Rob Flickenger writes "This month's freely downloadable SeattleWireless TV show is out. Continuing with the Big Brother theme, Drew from WiFimaps.com interviews Special Agent Tom Grasso of the National Cybercrime, Forensics, and Training Alliance (at the FBI) about wardriving and wireless. This episode also features Gerry Curry's deployment of wireless in the rural Nova Scotia, Canada, and Danny Dinneen from Ireland introduces the Cork Wireless community network project. The show is downloadable in Windows Media, RealMedia, and BitTorrent MPEG formats."

sonictooth asks: "I have dreams of writing a toy operating system, as I know some people have already done in college. Unfortunately, I don't have that opportunity. I was wondering what books (as there are so many) and methods people [have used], either in college or on their own. Amazon is littered with books from varying authors, Tanenbaum in particular, and there are both positive and negative reviews of his books. Does anyone recommend a simple book to walk you through the early stages, and then explain the more complex theories later on."

rudescotsman asks: "Hi, I'm an independent game developer who just finished his first game on the Pocket PC and SmartPhone platforms. I targeted PPC/SP originally because that's what I owned and the dev tools are easily accessible, but now I'm thinking I'd like to write games for other platforms too. What platforms do Slashdot readers think are appropriate for a one-man game coding-squad to tackle?"

Anonymous Coward writes "On February 2nd, the 5th International Free Software Forum [more info] issued a Call For Papers to the public. Proposals due on March 7th, and no marketing lectures are allowed. The conference will be held from June 2nd to June 5th in Porto Alegre, a southern Brazilian capital already known by the World Social Forum."

JigSaw writes "The new version of Qt (to be released Wednesday) features .NET support, full 64-bit support, IPv6 and backend support for two more databases. In light of the release, OSNews features an article with TrollTech's CEO, Haavard Nord. Nord says that he sees Linux strengthen its position in both business computing and embedded systems, while he forsees Qtopia and Linux taking over PDAs and Smartphones in the next few years." It's Wednesday, and Qt 3.3 has been officially released -- read on below for some more info.

MemRaven writes "In an article on CNet News, James Gosling reveals that he's returning to the Java Tools group at Sun. The article touches briefly on the Eclipse situation as well as some vague statements about what he's doing in the future. Since he's been gone from the Java fold for a while, this might spell some definite changes in how Sun treats its stepchild."

Saqib Ali writes "Registration for Linux Desktop Summit is now open. Here is the press release and the list of sponsors Highlights will include RedHat's direction for Linux on Desktop, and Sun Java Desktop. Today Sun did a presentation on Sun Java Desktop, the presentation will be available @ Java Desktop System in Action: Secure, affordable and compatible. Revolutionary (View on Demand), or in PDF format."

Jeremy Andrews writes "While the recently released 2.6 Linux kernel is all the rage these days, the much older 2.0 kernel is still alive and kicking. KernelTrap has interviewed David Weinehall, the maintainer of the 2.0 Linux kernel. David became the 2.0 maintainer in December of 1999, after Alan Cox moved on to work full time on the 2.2 kernel. In this interview David talks about what's involved in maintaining the 2.0 kernel, who uses it, when we can expect the impending release of 2.0.40, why you should upgrade (if you're still running 2.0.39), and more."

An anonymous reader writes "This article introduces the Intel Platform Innovation Framework for the Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI), which is intended to provide an alternative to BIOS that will allow for faster booting, manageability, and additional features. According to the author, there has been rapid evolution of the personal computer platform since the 1980s. These advances have included order-of-magnitude increases in performance, ease-of-use, storage capacity, and connectivity. But there is one element of the PC that has not changed for the past 23 years -- namely, the BIOS (basic input/output system)."

An anonymous reader writes "MozillaZine is reporting that the first public beta of Nvu has been released. "What's that?", I hear you cry. Well, Nvu (pronounced 'N-View', short for 'New View') is a new open source WYSIWYG Web page creator/editor with FTP facilities that produces standards-compliant code. It is based on Mozilla Composer and is being developed by ex-Netscape employee Daniel Glazman's new company, Disruptive Innovations, under licence for Lindows.com. All the code for Nvu will be released back into the wild under the MPL/LGPL/GPL tri-licence. More information is available in the Nvu FAQ. Users of LindowsOS, other Linux distributions and Windows 98 and later can download Nvu 0.1 now." TheWanderingHermit writes points out that the feature list includes "(finally!) the ability to include and edit forms."

Blair16 writes "From OSNews -- Mono 0.30 has been released. This release includes four components at once: the Runtime and Software Development Kit, the Documentation browser, and the ASP.NET server with its Apache module. Packages for various distributions are also available from our download page. This is mostly a fine-tuning release: bug fixing and performance improvements are the major benefits, but new classes and new features are also included. See the rest of the notes for details."

BenchmarkingFreak writes "OSnews is running a story about a new benchmarking competition: OSU Open Source Lab wanted to take the concept of benchmarking a little bit further with the Beaver Challenge 2004. In this competition they will be allowing a community of experts in each OS to tweak their configurations to ensure maximum performance. And they are running it all on wicked machines, just imagine... well you know."

Dan writes "Daniel Eischen says that libkse has been renamed back to libpthread and is now the default threads library. The gcc-pthread option has also been changed to link to libpthread instead of libc_r. For alpha and sparc64 machines, libkse has not been renamed and links are installed so that libpthread points to libc_r. FreeBSD GNOME team's Joe Marcus Clarke confirmed that the ports system will switch to using libpthread as the default for PTHREAD_LIBS shortly. A patch set is currently being tested, once that completes, the necessary port hooks will be in place to easily build applications linked to libpthread."

Asmodeus writes "Just noticed that the 2.1 release of the Bochs IA-32 emulator is out at the Bochs home page For those not in the know, Bochs is an open source implementation of the x86 instruction set(s) and a virtual PC (al la VMWare) which is capable of booting FreeDOS and Linux under the host control of another OS."

mAriuZ writes "Initially funded by a grant from the Pentagon's DARPA, the Sardonix project aspired to replace the Linux security review process with a public website that meticulously tracks which code has been audited for security holes, and by whom. As conceived by Crispin Cowan, Sardonix was to attract volunteer auditors by automatically ranking them according to the amount of code they've examined, and the number of security holes they've found. Auditors would lose points if a subsequent audit by someone else turned up bugs they missed. ... In the end, though, nobody showed up."

FyRE666 writes "Infoworld are currently running an interesting comparison of the 2.4 series kernel against the new 2.6 release on Xeon, Opteron and Itanium CPUs with some surprising benchmark results for common server-related tasks. Basically the new scheduler helps the 2.6 kernel to cream the old 2.4: Samba tests showing up to 73% speed increases, MySQL showing up to 29% and Apache serving dynamic content up to 47% faster!"

CrypticSpawn asks: "I read an article on Joel on Software it talks about Microsoft missing one important thing from the .NET infrastructure, and I wanted to know what Slashdot readers thought were Microsoft's reasons for leaving [a linker] out?"

An anonymous reader inputs: "Mad Penguin has posted a comprehensive review of Sun's JDS 2003 Linux distribution, and it is one of the most honest I have seen: "The developers behind this effort need to focus on what makes a desktop OS great: ease of use, multimedia support, and simple/accessible networking features." Without that, the author says that the distro cannot survive. there was also mention of Project Looking Glass, a 3D java desktop environment for Linux that is still under heavy development." Compare this review with the first one that was posted, back in December.

kid inputs: "There's an interesting article discussing how one might go about 'killing' x86. The article details a number of different technological solutions, from a clean 64-bit replacement (Alpha?), to a radically different VLIW approach (Itanium), and an evolutionary solution (Opteron). As is often the case in situations like these, market forces dictate which technologies become entrenched and whether or not they stay that way (VHS vs Beta, anyone?). Another article by the same author covers hardware multi-threading and exploiting thread level parallelism, like Intel's Hyperthreading or IBM's POWER4 with its dual-cores on a die. These types of implementations can really pay off if the software supports it. In the case of servers, most applications tend to be multi-user, and so are parallel in nature."

An anonymous reader writes "GNOME Foundation's Tim Ney describes some of the project's efforts marking the Lunar New Year of the Monkey with a tip, "Never sit with your back to a lobbyist for proprietary software." GNOME is rapidly becoming popular in developing countries and you can donate to help."