frankk74 writes "For those of you interested in Historical Computing and the Apollo manned spaceflights Ron Burkey has created a open source emulation of the Apollo Guidance Computer called vAGC. I use it as my desktop clock of choice. Note it only keeps mission time so after 24 hours you have reset the time :-). P.S. Another cool Apollo toy free and payware can be found here."

atoth writes "The German CCC issued a Call For Papers for its upcoming congress, which will take place from December 27th through 29th 2004 in Berlin, Germany. The motto for this year, 'The Usual Suspects', "integrates lectures, workshops and discussions about current scientific and technological developments, new aspects of engineering research and sociological insights gathered from deployment of modern technology.""

bender writes "An insightful look at what it is like to track down and fix a bug in Microsoft Office is available from Microsoft's Blog site."

An anonymous reader writes "The license changes in the last version of Xfree86 have caused many distributions to reject the project in favor of the forked X.Org X server. As X.Org prepares to release the second version of the X.Org "monolithic" X Server (dubbed version 6.8), Ars Technica investigates the future of the X platform, as cooperation between X.Org and projects like GNOME and KDE begin to take take hold at freedesktop.org. Already host to an impressive array of projects, it appears that freedesktop.org will become the hub in which other Free Desktop projects can collaborate. Daniel Stone, release manager for freedesktop.org, gets into the details on how it's all going to work, in conjunction with freedesktop.org's upcoming platform release."

depechemodem writes "In a follow-up to Microsoft Leaves U.N. Standards Group, it appears that it may have been in reaction to the UN's sponsorship of the 1st annual Software Freedom Day in which its International Open Source Network (IOSN) will educate Asian users on the benefits of Free and Open source Software (FOSS). FOSS promotes several high-profile applications including OpenOffice, Mozilla, MySQL, and Apache." An anonymous reader says of the U.N. effort, "Events will be organised in Bangladesh, Brunei, India, Malaysia, New Zealand, Philippines, Sri Lanka and Vietnam on Saturday, August 28th." According to another anonymous reader, "Go Open Source, funded by the Shuttleworth Foundation and HP, expects up to 10,000 visitors at the various Linux install-fests around South Africa this Saturday, says the Mail & Guardian."

comforteagle writes "O'Reilly's OSDir has published the first of a new bi-weekly column called "KDE: From the Source" from which KDE developer and unofficial North American spokesperson George Staikos will be regularly writing on issues and happenings from the KDE camp. Naturally, his first piece focuses on KDE 3.3 and its implications for Linux on the desktop."

longlanekid writes "Though HP has apparently designed a great program for slowing the spread/proliferation of virii and reducing the impact of DoS attacks, it's all being shelved due to Windows incompatibilities."

PDA_Monkey writes "The Neuros Audio team has just released the Firmware code for the Neuros Digital Audio Computer as Open Source! Along with the release comes a message regarding Open Source from Joe Born, President of Neuros Audio, LLC, asking the community of developers to help fully realize the vision of the digital audio computer by aiding in the process to create a GCC target to the TI DSP used in the Neuros and in developing a program loader."

prostoalex writes "Konstantin Gavrilenko from British security firm Arhont, co-author of Wi-Foo: Secrets of Wireless Hacking, recentlly reviewed on Slashdot, answered some of my questions on the current state of wireless security, market conditions for security experts and future trends, such as upcoming 802.1x and 802.11i standards."

jg21 writes "After the Slashdot discussion on Paul Graham's 'Great Hackers' essay, it had to happen. Java developers have taken umbrage at Graham's assertion that "Of all the great programmers I can think of, I know of only one who would voluntarily program in Java. And of all the great programmers I can think of who don't work for Sun, on Java, I know of zero." Now in JDJ Sachin Hejip pinpoints the Top Reasons Why Java is Considered Un-Cool and to tries to debunk them. He levels some of the blame at the Java compiler for "too much chaperoning" and speculates that Java fails the geek test precisely because "it's such a language-for-the-masses." But isn't he missing the point? Enterprise-grade apps and "coolness" may be inapproriate bedfellows. Besides, does any language offer both?"

prostoalex writes "Josh Ledgard from Microsoft, the developer responsible for open-sourcing WiX and WTL, is looking for opinions on what Microsoft should do next in regards to the open source movement that he himself established within the company. "Would you have interest in working on these types of projects with Microsoft? If not, what could entice you? If so, what would be your motivation?", asks Josh." Update: 08/24 19:04 GMT by T : As Ledgard writes on his site, "I am NOT the person responsible for the WIX/WTL projects. I cite them as examples and am working with people who where responsible for those projects to enable more of the same for the groups I work in." Sorry for the misattribution!

trixie_czech writes "It's finally arrived. Go to namesys for reasons to use reiser4 as a filesystem and benchmarks. Go here to download. Enjoy!" The Namesys homepage in its current stage reminds me of a cross between The Secret Guide to Computers and the GNU Manifesto -- which is to say, there is a lot to read here, not just a bullet-pointed feature list.

Lansdowne writes "Stan Lippman, one of the founding fathers of C++ and currently a language architect at Microsoft, has prepared an exhaustive translation guide, comparing old Managed C++ to the revised CLI/.NET version of C++. According to Lippman, "There are a number of significant weaknesses in the original language design (Version 1), which we feel are corrected in the revised language design (Version 2).""

dokey writes "In an interview with Builder AU, usability expert Jakob Nielsen gives his opinion of usability in Free and open source software. The article echoed what Jon "Maddog" Hall said earlier this year in a keynote at Linux.conf.au -- "Programmers Are From Mars, Users/Managers/Companies are from Venus". Is it time to pay more attention to end-users?(who aren't geeks)"

Kelly McNeill writes "The Darwine project intends to port and develop Wine as well as other supporting tools that will allow Darwin and Mac OS X users to run Windows Applications. It is an open source project led by a growing number of developers including Emmanuel Maillard, Pierre d'Herbemont and Sanjay Connare. osOpinion/osViews had the privilege to speak to with the project's administrator, (Jim White) to tell us more about Darwine and where the project is headed. For those that don't know, Darwine is Wine (Wine Is Not an Emulator) for OS X on PPC. The following is the transcribed dialog of their conversation which is also available in an audible format on osRadio.com."

Cheese Source writes "As previously mentioned on Slashdot, HP's latest and greatest calculator is the HP49g+. While it sports a very powerful (for a calculator) ARM9 cpu, it is only 3 times the speed of the 49g, running at 4MHz. This is because it has to emulate an older processor. Of course, some calculator geeks are now writing adapting a free, open-source C compiler for it. Based on GCC, you can now make programs that run natively on the CPU between 12 and 203MHz. 1000 factorial is calculated and displayed in the blink of an eye (the built in command takes 30 seconds). It will also allow for some great games."

TheAdventurer writes "Andre Lamothe, author of many popular video game programming books, has released his XGameStation. The initial offering, the XGameStation Micro Edition, is a retro level hardware platform, similar to the old Atari and NES systems, designed to teach enthusiasts and students the elements of console hardware design and effective low level programming skills. The unit comes with an e-book written by Andre on how to develop on the platform using its assembly language IDE (included) and how to make your own extensions to the device. It is priced at $199."

zachlipton writes "Perl.com has posted Larry Wall's State of the Onion talk from this year's Open Source Convention and The Perl Conference. Through the use of various screensavers, Wall talks a bit about himself, and of course, Perl and Perl 6."

An anonymous reader writes "In his blog entry for the 10th August, James Gosling (finally) publishes a short paper he wrote in 2002 entitled 'Window System Design: If I had to do it over again in 2002'. His design is to make the window system do the absolute minimum and move all the work into the client."

An anonymous reader writes "As reported on Cnet and others, an open source java iTunes client named ourTunes has been released under the GPL by a group of anonymous hackers. Unlike the Apple iTunes for Windows and Mac, ourTunes allows a user to queue up and save to disk the music shared by other users. Recent court rulings have held that developers of p2p file sharing software cannot be held liable for 'for any copyright infringement committed by people using their products.'"