Marcel Cox writes "In an effort to promote the development of GCC, Mathieu Lacage created a GCC news page similar to the idea of Kernel Traffic. While we are on the topic of GCC, it might be worthwhile recalling two major events that occured during the last month: 1. The tree-ssa branch has been merged into mainline, which among others means the end of G77 and the addition of GFORTRAN, the new GNU Fortran 95 compiler. 2. The second annual GCC Developer's summit took place some 10 days ago in Ottawa."

p80 writes "The Xiph foundation announced today that the 'Theora I bistream format is now frozen,' even though Beta 1 is not out yet and encourage people to try it as 'there's no reason to delay adopting a free alternative any more!' Mplayer and Xine both support Theora. For Windows users, Directshow filters for Ogg Vorbis, Speex, Theora and FLAC are available here. You can get test cases here and transcode Quicktime movies to theora on that page." This freeze, as an anonymous reader puts it, "means that all future versions will support the format as it is now. It will be interesting to see if there is as much uptake for this as there was for the Vorbis sound format."

jg21 writes "The Java platform has a stigma of being a poor performer, but these new performance benchmark tests suggest otherwise. CS major Keith Lea took time out from his studies at student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in upstate New York's Tech Valley to take the benchmark code for C++ and Java from Doug Bagley's now outdated (Fall 2001) "Great Computer Language Shootout" and run the tests himself. His conclusions include 'no one should ever run the client JVM when given the choice,' and 'Java is significantly faster than optimized C++ in many cases.' Very enterprising performance benchmarking work. Lea is planning next on updating the benchmarks with VC++ compiler on Windows, with JDK 1.5 beta, and might also test with Intel C++ Compiler. This is all great - the more people who know about present-day Java performance, the better.""

An anonymous reader writes "With everyone around talking about how Woody has an outdated installer and lacks some new packages and hardware support, some people feel the urge to get to work. The result? A customized installer. It has a 2.4.26 version kernel, supports XFS, LVM, RAID and various hardware drivers. Comes along with vim, bash, you can even resize partitions using parted and you get postfix as the default MTA. It has two flavours, a business card CD and a miniCD version which will help you install a minimal Debian system or even a X Window desktop."

Heraklit writes "As reported on Heise News, the Frauenhofer Institute of Computer Architecture and Software Technology has made available the first online quantum computer simulator - it will be simulating up to 31 quantum bits, for testing new advanced quantum algorithms. Behind the scenes, it is a 32 node Athlon 3200 Myrinet Linux Cluster with 56GByte RAM! Now imagine the computing power of a few hundred qubits, if ever constructed..."

joeldg writes "With the new Zend coding contest getting underway, a lot of PHP coders are hacking out some amazing new test code. In that vein and in response to the lack of skinning with PHP-GTK apps, I just finished up writing a tutorial with source code for doing skinnable desktop applications in PHP that run on both Linux and Windows."

ehmdjii writes "After a long betatesting-phase the POV-Ray team just released version 3.6 of the popular opensource raytracer. It's been two years since the last version and many bugs have been fixed as well as some changes in the render core. This release concentrates on stability and providing a framework for future re-implementations."

Adam Dunkels writes "Following the trend of writing 'inappropriate' programs in the PHP scripting language, I have written a small TCP/IP stack and a web server entirely in PHP. It is extremely stripped down: the IP stack only implements the most basic functionality required for running the web server and the web server cannot handle pages larger than 1.5k. Nevertheless, the stack is able to support an unlimited number of simultaneous TCP connections and the web server has support for PHP scripting. A live demonstration server is up and running the phpstack software."

t3rmin4t0r writes "The Pocket PC# group has ported DotGNU Portable.net to PocketPC. This is a significant step because the .NET Compact Framework SDK is heavily licensed, unlike the .NET SDK available for free from MSDN. Thanks to PocketPC#, now you can build Window.Forms C# applications for PocketPC without submitting to Microsoft's exhorbitant SDK licensing fees. Portability to embedded/low-end hardware is one of Portable.net's stated goals. DotGNU Portable.net also works on 9 major CPU architectures according to gentoo's portage. The Darwin-ports features a cool package with Windows.Forms for Mac OS X. Handhelds like iPAQ or Zaurus have also ports (the iPAQ one features Windows.Forms). Esoteric hardware like the Sony Playstation 2 or the Microsoft XBox can also run Portable.net."

nickirelan writes "Why Learning Assembly Language Is Still a Good Idea by Randall Hyde -- Randall Hyde makes his case for why learning assembly language is still relevant today. The key, says Randall, is to learn how to efficiently implement an application, and the best implementations are written by those who've mastered assembly language. Randall is the author of Write Great Code (from No Starch Press)."

ekr writes "A lot of effort goes into finding vulnerabilities in software, but there's no real evidence that it actually improves security. I've been trying to study this problem and the results (pdf) aren't very encouraging. It doesn't look like we're making much of a dent in the overall number of vulnerabilities in the software we use. The paper was presented at the Workshop on Economics and Information Security 2004 and the slides can be found here (pdf)."

jg21 writes "Paul Panks already has 30 text adventure games to his credit, and he's just written a report at LinuxWorld explaining how, when he came across Randall Hyde's website, he realized that Hyde's High Level Assembly language warranted a new departure - writing an open-source textadventure game. The result is "HLA Adventure" which he released into the public domain so anyone may contribute to the expansion of the game world, creatures within the world, and additional quests. HLA Adventure has its own Yahoo group." We recently covered HLA in our Developers section.

Nck writes "This weekend in L.A. will house LayerOne conference where hundreds will gather at the Los Angeles International Airport Westin to hear discussion on subjects from WiFi, crypto, security and how the DMCA is threatening to strangle reverse engineering and the future of interoperability to a presentation on network white ops by Dan Kaminsky. The conference is a collaborative effort put together by a hack-savvy group to educate the masses."

HackWire writes "Google's PageRank has only been available in your web-browser by installing the toolbar restricting use to Windows and Internet Explorer. Nick Stallman has created a module for Firefox to show PageRank from within the browser, within three easy steps Linux and Mac (even Windows) users can now see PageRank without being restricted to a OS or browser."

An anonymous reader points to Roblimo's "interesting article about how the U.S. sold out to software patents and the EU should as well." Should be of interest to Europeans, forced as they are "to suffer from willy-nilly software development by individuals who have not been screened, approved, and trained by corporate human resources professionals."

Mike Bouma writes "Core AmigaOS 4.0 developer Hans-Jörg Frieden has written a status report with regard to the current state of AmigaOS. Various advances have been made since the Developer Pre-release version of AOS4 was completed. Meanwhile AmigaWorld.net has launched a new File Depot portal dedicated to providing and hosting Amiga OS4 files and related resources. A first impressions review and some first user screenshots of the pre-release CD are also available."

Lunchy writes "A long standing monument to the growth of research and development in Silicon Valley, the NASA Ames Research Center has done advanced research in the area since 1939. Originally, the center focused on aircraft (and dirigible) research but it is now a high-tech computer science center. The open source community may be interested to know that NASA Ames is now OSI Certified and is releasing some of their software under open source licenses."

An anonymous reader writes "mozilla.org have released what are expected to be the final release candidates for their next versions: Mozilla 1.7RC3 (MozillaZine article; download) should iron out any final bugs in what will replace 1.4 as the new stable branch and Firefox 0.9RC (MozillaZine article; download) features the new default theme ported from Mac OS on Windows (though please bear in mind that the theme is nowhere near finished yet). The final releases of these versions are due very soon."

No_Weak_Heart writes "In his in depth paper Evolution of the Linux Credits file, Ilkka Tuomi discusses the challenges of extracting data from open source files, and then uses the extracted data to describe the geographical expansion of the core Linux developer community."

Lufi2 writes "QNX 6.3 was released on 3 Jun. New features include accelerated 3D, the Voyager 2 browser which supports HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.1 now, SCTP (stream control transmission protocol) and packet filtering with NAT! GCC 3.3.1 is also included. If it's not a typo, the Professional version costs $8695/user o_O Usual QNX NC (non-commercial = free beer) LiveCD is not available on the download area yet (As of 9 Jun)... But it sounds very promising"