An anonymous reader writes "Open Watcom 1.2 has been released and is now available for download from the Open Watcom website. This release contains a large number of new features, product enhancements and several fixs designed to bring Open Watcom to a higher level of quality and compatibility. SciTech software Inc, the official maintainers of the Open Watcom project, have also announced the availability of an updated Open Watcom CD, complete with SciTechs installer for DOS, OS/2, and windows. Support for the update will be handled exclusively through the Open Watcom website. Read More." According to the web site, "the Watcom C/C++ and Fortran products will be the first mass market, proprietary compilers to be Open Sourced."

An anonymous reader writes "The program for CodeCon was quietly announced a few days ago. The third edition of this groundbreaking programmer's conference, which adheres to a strict set of rules geared to providing a high-content event (such as requiring working demos of projects presented, and all presentations to be given by an active developer) is well stocked with interesting p2p, crypto, coding, and open source projects. Some of the highlights of this year's con include Audacity, Bram and Ross Cohen's Codeville, The U.S. Navy's Onion Router, and PGP Universal. Other notable applications, like Bittorrent, the Invisible IRC project, GNU Radio, and Mixminion all made their public debuts at past CodeCons. Produced by cypherpunk Len Sassaman and BitTorrent programmer Bram Cohen, this grass-roots conference is a must-see." CodeCon runs Feb. 20-22 in San Francisco, while FOSDEM (the Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting) is taking place in Brussels on Feb 20-21.

JigSaw writes "Gnome's Christian Schaller has written an intro/status document on GStreamer, the next generation multimedia development framework for Unix. Christian explains what it is, why it is important, its use in both the desktop and server side, its use on embedded Linux, Gnome and even KDE. He also discusses its current competition and the plans for the future."

An anonymous reader notes "Businesswire reports in this article that RedHat will assign its copyrights for the eCos embedded OS to the FSF. This is great news, considering that they have stopped developing it in 2002. Hopefully this will mean new life for the project."

burnitall writes "The Vancouver PHP User's Group is hosting the ultimate deal in cons next Thursday and Friday (Jan 22 & 23) in Vancouver BC CA - registration is only $150 CDN vs thousands at more commercial events. This is a non-profit con bringing together some of the biggest names in PHP, including Rasmus Lerdorf ( PHP inventor ) and Sterling Hughes (PHP core developer) amongst others. The conference is put on by volunteers and is still seeking sponsorship ..."

submitted by Simon Strandgaard writes "When new operating systems gets designed today, great systems such as Amiga, Atari and VMS, seems to get overlooked in regard to their original features not found on other OSes. It might be time to collect and categorize those special unique features under the great/lost ideas wiki, so new OSes don't have to re-invent the wheel and re-innovate." This is all for R.O.S., a "ruby-centric operating system."

hendridm writes "The new 5.0-alpha release of MySQL includes the addition of stored procedures, as well as other advances designed to enhance the development of large-scale enterprise database applications. The MySQL 5.0 alpha development release is now available for testing and evaluation by the open source community. There's more info via CNET News, or you can download your copy today."

honestpuck writes "One of my key concerns when reviewing a good book is the pull between information density and a light, easily read style. I believe that as we get further along the learning curve we can sacrifice some readability for density -- we want more facts and less explanation." Read on for honestpuck's take on the third edition of Core PHP Programming to see how well it achieves that balance.

Bud Higgins writes "The U.S. Air Force has posted a Small Business Technology Transfer Program (STTR) solicitation in which they seek proposals for the automated detection of steganographic content. They seek an application that should run both unobtrusively in the background and in a manual mode, and provide the user the capability to scan all email attachments, downloaded materials and accessed files with an appropriate steganalysis algorithm, reporting any abnormal results (i.e. the presence of steganography). I personally don't think that is feasible, but maybe a good programmer can prove me wrong. A link to the solicitation AF04-T008 can be found here. For those who are not familiar with the SBIR/STTR program, it provides up to $850k for 3 years of research." This sounds very similar to what Niels Provos did over a several-year period at University of Michigan's CITI and released under a free license. I hope the USAF doesn't spend too much of my money without considering extending that research.

mache writes "Full NTFS write support for Knoppix is under discussion on Knoppix Ideas forum and it looks that Knopper will include Captive into Knoppix 3.4. The best part of Live CD with full NTFS write support is that it actually exists in LinuxDefender, a remastered Knoppix distribution made by Bitdefender, presented at LinuxConf 2003, the annual Romanian Linux Users Group (RLUG) conference."

Balinares writes "Great bunch of news on the Linux desktop unification front. After the unification of GTK and Qt themes that Slashdot already reported on, it is OpenOffice's turn to get the unified look treatment (screenshot 1, screenshot 2, screenshot 3). In related news, the recently released QtGTK library allows to merge the Qt event loop with that of GTK. In other words, this means you can now easily use KDE's DCOP, IOslaves, and, last but not least, file dialogs, from inside your GTK apps. (Screenshot of this feature used in XMMS2: 1 2). It comes with a tutorial that explains the basics. Finally, the new fuse_kio tool now makes it possible to use KDE's IOslaves directly at the filesystem level, from any Linux app. 2004 is really beginning well for all those of us who use Linux as their primary desktop!"

nnorwitz writes "PyCon 2004 is coming to Washington, DC at the end of March. It's a great place to meet lots of smart people and learn new things. Many interesting discussions go far beyond Python into other programming languages and topics. We should find out more about the Pie-thon, the OSAF since Mitch Kapor is the keynote speaker. There may even be a few surprises. The price is only $175, but early bird registration ends soon. It's not too late to submit a presentation either. I hope to see lots of new faces this year! I want to talk to some Perl and Ruby zealots^Wconverts^Wprogrammers. :-)"

ikewillis writes "OSnews compares the relative performance of nine languages and variants on Windows: Java 1.3.1, Java 1.4.2, C compiled with gcc 3.3.1, Python 2.3.2, Python compiled with Psyco 1.1.1, Visual Basic, Visual C#, Visual C++, and Visual J#. His conclusion was that Visual C++ was the winner, but in most of the benchmarks Java 1.4 performed on par with native code, even surpassing gcc 3.3.1's performance. I conducted my own tests pitting Java 1.4 against gcc 3.3 and icc 8.0 using his benchmark code, and found Java to perform significantly worse than C on Linux/Athlon."

jcr13 writes "MUTE is a search-and-download file sharing network that uses ant-inspired routing to make both downloaders and uploaders anonymous. Version 0.2 was released today (change log). Since its mid-December 0.1 release, MUTE has risen from complete obscurity to one of the top-ten most active SourceForge projects. Several people have described MUTE as a "third-generation file sharing network," with the first two generations being Napster and Gnutella (and generation zero being the web---remember when MP3s were traded through web pages?). Each generation circumvents the tactics that the RIAA used to squash the previous generation. Alas, each generation is less and less efficient (though MUTE's dynamic routing works surprisingly well). MUTE was discussed in a previous Slashdot story. Oh, and if you are wondering, it's M.U.T.E., lady, an acronym, not "mute," and we had best not go into it any further."

An anonymous reader inputs: "The C programming language defines two standard memory management functions: malloc() and free(). C programmers frequently use those functions to allocate buffers at run time to pass data between functions. In many situations, however, you cannot predetermine the actual sizes required for the buffers, which may cause several fundamental problems for constructing complex C programs. This article advocates a self-managing, abstract data buffer. It outlines a pseudo-C implementation of the abstract buffer and details the advantages of adopting this mechanism."

grndslm notes: "PalmSource has indeed shipped Palm OS 6, the next major release of its operating system, to its licensees. The company has posted a press release this morning, PalmSource CEO David Nagel will also be presenting at the Needham Growth Conference today as well."

SimonCooper inputs: "Are you frustrated with software bloat? If so then you might want to consider submitting a little something to The 17th International Obfuscated C Code Contest. The contest is now open for submissions and runs from midnight Jan 7th, 2004 through the end of 29th Feb 2004 (all times in UTC!). Later on in January it will be possible to submit entries using a web form."

John Martin writes "2CPU.com has posted an updated article about Hyper-threading performance. They discuss the technology behind it, provide benchmarks, and make observations on what the future holds for hyper-threading. It's actually an easy, interesting read. Of note, they'll be publishing Part II in the near future which will detail hyper-threading performance under Linux 2.6. Hardware geeks will probably appreciate this."

penciling_in writes "In a CircleID article called Letting DNS Loose, Paul Mockapetris, the inventor of DNS and Chief Scientist and Chairman of Nominum, gives a good indication of what is to be expected in the upcoming years when it comes to data riding on DNS: "RFID tags, UPC codes, International characters in email addresses and host names, and a variety of other identifiers could all go into DNS, and folks have occasionally proposed doing just that. It's really just a question of figuring out how to use the DNS -- it's ready to carry arbitrary identifiers." According to Paul, there are 40 or so data types to be added to DNS: "In fact the whole ENUM scheme is built out of classical DNS technology, and NAPTR is really just the latest data type to be added to the DNS. NAPTR is also just an extension of SRV, which was an extension of MX, which are DNS data types that Active Directory uses to start itself and the Internet uses to route each piece of mail." Paul also clarifies the recent BBC story previously discussed here on Slashdot."

Ian Mitchell writes "According to jCert's web site the initiative has finally expired. For several years jCert promoted the concept of 'certify once, recognized everywhere,' describing itself as 'a consortium of Java-based enterprise-development software vendors and other interested organizations that work together to define a single training and certification path for employers and individuals.' It once included such heavyweights as IBM, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, BEA Systems, Hewlett-Packard, Sybase and iPlanet. However the core jCert members gradually left to pursue their own certification strategies, and IBM - the last remaining member with a J2EE platform - withdrew its certification roles on January 1st."