AciDive asks: "I am currently working on developing a game and I want to use OpenAL for the sound. I have downloaded the SDK and currently have it working with Dev-C++. The reference documentation that comes with the SDK is good but it leaves something to be desired. What I would like to know is has anyone here on Slashdot ever done any sound programming with OpenAL and if so what resources did you use to get yourself started?"

ryen writes "Designed to compete against MS Office, EIOffice 2004 is coded in Java therefore able to run on both Windows and Linux. EIOffice 2004 offers features which should get a few users' attention, but does it have enough to have people switching from MS Office? Flexbeta has the review." That's Evermore Integrated Office, if you're wondering.

akahige writes "Fresh from the debunking of the 'Linus couldn't possibly have written an OS without ripping someone off' book published by the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution, Tanenbaum has published an email he got from the consultant hired to do the code comparison between MINIX and Linux. Among other juicy comments, 'pay no attention to this man.' (There was no stolen code, either.) In related matters, ESR was apparently sent a pre-release excerpt of the book which he completely eviscerates with his usual zeal. Another story on NewsForge." See our previous stories if you're coming to this late.

beelsebob writes "Rosyna, the famously tellytubby-like Unsanity Developer has spoken out in the defense of their Application Enhancer (APE) framework. The framework has taken a beating since it came out, being accused of being spyware, or of crashing computers. In fact Unsanity have only received one bug report about APE itself, which was promptly fixed. The article is a very good defence of the product, and a very good read."

An anonymous reader writes "According to a CNET News article: 'Oracle will finish switching its 9,000-person in-house programming staff to Linux by the end of 2004, the database powerhouse said Wednesday. In October, the company finished the Linux transition for the 5,000 programmers of its Oracle Applications software. Now the transformation has begun for those who work on the database product, said Wim Coekaerts, director of Linux engineering, in an interview at the CeBit trade show in New York.'"

Alex_Ionescu writes "WineHQ brings us the scoop on the latest developments in ReactOS, as well as on Steven Edward's excellent job on porting Wine to MingGW and linking the two platforms together. This is an interesting insight into the WINE and ReactOS project, and a must-read for anyone interested into the future of Windows-replacement projects like these."

Anonymous Cowardly Lion writes "An interesting article written by a professor at the University of Toronto argues that next-generation programming systems will combine compilers, linkers, debuggers, and that other tools will be plugin frameworks [mirror], rather than monolithic applications. Programmers will be able to extend the syntax of programming languages, and programs will be stored as XML documents so that programmers can represent and process data and meta-data uniformly. It's a very insightful and thought-provoking read. Is this going to be the next generation of extensible programming?"

jvsanford writes "Three Old Dominion University (ODU) computer science professors plan to develop a 'deep' web search engine that searches digital libraries and collections that expose their metadata via the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). In addition, they are also planning to develop an Apache module, mod_oai, that will increase the number of people who can export their metadata and resources via OAI-PMH."

Spencerian writes "Aaron Hillegass new book, Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X, 2nd Edition, is a very helpful book for developers interested in getting not only their feet wet, but become totally immersed in creating applications using the OpenStep-derived API known now as Cocoa. Don't dive in without knowing how to swim in C++/Java, however." Read on for the rest of Spencer's review.

podo asks: "I've spent the past two months of my life working almost full time on a PHP/MySQL based web site for a client. Today I received an e-mail from the client point me to a similar web site set up by a competitor. 'Doing exactly what we are doing.' The site in question is not doing what we are doing, they have no dynamic content, no web forms, just e-mail addresses. They scarcely have any content (I counted only four HTML pages) at all. The client is chastising me for taking a long time and because the other site is 'much more impressive visually' than ours. Has anyone else found themselves in a situation where their painstaking work is compared to work which is a showcase for mediocrity? How have you dealt with such clients who fail to see the difference between a shoddy rush job and real quality?"

JimCricket writes "There's an interesting piece at Download Aborted about using distributed computing (a la SETI@Home, Grid.org, etc.) in the film industry. With the recent release of Shrek 2, which required a massive amount of CPU time to complete, one must wonder why the film industry doesn't solicit help from their fans. I'd gladly trade some spare CPU time in exchange for the coolness of seeing a few frames of Shrek 3 rendered on my screensaver!"

Alex Garrett writes "First, a quibble. Hardcore Java is not hardcore. Hardcore is implementing coroutines in assembly language or creating a full-fledged OO system in 6K. But if you ignore the title and judge the book solely on its merits you'll find that a Java novice will find a good selection of interesting topics and even an expert will learn a few things. The expert will also find plenty of things to disagree with -- some matters of opinion and others of fact." With that start, read on for the rest of Garrett's review of Hardcore Java, a book in which he finds slightly more worth for Java novices than experts.

Robert Accettura writes "According to ZDNet, Microsoft may be feeling threatened by Linux gaining ground in the High Performance Computing (HPC) arena. As a result, they have formed a HPC group to bring windows to these systems. It makes a mention of how clustered computing may be a target. I guess the only thing better than crashing 1 computer at a time is crashing an entire room full at once."

AllMightyPaul writes "Last Friday, the Mozilla Organization announced Mozilla 1.8a. You can download Mozilla 1.8 alpha (with torrents available) from the Mozilla public FTP server. Features include a basic upload FTP UI, improved junk mail filtering, and the number of cookies that Mozilla can hold has also increased 'dramatically.' What's amazing is that they haven't even released Mozilla 1.7 yet. Here I thought that Mozilla was going to standardize on 1.7."

Orbital Sander writes "According to the Apache News Blog, the Geronimo project has voted in favor of applying to be a top-level Apache project. Geronimo aims "to produce a large and healthy community of J2EE developers tasked with the development of an open source, certified J2EE server, that is ASF licensed and passes Sun's TCK reusing the best ASF/BSD licensed code available today and adding new code to complete the J2EE stack." So far, Geronimo has lived in the Apache Incubator."

Party_Pack writes "ESRI, the makers of the GIS (Geographic Information System) Arc/INFO (as well as ArcView) and its more modern COM based successor ArcGIS are once again, in the just released ArcGIS 9, giving their users the choice of a fully featured scripting language rather than just the hideously complex ArcObjects/full programming language model they currently offer. Interestingly they have chosen to move away from their tradition of proprietary languages such as AML and Avenue and use Python. This is great news for both ArcGIS users and the Python community, as ESRI will hopefully feed any development work back into the community."

Bruce Perens writes "Computer Associates is releasing CA Advantage Ingres as Open Source under a variant of the Common Public License. The press release is here. This is a commercial fork of the public-domain University Ingres of the '80's, probably the first real relational database. CA's product added SQL and in general brought the program up to enterprise quality. So has the PostgreSQL project. It will be interesting to see if there can be any synergies between the two products. The BSD licensing on PostgreSQL would allow it." Here's an article at CRN on this and a few other open source moves announced today by CA; can anyone find a link to the text of CA's "Trusted Open Source License"? Related news, contributed by an semi-anonymous reader, is that CA has established "a new open-source foundation that will support Plone, the content management system built on the free Zope Application server," and that Plone's license will change as a result.

[rvr] writes "Are you a Perl hacker? Do you want a Apple G5 with a 23" screen, a 17" PowerBook, a Thinkpad or iPods? Six Apart, the company behind of Movable Type and TypePad, is running a contest of plug-ins for Movable Type 3.0. The total amount of prizes is $22,000. The deadline is June 18, 2004."

Lispy writes "While monitoring the Xorg mailinglist I came across this set of WinHEC PPT-presentations (work fine in OOorg) that cover some interesting details on the underlying architecture of Aero, Aero Glass and future font rendering in Microsoft's upcoming Longhorn OS. What does the Slashdot crowd think about the overall design and its downsides, such as power consumption on notebooks?" (KPresenter works fine, too, btw.)

SilentBob4 writes "Today, a review of CrossOver Office 3 (written by Preston St. Pierre) as well as an interview with the founder of CodeWeavers Inc., Jeremy White (written by Adam Doxtater) have been published for mass consumption. It looks like CrossOver Office/Wine has come a long way since the dark ages of Linux science. Congratulations to the developers on both teams on a job well done. The interview with Jeremy is better than any I have seen recently."