slevin writes "Recently I listened to a talk by Alan Kay who mentioned that many 'new' software ideas had already been discovered decades earlier by computer scientists - but 'nobody reads these great papers anymore.' Over the years I have had the opportunity to read some really great and thought-provoking academic papers in Computer Science and would like to read more, but there are just too many to sort through. I'm wondering what great or seminal papers others have encountered. Since Google has no answers, perhaps we can come up with a list for the rest of the world?"

Wild-eyed Visionary writes "According to the San Jose Mercury News, Jimmy Mardell, 25, of Stockholm, Sweden, beat out more than 5,000 coders to win $10,000 in Google's second annual Code Jam programming contest. Second place: Christopher Hendrie (Canada), third place: Eugene Vasilchenko (Russia), fourth place: Tomasz Czajka (Poland). Tom Rokicki, of dvips/Radical Eye Software fame, was the oldest finalist at age 40."

TMDC Organizing writes "The sixth pseudoannual text mode demo competition is on. The goal is to make cool audiovisual demos that run in an NT console. Deadline for submissions is 12.12.2003 (Slashdot has covered TMDC before). An invitation demo and all the entries from two last contests are available." The FAQ has some static screenshots.

An anonymous reader writes "The optimization troubles in GPU land aren't over yet. Yesterday Futuremark released a new anti-optimization patch for 3DMark03. Gainward (who sell graphics cards using NVIDIA hardware) today made a comment that Futuremark had disabled certain features in their ForceWare 52.16 drivers, thus resulting in huge performance drops. A few hours ago Futuremark made an official statement about this : 'The accusation is totally wrong because what it suggests is not even feasible technically. 3DMark03 does not talk to graphics driver, it talks to the DirectX API, which then talks to the driver. Thus, it is impossible for the application to disable GPU compiler...'"

Anonymous queries: "It was recently announced that JBoss and IONA have entered into a partnership where IONA (who had their own J2EE certified application server) will now provide enterprise support for JBoss. Will relationships like this one allow open source projects to compete with and displace closed source commercial products. Are large enterprises likely to stop paying huge licensing fee's to BEA & IBM, and start deploying on JBoss with an enterprise support contracts from IONA."

Chirag Mehta writes "I just released a freeware service called BotBlock (barebones demo) that lets site owners copy/paste a few lines of PHP code and insert a CAPTCHA image-verification system into any web form. The amount of form spamming by bots is on a rise. While remedies exist for MT blogs, a more efficient solution is to use image-verification or text-identification. Used for a while by sites like Yahoo! (scroll to bottom), Hotmail and patented in 2001 by AltaVista, CAPTCHAs are now being used more widely. PARC also came up with two algorithms Baffletext and Pessimal Print. The technology always existed, but until now required the site owners to install image libraries and understand how to generate images that cannot be OCR'ed. With BotBlock it is like inserting a page counter."

Jim Gettys writes "While Keith Packard's eyecandy at freedesktop.org, including drop shadows, translucent menus and windows with alpha channels is nice to look at, and in some ways useful, *much* more important is that the same facilities are useful for thumbnailing, screen magnifiers, and arbitrary transforms of applications on their way to the screen, just to name a few of the potential applications. So enjoy the eyecandy, but remember, too much candy can rot your brain. And if you want to avoid fattening your brain, you can come help us make this ready for prime-time, and work off the candy you ate and pitch in at freedesktop.org." For background, see this earlier Slashdot post about Freedesktop.org, and the brief description below.

Mecha-A writes "Linux From Scratch 5.0 was released earlier this month, incorporating GRUB as a bootloader, GNU coreutils, GCC 3.3, and lots of other package upgrades among other improvements. If you haven't tried it, LFS is a procedural outline for building a Linux system from the ground up. For those who can't get enough customizability..."

Lee Busby writes "As a co-author, I am biased, but I think that our recent paper describing a diskless Linux deployment at Lawrence Livermore National Lab (PDF)may be of general interest. It's a little different than most diskless systems -- simpler, and designed to be high performance."

friedo writes "About.com has an excellent two-part article (Part 1, Part 2) by Eric Nagler, author of "Learning C++," about "specializing" function templates in C++. "Rather than specifying an explicit type of all of the arguments or the return value in the definition of a function, placeholders are used. This reduces the need to create and maintain multiple copies of a function for different parameter types. But sometimes, it is not possible to write a single function template that works efficiently or even correctly for every argument type. It is in these cases that function template specialization is useful.""

An anonymous reader writes "Last week, Softier made news with one of the first native ports of Linux to a Digital Signal Processor (DSP) architecture, introducing its "MediaLinux" and "MediaBIOS" for TI's DM64x DSP platform. In this whitepaper, Softier CTO Eatamar Drory and Senior Programmer Or Sagi discuss the unique approach to real-time processing that enables MediaLinux to run existing TI DSP algorithms untouched within the context of real time processes. Added benefits to this design include predictable scheduling and short interrupt latency. The article discusses key architectural points of the MediaLinux approach in comparison with two well-known alternatives."

shamir_k writes "Joey Hess has come up with an innovative solution to a problem we have all faced. He's put his whole home directory in CVS. Not only can he move between multiple computers easily, he also has automatic distributed backups."

Anonymous Coward writes "The WineConf conference has opened up. Everyone is welcome at the second semi regular conference of Wine enthusiasts. Come and gather with fellow Wine hackers to: * Discuss the future of Wine * Work on nasty glibc bugs * Attack installers in an install-o-thon * Relax in the beautiful winter weather of Minnesota, enjoying the St. Paul Winter Carnival (complete with Ice Palace!). * Marvel at how the weather promotes an amazing amount of hacking time. * Hoist a real glass of Wine with your compadres at the Mall of America. The conference is in the early stages of planning, so full details are not yet available. However, here are the details that are firm: Date Saturday, January 31st and Sunday, February 1st, 2004."

killergreen writes "I know some of us (myself in particular) really dig LiveCDs for work (some make fantastic diagnostic and/or security tools) or play. Well,here's one that incorporates the 2.6 kernel for experementation."

jmccay writes " Back in September, Slashdot posted an article about a new tool that Borland is releasing (C++ BuilderX) which is a multi-platform and multi-compiler development environment. What wasn't mentioned in the article that I scanned in the post was that Borland is going to use wxWindows for this product. I have been working with wxWindows for about 6 months now, and I like it. A statement by Julian Smart (founder of the wxWindows project) gives more information on the product and Borland's participation in the wxWindows project. He says that they are also going to help out the project by 'contributing expertise and funding to help in areas such as enhanced run-time type information, the new build system and code reengineering, and will continue to invest in wxWindows while supporting its open source status.' There is also an FAQ available to read on the linked page. This is great news for both the project and the Open Source community as a whole."

Demondo writes "Well the first annual Unreal University weekend is over, and based on the numerous pictures, videos, and impressions people are giving it seems that Epic Games, 3DBuZZ / Mastering Unreal, and the sponsors (Center for Digital Entertainment and nvidia) have pulled it off quite successfully. I just hope that I can go next year."

Kanagawa writes "This morning, Jim Jagielski, Exec. V.P. and Secretary of the Apache Software Foundation, announced on the geronimo-dev mailing list that 'the ASF received a letter from JBoss's lawyers regarding... the similarity of code between [J2EE implementation] Geronimo and JBoss.' The letter is available in PDF. According to the letter, similarities were noticed back in July, and haven't been fixed."

belswick writes "UW has posted a paper titled "Measuring and Analyzing the Characteristics of Napster and Gnutella Hosts" at Washington in PDF form. Interesting reading for those who implement P2P software, with actual measurements, tools, and topologies. You 3l33t H4x0rz are ACM members, R1gh4?" You can get a cache of the PDF and view it online as well.

descubes inputs: "An XL compiler bootstrapped two days ago (that means it compiled itself). Take a look at the project homepage to discover this language, designed around concept programming ideas, which is a sort of cross between C++, Lisp and XML. Much help is now needed to improve this rudimentary first iteration." One thing to note is that the C++ version of the compiler came in at 4500 lines, while the XL equivalent came in at some 2700 lines. This seems to imply that XL may be easier to work in than C/C++. Might XL someday be nudging the old workhouse out of a job in the near future?

geoff313 writes: "It would appear that Microsoft is making a real push for the migration of existing COBOL applications to Windows and their .Net platform. Micro Focus, a company who makes COBOL migration products and last year became a member of Microsoft's Visual Studio Industry Partner (VSIP) program, announced their Net Express with .Net product, a plug-in to Microsoft Visual Studio .Net 2003. It allows for COBOL code to be integrated and manged with other code in Visual Studio. In an interview with eWeek he declares that 'Micro Focus and Microsoft are bringing the mainframe to Windows and .Net'. This makes me wonder, are there any Open Source projects working to provide for this eventual migration? Gartner estimates that over 75% of business data is processed by an approximately 200 billions lines of COBOL, so this seems like a huge potential market to lose to Microsoft."