nollaigoc writes "John Walker, founder of Autodesk, makers of Autocad now lives in Switzerland.
His homepage http://www.fourmilab.ch/ is an eclectic mix of interesting stuff. There is an interesting link of his latest perl project in printing passport photos at a mall on a single sheet, while resizing the image from a digital camera to print out multiple copies of the at the correct size on a single sheet."

djdoubles writes "Apparently Verizon Wireless has put firmware with crippled Bluetooth features in the new Motorola v710 phone. A lot of people have been anticipating a Bluetooth phone from Verizon, only to be disappointed by lack of OBEX. Verizon says they have no plan to add OBEX because it doesn't fit their business model--greedy bastards. PC Magazine doesn't have very nice things to say either. More discussion here."

rjjm writes "Alex Mclean has written a stormin' article at perl.com on Hacking Perl In Nightclubs. Alex programmes live on stage to perform his music."

cymen writes "Google's Code Jam 2004 is open for registration at TopCoder.com. Slashdot reported on the 2003 winner and Google has a Code Jam 2003 summary. Grab some caffeine and get hacking!"

FlipmodePlaya writes "Linux Today reports the first release candidate for Gnome 2.8 has been released. A look at the new stuff can be found here. Notably, the possible inclusion of Evolution, and some networking goodies. My opinion: the GUI changes look too much like Windows/Internet Explorer for my tastes; I guess it's not just KDE."

An anonymous reader writes "Cryptography Research has issued a Q&A that explains the security implications of the hash function collision attacks recently announced at CRYPTO 2004. Apparently the consequences can be catastrophic for certain kinds of code signing and digital signatures, but MD5 sums for checking binaries are (mostly) OK. While the speculation that SHA-1 is about to fail seems to be overblown, updating the many legacy systems and protocols that rely on MD5 is going to be a massive undertaking."

chas7926 writes "OSNews.com is running an article that claims that the open source development model is not a very effective way to develop high quality games. Even the exceptions are not much of a threat to major label products. Does open source development only make sense for products like web servers and operating systems?"

An anonymous reader writes "According to an article at LinuxDevices.com, the latest market research data from Venture Development Corp. shows that Linux is now firmly in first place as the OS of choice for smart gadgets and embedded systems. VDC's latest data indicates that Linux now accounts for 15.5% of embedded projects, beating out Microsoft's WinCE (6%) and XPe (5%), and Wind River's VxWorks (10.3%)."

comforteagle writes "Brian 'INGY' Ingerson is a well known and prolific Perl programmer. Far from being yet another perl hacker he is the author of several CPAN modules including award winning Inline, YAML, and most notably of late his wiki application Kwiki. I had the opportunity to interview INGY about his work on Kwiki, and his philosophy in programming in general."

jhealy1024 asks: "I'm looking for a way to replace our FileMaker DB solution with an open-source RDBMS. Problem is, FileMaker's GUI and report design tools are pretty darn good, and I can't find a suitable replacement. Anybody out there have a solution that doesn't require me to take a year off to hand-code a replacement solution?"

grd000 writes "I have been using Olero Software's Object Relational Mapping and Code Generation Tool (ORM) for Microsoft .NET for the last year or so with great success. I'm delighted to say that yesterday, the Olero folks decided to release their $495 tool as open source. I'm not sure what prompted the decision. Sluggish sales? In any event, this is a boon for .NET developers. ORM speeds up development by generating a C# or VB-targeted object based on a given database schema. Inserts, updates and deletes can be performed using simple or complex criteria in just a few lines of source code, and with transactional support."

Arachn1d writes "The IOCCC has finally announced the winners of the 2004 contest.
With winners this year including a mini-OS and a ray-tracer, the submissions should be interesting indeed - if you can make sense of them. According to the page, the actual code for the winners should be up mid-october."

An anonymous reader writes "It's fair to say that most people love PNG images (or at least hate GIFs). However, the one advantage GIFs have over PNGs is that they can be animated. There is, of course, an animated version of PNG, MNG, but few programs can view these images (mainly because the MNG decoder is so large that the likes of Mozilla refuse to include it). But there may be an answer coming: Vladimir Vukicevic and Stuart 'Pavlov' Parmenter (of Mozilla fame) have put together a specification for APNG (Animated Portable Network Graphics)." (Read more below.)

viveka writes "Back in April, Slashdot reported the announcement of a Universal 3D File Format by Intel, Microsoft & others - to be "as open as MP3". Of course, that's not all that open. And this turns out to be the sneaky part. There is a real open standard already - X3D is ISO-ratified, royalty-free, and has multiple open source implementations. U3D is "going to be submitted to ISO" - one day - but right now they're talking to ECMA, which allows royalty-bearing patents. I found this article by Tony Parisi, co-chair of the X3D Working Group a fascinating insider's picture of the standards wars, along with insights into what it takes to release an online game, what really killed VRML, and why open standards do (and don't) matter. I mean, a royalty-bearing, pseudo-open universal 3D format from Intel and Microsoft? Sorry, guys. That trick doesn't work anymore ;)"

Jason Keiber writes "I work at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a think tank in D.C., and I recently compiled a chart that provides information on the number and type of Open Source (OS) software policies and legislation considered by national, regional or local governments around the world. It looks at whether the policy or legislation mandated the use of OS, expressed a preference for OS software, encouraged its use or commissioned research into OS software. General purchasing decisions were not included. This is a work in progress, but seeing how I was having diminishing returns in my research, we decided to post it and welcome comments."

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."