An anonymous reader submits "According to a recent mailing list post by Harry Katz who is the Program Manager of Exchange at Microsoft, they plan to submit MSFT's "Caller ID" proposal to the IETF: 'I want to inform members of the MARID working group that Microsoft will shortly be submitting the Caller ID for E-mail specification to the IETF as an Informational RFC. We request that the Caller ID specification be considered an input document to the working group's deliberations.'"

Wapiti-eater writes "Released 7th April by the CERT Coordination Center, the Advanced Information Assurance Handbook looks to be a good general coverage, how-to type starting point (283 pages). 'This handbook (pdf) is for technical staff members charged with administering and securing information systems and networks.' Dealing primarily with Win2K and Redhat systems, it contains good information applicable to almost any public facing system."

bitFlipper asks: "I'm the sole developer of embedded software for a small company. Currently I'm maintaining about five different product lines, each with about 30K lines of code and 100+ files. At the moment I'm winging it without a version control system (using snapshots to CD-R), but this is an unhealthy state of affairs. The open source/big project model of many developers scattered across the globe doesn't apply here--it's just me. And since I have to provide my own tools, the budget for this is near zero. It also has to run on Win32. Oh, and the code I'm developing is not open source. I've looked at RCS (which is certainly simple, but maybe too simple) and Subversion (which is probably overkill). What can people recommend for a version control system that's free or low cost, Win32 compatible, and simple to set up, use and maintain?"

Jan Stafford writes "Need to monitor Linux performance without purchasing a pricey diagnostic package? Try these simple, built-in command line tools. This article was written by site expert and author (Rapid Application Development with Mozilla) Nigel McFarlane."

An anonymous reader writes "The KDE Project today announced the immediate availability of KDE 3.2.2, a maintenance release for the 'advanced and powerful free desktop for GNU/Linux and other UNIXes'. The new version provides corrections of problems reported using the KDE bug tracking system and enhanced support for existing translations. Mirrors found here."

AMuse writes "After taking a course at SANS from Ed Skoudis (and later hacking with him at the DefCon "Capture the Flag" contest in Las Vegas), I decided it was time to buy a copy of his latest book and see if he writes as well as he teaches. "Malware: Fighting Malicious code" is his most recent computer security book and was definitely a worthy purchase. Though the topic itself is not for novices, Skoudis does a splendid job of reviewing the basics with each chapter so that a less experienced security professional can follow along and learn. Additionally, he is very careful to show both Windows and UNIX/Linux examples of the topics, making the book accessible to a far wider crowd than some platform centric books I've read." Read on for the rest of AMuse's review.

TDRighteo writes "OSNews is carrying a quick introduction to a programming language under development - D. Features include garbage collection, overrideable operators, full C compatibility, native compilation, inline assembler, and in-built support for unit testing and "Design by Contract". With all the discussion about the future of GNOME with Java/Mono, does D offer hope of a middle-road? Check out the comparison sheet."

Karma Sucks writes "In 'A Taste of Qt 4', Trolltech reveals that it is positioning Qt 4 directly against Java. Qt 4 promises to be smaller and faster than its predecessors and there will be a boatload of new features including support for non-GUI applications and accessibility under Linux using Sun's ATK. More controversial is the introduction of a new and elegant foreach construct. Incidentally, for those still opposed to Qt's moc preprocessor, Havoc has some interesting comments. It is possible the idea will be adapted to provide GObject introspection in the future."

FortranDragon writes "Microsoft has made the command line toolkit for Visual C++ available for a free download. You can use the toolkit to build applications and redistribute them if you want (though you should read the EULA for the details, as always). This is a nice boon for those that have to deal with cross-platform compatibility, especially since Microsoft has tried to make Visual C++ more conformant to the ISO C++ standard. Go forth and compile your favorite OSS or FS programs today. ;-)"

CowboyRobot writes "Three years ago, former Infoseek developer Matt Wells decided to go solo and build his own search engine, Gigablast. In this article, Infoseek founder Steve Kirsch interviews his former employee about the process and challenges of creating a modern, scalable search engine. From the article: 'Search is a fiercely competitive arena, even though there are really only five Web search companies today: Google, Yahoo (Altavista/AlltheWeb/Inktomi), Looksmart (Wisenut), AskJeeves (Teoma), and Gigablast. It's a tight little community, and a lot of the people know and watch each other. Microsoft is also coming to the party, and everyone's a little bit nervous to see what it's bringing.'"

JigSaw writes "Here's some serious competition for VMWare and Virtual PC: OSNews reviews a new OS emulator, the Serenity Virtual Station, which can run as a host on FreeBSD, Linux and OS/2 and supports as guests a slew of OSes. It is based on the twoOStwo virtual operating engine (which additonally runs on top of Windows as well)."

rheum101 writes "Larry Wall just released the eagerly anticipated Apocalypse12 . detailing Perl6 OO in all it glories. To quote the author -> 'One other note: if you haven't read the previous Apocalypses and Exegeses, a lot of this is going to be complete gobbledygook to you. (Of course, even if you have read them, this might still be gobbledygook. You take your chances in life...).'"

damphlett asks: "My boss is a person of considerable hiring power within the Software Development area of a major global Investment Bank. I've just had a conversation with him that scared the hell out of me. He believes that people with 10 years experience in C++ have nothing significant to offer over people with 2 years experience. As someone with 12 years C++ the difference is so self evident I barely knew where to begin explaining his error, but he won't be convinced otherwise. Can Slashdot offer up some tangible benefits that can result from 10+ years experience in programming that I can share with him?"

cpfeifer asks: "Russ Miles wrote about going through the pain of setting up his own infrastructure for his OSS project, AspectXML. He asks: 'Are there tools out there that make this process much easier, and perhaps ones that I could take advantage of by moving my own open source project to? Also what experiences have people had with the different community projects?' Should you start up your own gforge server, host it on Sourceforge, or perhaps look to one of the OSS groups like Apache, Codehaus or Tigris?"

ehmdjii writes "The PHP Development Team is proud to announce the release of PHP 4.3.6. This is is a bug fix release whose primary goal is to address two bugs which may result in crashes in PHP builds with thread-safety enabled. All users of PHP in a threaded environment (Windows) are strongly encouraged to upgrade to this release. All in all this release fixes approximately 25 bugs that have been discovered since the 4.3.5 release. For a full list of changes in PHP 4.3.6, see the ChangeLog."

JohnA writes "After what seemed to be a 30 year beta period, the Apache Jakarta team has made available the final release version of Velocity 1.4. If you're not familiar with Velocity, it's one of the most powerful and popular templating engines around. And, as an added bonus, a DreamWeaver plugin was also released."

lawrencekhoo writes "MySQL AB announced yesterday that software for building a MySQL Cluster will be available for download by the end of April. Articles available from Computerworld, Internetnews, Linux Electrons, and PHP Architect. Great! Now my website can finally have 99.99% availability ..."

greg_barton writes "James Gosling has responded to the two previous commentaries cited on Slashdot about the Java Dilemma. Some interesting excerpts: "In Rick Ross's 'Where Is Java In This Settlement?' he worries that Sun may have sold out the Java community. We didn't. We have not sold our soul to the Dark Side." and "There's a long thread of discussion on Slashdot 'Two Takes on the Java Dilemma' that is pretty entertaining, from a wow, what are they smoking! point of view. There are voices of reason, and conspiracy nuts.""

meriksen asks: "I found a very interesting paper which I am sure will stir up a hornets nest. Despite the growing success of the Open Source movement, most of the general public continues to feel that Open Source software is inaccessible to them. This paper discusses five fundamental problems with the current Open Source software development trend, explores why these issues are holding the movement back, and offers solutions that might help overcome these problems." What do you think of the issues given in this paper, and how do you think the Open Source community should address these issues?

Ant writes "Computerworld has an editorial article about slowing down, not speeding up, patch releases."