An anonymous reader writes "What's different between Grid computing and P2P, CORBA, cluster computing, and DCE? This article provides a cursory analysis of the similarities and differences between Grid computing and such distributed computing systems as P2P, CORBA, cluster computing, and DCE."

KjetilK writes "During the past couple of days, the World Wide Web Consortium, have advanced several core XML-specifications to Recommendations. You have the Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.1 and Namespaces in XML 1.1 as well as XML 1.0 Third Edition. In addition, XML Infoset Second Edition is now a Recommendation and VoiceXML 2.0 is now Proposed Recommendation."

kyknos.org writes "As officially announced yesterday, the European committee has granted 1.9 Million euro funding to Uni-verse. This three-year cooperation project around Verse, a 3d network protocol, intends to develop a networked open source 3D platform which includes collaborative tools, 3D rendering systems and acoustics simulation. As partner in the Uni-verse consortium, the Blender Foundation has been granted 140.000 euro to finance further professionalizing services at blender.org, and enable long term research and development support for a next generation open source 3D tool. The consortium has been founded by the Stockholm Technical University (KTH), which also employs the original Verse developers Eskil Steenberg and Emil Brink. The other development partners are the Interactive Institute Sweden, the Helsinki University of Technology, the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics and the Blender Foundation. Application testing and content creation will be done by Paregos Mediadesign Sweden and MinusPlus architects in Hungary."

An anonymous reader writes "There's an interesting article on O'Reilly's OSDir site, with John Weigand, and Skip "former chairman" McGaughey, on what moving Eclipse away from IBM's sole clutches will mean for we ordinary developers. It's interesting to hear a more ground-floor account of this vs the usual "Big XXX Company joined Eclipse today PRs.""

bender writes "About a decade after the release of of the NewTek Video Toaster for the Amiga, OpenVideoToaster is now hosting the source code of the software! The Video Toaster ushered in the age of affordable desktop video in 1991 and was used in products such as Babylon 5 and Jurassic Park."

TrentC writes "I was looking at the Creative Commons site this weekend, and was surprised to find, on their license generation page, entries (translated into Portuguese) in a sidebar for the GNU General Public License and GNU Lesser General Public License, including RDF blocks. Since CC is pushing for projects that can generate, validate, display and search for CC license metadata, how cool would it be to be able to do a Google search for GPL-licensed material, or a P2P network for MP3s released under the CC Attribution-ShareAlike license? As an example, Nathan Yergler has released mozCC, a plugin for Mozilla and Firebird that allows you to view CC license information embedded in a webpage, and provides icons on the status bar displaying the CC license options."

An anonymous reader writes "KernelTrap reports that David Weinehall has released the 2.0.40 stable Linux kernel, calling it the "Moss-covered Tortoise". It earned this name by being released over 3 years after its predecessor, 2.0.39. Those still using the 2.0 kernel are recommended to upgrade for numerous reasons, including fixes to local exploits and remote information leaks. View the changelog and download the new kernel from a kernel.org mirror."

nandhp writes "The NSIS (Nullsoft Scriptable Install System) project has finally released version 2.0 final. NSIS is a powerful open-source install system for Windows that is based on scripts. It was invented by Nullsoft for the distribution of WinAmp. You can get it here"

prostoalex writes "Bruce Eckel (from the Thinking in C++/Java/Patterns/Enterprise Java fame) and Bill Venners have interviewed programming legend Anders Hejlsberg. After 13 years in Borland and joining Microsoft in 1996, Hejlsberg now leads the development of C# language and talks about the development process, reasons some things exist in C# and some not, as well as future directions."

An anonymous reader writes "This article is the first in a series by William von Hagen on using the new Linux 2.6 kernel, with a special emphasis on the primary issues in migrating existing drivers, applications, and embedded Linux deployments to a Linux distribution based on the 2.6 kernel. Bill is the author of Linux Filesystems, Hacking the TiVo, SGML for Dummies, Installing Red Hat Linux 7, and is the coauthor of The Definitive Guide to GCC (with Kurt Wall) and The Mac OS X Power Users Guide (with Brian Profitt)." This looks to be a good series for anyone planning to migrate to Linux 2.6, and having done just that myself, I'll attest to wanting more documentation along the way.

An anonymous reader asks: "I started using Linux years ago, with a Red Hat distribution. When Red Hat's custom configurations started getting in my way, I jumped ship to Slackware. I have never looked back except that I cannot stand the BSD style init scripts. I like having a full compliment of run-levels and control on the fly over which scripts will be running, and which ones will not. That is hard to achieve, when you put multiple configurations in the same file. I also liked having the scripts around to start, stop, and restart services. While I was rewriting my own startup scripts [based on Debian's scripts], I discovered that there is a third style, based on dependencies. AFAIK this is the style adopted by Gentoo. I don't want to start a distro war; but, I am curious about what kind of init scripts Slashdot readers prefer, and what they think are the benefits of each."

johnnyb writes " A new book was just released which is based on a new concept - teaching computer science through assembly language (Linux x86 assembly language, to be exact). This book teaches how the machine itself operates, rather than just the language. I've found that the key difference between mediocre and excellent programmers is whether or not they know assembly language. Those that do tend to understand computers themselves at a much deeper level. Although unheard of today, this concept isn't really all that new -- there used to not be much choice in years past. Apple computers came with only BASIC and assembly language, and there were books available on assembly language for kids. This is why the old-timers are often viewed as 'wizards': they had to know assembly language programming. Perhaps this current obsession with learning using 'easy' languages is the wrong way to do things. High-level languages are great, but learning them will never teach you about computers. Perhaps it's time that computer science curriculums start teaching assembly language first."

Craig Maloney writes "If you are a Windows programmer looking to create or move your stand-alone database applications away from Microsoft-specific tools such as Visual Basic, Visual C++, Access or SQL Server, MySQL: Building User Interfaces is written just for you." Read on for the rest of Craig's review.

An anonymous reader writes "Cross-site scripting (XSS) occurs when an attacker introduces malicious scripts to a dynamic form that allows the attacker to capture the private session information. This article casts light on the areas vulnerable to XSS exploitation, explains how the user can protect himself, and details what the webmaster can do to secure a site from this type of malicious intrusion."

JamieX writes "kernelthread.com brings you a very cool and instructional article in An Introduction to Virtualization... The piece talks about the history of VM's, why they are becoming important again, implementation issues and most of all a look at a large number of virtualization solutions for all kinds of operating systems... many of them barely known... essentially more than you want to know about virtualization on a single page! Great read and reference."

kingkola writes "Finally, after about two years of development, the Beta for Java SDK 1.5, aka Tiger, has been released. Features added in this edition include generics support, autoboxing of primitives, syntactic sugar for loops, enumerated types, variable arguments, sharing of memory between multiple VMs and a bunch of other bugfixes, enchancements, etc."

brasten wants to get to the core of this issue: "I'm in the market for a new development notebook. I would like to jump into the Apple world and pick up a PowerBook. However, compiling very large Java applications of course takes some time, and so raw processing speed is a factor. I have been unable to find solid data on how fast a 1.33GHz PowerBook runs against the modern x86-based notebooks. Does anybody have any information that could help me compare?"

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?"