Programming

BASIC Computer Language Turns 40 1042

5 REM nam37 codes
10 PRINT "In 1963 two Dartmouth College math professors had a radical"
20 PRINT "idea - create a computer language muscular enough to harness"
30 PRINT "the power of the period's computers, yet simple enough that even"
40 PRINT "the school's janitors could use it."
50 END
Java

Geronimo 1.0 Milestone Build M1 Released 147

Dain Sundstrom writes "The Geronimo team is pleased to announce the availability of our first milestone release, 1.0 M1. M1 marks the first of many milestone releases to come. This milestone integrates the main container components: Geronimo, MX4J, Jetty, OpenEJB and ActiveMQ. It has been amazing to see our communities come together and show such strong support for Apache Geronimo. There is still much work to be done on this integration and we look forward to fostering more collaboration between our projects to create an even more unified M2. As this is our first release and bound to draw a lot of attention, we have put together a thorough set of release notes which detail the current state of Geronimo. We advise that this is simply a milestone release and is not for general use, nor is it any indication of a final release. Our goal with this release is to start out slowly with a base set of functionality and gather some initial feedback that we can incorporate into future milestones."
Ximian

Miguel de Icaza on Mono, Ximian/Novell, XAML 481

moquist writes "Netcraft has an interview with Miguel de Icaza, of Gnome and Ximian fame. Icaza expounds his thoughts on Mono (the .Net framework for open source), the current direction of Microsoft's .Net, Novell's acquisition of Ximian, Novell's Linux desktop environment, Linux for grandmas and kids, and "the greatest danger to the continuing adoption and progress of open source" (Hint: it's pronounced "XAML".)."
Security

New Location For (Bleeding-Edge) Snort Sigs 26

Vantage writes "A few of us have gotten together and built a snort 'signature repository.' ... This is a place for everyone to post their personal and company-made signatures and to take a look at and use those submitted by others. It is by no means a replacement for the snort.org signature base, but it will help to get signatures out there for brand new vulnerabilities. We are hoping that those snort users in the /. community will add there sigs to this database. We are looking to add any and all signatures herem so please feel free to post all of your sigs."
Programming

Struts Survival Guide 113

Wilson Fereira writes "The Jakarta Struts framework is undoubtedly the most popular MVC framework for developing web applications in J2EE. A lot of books have emerged to satisfy the appetite of avid Struts reader including the two famous books from O'Reilly and Manning Publications. Struts Survival Guide: Basics to Best Practices (SSG) is a new addition to the already growing list of Struts books. SSG is from a new comer in the publishing business - ObjectSource Publications." Read on for the rest of Fereira's review.
Programming

Get Ready for For The 7th ICFP Programming Contest 18

nate writes "Convinced your favorite programming language provides unbeatable productivity? Convinced you and your friends are world-class programmers? If so, we're providing you the opportunity to prove it! We are pleased to announce the 7th ICFP Programming Contest to be held in conjunction with ICFP 2004. All programmers are invited to enter the contest, either individually or in teams; we especially encourage students to enter. You may use any programming language (or combination of languages) to show your skill." Read on below for the details.
Programming

A Glance At Garbage Collection In OO Languages 216

JigSaw writes "Garbage collection (GC) is a technology that frees programmers from the hassle of explicitly managing memory allocation for every object they create. Traditionally, the benefit of this automation has come at the cost of significant overhead. However, more efficient algorithms and techniques, coupled with the increased computational power of computers have made the overhead negligible for all but the most extreme situations. Zachary Pinter wrote an excellent article about all this."
Microsoft

The War Of The Word 511

atari_kid writes "For who didn't know Microsoft has a internal blogging service, which is becoming popular with their employees. And even some of their high level managers have their own blog like Chris Pratley, a group program manager (GPM) for Word2002 (OfficeXP) project. Mr. Pratley just blogged on his 'personal philosophical' conversion from a Mac geek to a Microsoft devotee & his interesting perspective on the 'Word Processor' wars of the mid-90's and why Microsoft won."
Programming

Linux Programming by Example 119

Simon P. Chappell writes "Linux programming is the C Programming Language. Elaborating a little, Linux programming is C, with the GLIBC library and the POSIX standard API. Even a language as powerful as C needs libraries and to get the Holy Grail of cross-platform portability, it's necessary to have them standardised. The POSIX API is that standardisation and Linux adheres to it very well (opinions from those litigious folks in Utah aside). For those of us who already know C, Linux Programming by Example sets out to teach you the rest in a step by step, helpful, relaxed and incremental manner."
Software

JOE Hits 3.0 519

orasio writes " Joe's Own Editor , a unix editor very much like the old Turbo-Pascal 4 editor, or WordStar, used and enjoyed by us console freaks who still miss the old DOS days, and cannot finish understanding vi's modes, has been revamped, adding syntax highlighting and internationalization support after many years without new features. The Sourceforge project is open for contributors since a year ago, but this is the first major feature improvement, that brings new life to JOE as a neat console-based programmer's editor." Joe is one undervalued program -- less arcane than vi, less cumbersome than emacs.
Debian

Social Contract Amendment May Bump Sarge To 2005 525

An anonymous reader submits "Debian's Release Manager Anthony Towns announced that after the Grand Resolution to amend the Social Contract has been successful (it does not only apply to software any more), vital parts to modern Linux systems, such as important documentation, firmware needed for proper hardware support will have to be removed from the distribution before the next release. Moreover, the upcoming installer will need to be changed. He goes on to say that he does not expect this to happen by the end of this year which means that Sarge will not be released in 2004."
Operating Systems

Daniel Robbins Resigns As Chief Gentoo Architect 361

bdowne01 writes "Gentoo Linux has experienced rapid growth in the past year--much to the credit of Daniel Robbins, the founder and Chief Architect of the project. Earlier today, he announced his resignation from his role on the gentoo-nfp mailing list." Tester adds "But before leaving, he has set up a non-profit foundation that will own all of the copyrights to Gentoo. The initial board of trustees will be appointed by Daniel, but next year they will be elected. The membership of the foundation will be open." Reader burnitall points out a note on the Gentoo homepage reading "... We are extremely sad to see Daniel Robbins depart, and we both wish him the best in his new endeavors and promise that the door will always be open for his return." Robbins' message also indicates he hopes to continue working on the release engineering aspect of Gentoo.
Security

Open Source Security's Best Kept Secret 9

An anonymous reader writes "Prelude IDS Framework: "Open Source Security's Best Kept Secret" is an overview of the Prelude Project. The article touches upon the long list of devices and log types Prelude understands. As well as Prelude's ability to utilize patched versions of software like Snort, Nagios, Nessus, SamHain, etc. to all report to Prelude. There are also screen shots of two new front ends for Prelude (pylude and prewikka)."
Perl

MySQL and Perl for the Web 244

Craig Maloney writes "MySQL (love it or hate it) is one of the most popular databases for deploying websites. Perl (also love it or hate it) was almost synonymous with website programming. Arguably there are different choices for different needs in web development (PostgreSQL, PHP, Java, etc.), but there is no argument that if you are planning on putting together a website, using MySQL and Perl that MySQL & Perl for the Web will aid immensely in that development." Read on for the rest of Maloney's concise review of the book. While not new, he says it's still a valuable volume.
Wine

"Missing Link" In Windows Emulation Unveiled? 458

ben_ writes "According to this article on inq7.net, a Philippines company called SpecOps has revealed their Project David, a middleware layer that solves the problem Wine has been working at for years and will "enable all major Microsoft Windows applications to run on the free and open source Linux OS". Further (and more sceptical) analysis at Linux Electrons." I'm with Linux Electrons on this; as nice as it sounds, the information about David comes via Press Release which as we all know are founts of dependability *cough*.
Windows

Miguel de Icaza on Longhorn 662

An anonymous reader writes "In Miguel de Icaza's latest blog entry the Mono project leader discusses the threat Longhorn's new technologies and frameworks pose to Linux and open source. He also directs users to this recent USENET post about the goals of Mozilla, which is a very interesting read. Originally seen on OSnews." Mmmm...Miguel smart. Seriously, good commentary - and ripe for discussion/flame wars.
Programming

Genetic Algorithms for GCC Optimization 45

captain igor writes "For the power users in the house that enjoy taking the time to squeeze every last drop of performance out of their programs, here's an interesting little program I ran across today call Acovea. Out since 2003, Acovea's main function is using genetic algorithms to determine an optimal set off Gcc optimization flags to squeeze the most performance out of a given program. Certainly an interesting concept, definitely worth a look. Some nice results on a P4 and Opteron can be found here "
Programming

A Standardized Open Source Network Authentication 27

JigSaw writes "The open source community has mastered many challenges and has been successful in numerous areas. However, there is one glaring weakness that needs to be remedied. Without progress in this area, open source in the enterprise will always play second fiddle to Microsoft, Novell, and other corporate computing entities."

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