GUI

Waimea Developer Returns From Beyond 37

Posted by timothy from the prettiness dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Waimea 0.5.0 was released after about a year from the developer disappearing. It turns out he was just working on getting the OpenGL backend for Cairo completed. Waimea is the first window manager that uses Cairo for rendering."
Software

Shareaza 2.0 Released Under GPL 321

Posted by timothy from the runs-under-whatnow? dept.
RageEar writes "Today it was announced that the latest version of Shareaza, a popular P2P application for Windows, was released under the GPL. Currently the source code is hosted by the Shareaza servers, but the announcement makes mention of the code becoming a project on Sourceforge. The binaries are still available for Windows only, but I imagine it is only a matter of time before a Linux port emerges."
Businesses

SCO and Software Liability: What To Consider 7

Posted by timothy from the fret-productively dept.
mristau writes "I wrote my senior thesis on the problems of software liability in the context of both proprietary and open source software development. I used the SCO v. IBM issues as a basis for further hypothetical analysis. The work provides sufficient technical background for a general audience. I'm not a legal scholar so my analysis isn't perfect, but the issues are relevant to us all."
Intel

Intel To Release Next-Gen BIOS Code Under CPL 224

Posted by timothy from the old-texas-town-of-el-paso dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Intel said today that it plans to release the 'Foundation code' of its next-generation firmware technology -- a successor to the PC BIOS -- under the Common Public License (CPL), an open source license, later this year. More than 20 years old, the BIOS (Basic Input-Output System) is the oldest software technology in PC platforms. Intel says its firmware Foundation code, a result of a project codenamed Tiano, 'provides that the successor to the BIOS will be based on up-to-date software technology.' The Foundation code is designed to be extended with new features and services, such as improved platform manageability, serviceability, and administrative interfaces which are too complex to implement in the old BIOS environment, according to Intel."
Programming

Evaluating Open Source 110

Posted by michael from the but-what-about-phase-2? dept.
CowboyRobot writes "Jordan Hubbard cofounded FreeBSD and now oversees the Darwin implementation of BSD for Apple. He describes open source as 'finally being openly acknowledged as a commercial engineering force-multiplier and important option for avoiding significant software development costs.' And thus, companies need to know how to evaluate open source engineering as an option for them. In a new article titled Open Source to the Core, Hubbard goes through a typical open source adoption process."
Security

The Spinning Cube of Potential Doom 161

Posted by michael from the wing-commander dept.
An anonymous reader writes "This month's Communications of the ACM (does not seem to have a link to online text) has an article about The Spinning Cube of Potential Doom, a security visualization tool that I first saw at SC2003. The cube displays data from Bro along 3 axes and creates interesting visual results (port scans, barber poles, lawnmower). This definitely makes patterns in all that 'boring log data' jump out. This is a very interesting development, the ability to monitor in real time and replay historical security related information. Definitely a step towards the new types of tools we will need to secure hosts and networks."
Programming

Python Development Environments? 87

Posted by Cliff from the coding-with-a-net dept.
baxissimo asks: "I've played around with Python a bit, and as a scripting language I quite like it. So I sat down the other day to see if I could use it to make a modest OpenGL/GUI application on Windows. The short story is I gave up. I couldn't get the Python IDE I had to run--but that didn't stop me. At first I just shrugged my shoulders and said to myself 'Ah, who needs it? I've got emacs,' and then proceeded to waste a few hours trying to cobble together an app that would run before it dawned on me that Python without a decent IDE is definitely not easier to use than C++ with an IDE. So is anyone out there actually using Python to make serious apps? What tools are you using?"
Microsoft

Mozilla And Opera Team Up For Web Forms Standard 50

Posted by timothy from the wonder-non-twins dept.
darthcamaro writes "According to an article running on Internetnews.com today, Mozilla and Opera have teamed up on a web standards proposal for Web Forms 2.0 to be presented at a W3C working group this week. One of the proposal's authors is quoted in the article as saying '... that if a backwards-compatible open-standards alternative isn't created first, then 10 years from now the de facto Web application standard will be Microsoft's Avalon and the .NET framework.'
Are Opera and Mozilla the new 'rebel alliance' in the fight against the Microsoft Empire? Should we call this chapter 'A New Hope'?"
Java

Australian Tax Office Moves Toward Open Standards 10

Posted by timothy from the bruce-sips-the-coffee dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Neat! The Australian Tax Office (the Aussie equivalent of the IRS) has been criticised for being too reliant on Microsoft software and, well, they're doing something about it such as supporting Java runtime for the first time. So maybe I can do my tax return on something more secure than a Windows PC this year?" This makes a good update for our previous post on the office's open source moves.
Programming

Programming For Terrified Adults? 909

Posted by simoniker from the logical dept.
makeitreal writes "My mom is getting bored with learning the basics of email and has mastered Solitaire. She asked me what I do on my computer and I told her that I was teaching myself programming in Scheme. She expressed an interest in learning what I was doing, but I tried to teach it to her with the HtDP and we didn't even get past the introductory chapter. Everything I've looked at so far seems too complicated (Scheme, Python, VB) or too childish (Logo, Squeak, Lego Mindstorms). Is there anything in the middle that is also cheap/free and suitable for adults? Or should I give up the whole idea?"
Security

End Of Development For Grsecurity Announced? 306

Posted by simoniker from the future-not-so-secure dept.
vrtk writes "I received this minutes ago, from the grsecurity mailing list, also displayed on the official site for the open-source security project: 'Beginning today, May 31, 2004, development of grsecurity will cease. On June 7, the website, forums, mailing list, and CVS will be shut down. Due to a sponsor unexpectedly dropping sponsorship of grsecurity while continually promising payment, I began the summer in debt and had to borrow money from family to pay for food. If none of the companies that depend on grsecurity, some of them being very large, are able to sponsor the project, grsecurity will cease to exist. I am not looking for paypal donations at this point, unless those that donate do so with the recognition that despite their donation, grsecurity may still never be returning.'"
HP

HP Announces Support For MySQL, JBoss 139

Posted by simoniker from the i'm-not-the-boss-of-you dept.
Chroniton writes "According to InternetNews.com: 'HP stepped up its commitment to open source software Monday by pledging to offer and support the MySQL database server and JBoss application server software in its servers' - it's also mentioned: 'The deal is truly symbiotic. While MySQL and JBoss get backing from a technology driver such as HP, HP gets the added credibility of being cozy with open source, a label many enterprises and HP rivals, such as IBM and Dell, are working toward.'"
Sun Microsystems

Sun To Upgrade Java Desktop System 189

Posted by Hemos from the playing-catch-up dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The second version of Sun's Java Desktop System should be unveiled this week, according to this article. And as part of Sun's effort to entice programmers to its new software, the new JDS software will include the Java Studio and NetBeans developer tools." The JDS is their Linux desktop system.
Wine

SpecOpS Labs Response to Wine Project 105

Posted by Hemos from the the-battle-continues dept.
Kelly McNeill writes "osViews/osOpinion received the following letter from SpecOpS Labs. This letter is in response to the WINE HQ Weekly Newsletter, Issue 222 dated May 14, 2004, entitled "PROJECT DAVID USES CODEWEAVERS CROSSOVER OFFICE". Their objective in writing this letter is to clear up some of the issues raised on the statements contained in the aforementioned Newsletter, which they believe might misrepresent their efforts to expand the availability of Windows applications on Linux."
Programming

High Level Assembly 53

Posted by Hemos from the for-the-insane-or-hardcore dept.
dunric writes "Randall Hyde has developed a programming language called High Level Assembly (HLA). It is a great way for new programmers to develop applications for both Windows and Linux. It works with a variety of assemblers, including Gas, Fasm, Masm and others. The website for Randy's HLA is located at: http://webster.cs.ucr.edu/"
Java

Build Distributed Object Mgmt Frameworks for J2EE 8

Posted by Hemos from the for-those-few-who-need-it dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Many enterprise Java technology developers build their own object management infrastructures to improve application performance. However, traditional object pools encounter problems in applications that run across distributed JVMs on multiple physical machines. In this article, Zhengrong Tang presents an object management framework that uses the concept of scopes to handle distributed systems with ease."
Linux

Gentoo/PPC64 Beta Live CDs Released 168

Posted by timothy from the lest-your-hardware-go-unemployed dept.
pvdabeel writes "Gentoo/PPC developer, IBM employee and former PPC64 kernel maintainer Tom Gall has announced beta-level live CDs and stages for ppc64. The hardware supported by gentoo-ppc64 is PowerMacintosh G5, IBM pSeries, older IBM 64 bit RS/6000s (such as the model 260, 270, F80, H80, see linuxppc64.org for a complete list) and soon IBM iSeries hardware. Gentoo-ppc64 is the other side of the ppc equation, it is a 64-bit kernel as well as a 64 bit user space. We are the first linux distribution to offer a 64-bit top-to-bottom solution which is not a toy environment. This is a significant and exciting step as there is interest in cluster computing circles, users of java, and more generally those who have needs of large address spaces. It's fairly exciting to be on the forefront and continue to push the capabilities of linux on ppc64 forward."
Software

Mo' Beta Testing Blues 117

Posted by timothy from the plausible-deniability dept.
theodp writes "Wired picks up on the observation made by Jason Fried that more and more sites and tools are launching and remaining in 'beta' mode. Prominent sites like Google News, A9, Froogle, Friendster, Tribe, and Orkut all sport 'Beta' disclaimers. Is this to get users to do the testing, a subtle way of saying 'don't expect support', or simply a marketing ploy to generate buzz by making users feel 'exclusive'?"
Perl

Periodic Table of the Operators 323

Posted by CmdrTaco from the whats-the-atomic-weight-of-a-regex dept.
mAsterdam writes "At his code blog Mark Lentcner writes: "A while back, I saw Larry Wall give a short talk about the current design of Perl 6. At some point he put up a list of all the operators - well over a hundred of them! I had a sudden inspiration, but it took a few months to get around to drawing it..." You might want to take a look at this and think about which operators are yet to be discovered."
Music

New MPC Decoding Library And Updated Homepage 15

Posted by timothy from the can-you-hear-me-all-compressed dept.
Dcoder writes "The MPC codec has finally completed its transition to the open source world by making Musepack.net its new official home, featuring a complete collection of tools, plug-ins and codec binaries (Linux, Win32 and Mac OS X) and the sourcecode to the complete SV7-1.15r codec source. Additionally, Peter Pawlowski has recently completed his work on an LGPL-licensed portable mpcdec library, which comes with floating and fixed-point math modes and performs at around 10x realtime on a Intel XScale 400Mhz and is even fast enough to bring MPC decoding to slower ARM chips like the iPod's ARMv4. Musepack's outstanding quality has been proven only recently by a public listening test."

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