "I've submitted a Java Specification Request on complementary currencies to the Java Community Process. This specification will allow to implement arbitrary units of exchange as Java currencies. Examples are timedollars and other community currencies. This JSR is still in need of an expert group and will probably not receive too much industry suppport, so any help from the open source community is welcome."

prisonernumber7 writes "X.org is showing a lot of progress! The combination of the XFixes extension, Damage extension, Composite extension and XEvIE (X Event Interception Extension) present in X11R6.8 present user interface designers with a wide range of here-to-fore difficult to achieve possibilities. What does this mean for the enduser? That's window shadows and window shadows within windows as well as true translucency for the OSS community. Good samples of Gnome and KDE desktops with drop shadows, and so on can be found here, here, here, here, here, translucency here, here and here, and its use on handhelds running Linux."

Nuclear Elephant writes "Pen Computing Magazine recently ran an article about the Motorola v710, which has been crippled by Verizon. A hacking contest is now underway, and the pot is steadily growing. The first hacker to provide a hack (or instructions) to enable OBEX and OPP features on the handset before Jan 1 wins the pot. See the official site for more information." We mentioned this phone a few days ago.

Torsten Rahn writes "The KDE Project is pleased to announce the successful completion of the KDE Community World Summit ("aKademy 2004") in Ludwigsburg (Germany) taking place from August 20th to 29th. With more than 230 KDE core developers, usability and accessibility experts, translators, editors and artists participating, the event is expected to have a huge and lasting impact on the next major releases of the leading Linux and Unix desktop environment. In addition, 270 visitors from the KDE user base and from other Free Software projects brought the total number of attendees to 500. The international participants, coming from 5 continents, took part in 65 talks, 10 full-day tutorials and numerous BoF-meetings over the course of 10 days. Thanks to this huge turnout and the numerous activities, the event evolved into the largest conference ever held that focused on a single open source desktop environment."

gletham writes "This is the first in a series of interesting articles designed to provide the reader with an overview of CarbonTools, the new toolkit for open geospatial application development based on OGC standards. The combination of OGC standards and modern software development systems open up the potential for a whole new class of innovative geospatial solutions. CarbonTools brings these worlds together for the first time."

cliffwoolley writes "After several years of development, the Apache Portable Runtime, which is the portability library underlying the Apache HTTP Server 2.x, has finally reached its own 1.0.0 release. If you want to write a portable app without the headaches, APR is the way to do it. Grab a copy and check it out. The full announcement is here."