Honestly writes "Apparently DotGNU seems to be offering more than the 'warm fuzzy feeling' to its contributors. Somebody has funded about $4500 worth of prizes for code contributions. The developers have confirmed that the $$$ is in FSF Hands (good hands, I suppose). Here is the split up of prizes. It's almost strange to earn money writing open source. Especially when you're not even employed by dotgnu. Anyway all I can say is ,I like it. It's ideal for a grad student with lots of free time. But hardly anyone seems to have seen the Newsforge posts (except maybe me)."

An anonymous reader writes "Here's a good computer project for the long labor-day weekend. KernelTrap has posted a howto detailing eight steps to upgrade your GNU/Linux OS from the 2.4 stable kernel to the 2.6.0-test development kernel. Complete with screen shots, the end result sounds to be well worth the effort." Since chances are most people will be upgrading anyway once 2.6 is deemed release-worthy, it's always worth learning the upgrade procedure well.

514x0r writes "The spectre in the back of many of our minds is that in a few years we may be replaced by an underpaid programmer in India. Newsforge.com is currently running an article about why this is unstoppable, that actually ends on a positive note...sort of." Newsforge and Slashdot are both part of OSDN.

An anonymous reader writes "MIZI Research appears to be taking on the largest players in the emerging third-generation smartphone software market with an integrated solution based on its MIZI Linux 2.0 distribution. Furthermore, the Korean embedded Linux specialist is rumored to have a development deal with an unidentified major consumer electronics powerhouse that, if true, could result in 3G smartphones based on MIZI Linux 2.0 receiving aggressive worldwide development, distribution, and marketing soon."

joukev writes "Perl.com is running an article on pVoice. pVoice is an Open Source communication system for severely disabled children written in Perl. I started this for my daughter in 2001. She's still using it and hopefully the medical world will see that there are Open Source alternatives for these kinds of applications. More information on pVoice can be found on the pVoice website (general information) or on the pVoice Developers website."

Martin Marvinski writes "PostgreSQL Inc, the commercial company providing replication software and support for PostgreSQL, open sourced their eRServer replication product. This makes PostgreSQL one step closer to being able to replace Oracle as the de facto RDBMS standard. More information can be found on PostgreSQL's website."

Young Grasshoopa asks: "In my 6 years of IT life, I've been a sys admin, perl programmer, and a config. mgmt. engineer. I've recently learned programming in C, and somehow ended up learning a bit of Linux Kernel programming as well. I now have developed a strong motivation to become a Linux kernel developer, but given my background, I am not sure how to approach companies or Open Source Project groups. I ask all those who were in a similar situation - how do you become a full-time kernel developer?"

An anonymous reader writes "Following on from the recent spate of reverse engineering articles, there is an interesting summary of the reverse engineering of a binary only Linux driver. The driver is for the integrated MPEG decoder on VIA's popular EPIA-M boards. At the moment VIA has not publicly released the source code for the MPEG chipset on these boards and will only make the code available under NDA saying that "Typically, only requests from companies developing product for sale will be approved." As a result this is holding back development of open source tools (e.g. xine, mplayer, vdr) that would be able to make use of the interesting hardware on these boards."

Gianluca Insolvibile writes "I plead guilty: I have always admired Microsoft's COM architecture and the relative simplicity that allows you to reuse already installed components to create even complex programs. And I have always been fascinated by the distributed nature of DCOM, which seemed to me much more graspable than complex monsters like CORBA and J2EE. While looking for equally expressive Open Source component technologies among GNOME and KDE, I was never able to find something fitting my needs (I never got into Bonobo deeply enough, though)." Read on to see how this led Gianluca to Juval Loewy's O'Reilly-published Programming .NET Components, and what he thinks of the book.

An anonymous reader writes "This column explains how to write secure applications; it focuses on the Linux operating system, but many of the principles apply to any system. In today's networked world, software developers must know how to write secure programs, yet this information isn't widely known or taught. This first installment of the Secure programmer column introduces the basic ideas of how to write secure applications and discusses how to identify the security requirements for your specific application. Future installments will focus on different common vulnerabilities and how to prevent them."

ThaReetLad writes "In this article at DevX, Executive Editor A. Russell Jones makes the case for a standardised GUI for Linux. He argues that the promotion of choice of GUI as a positive feature of using Linux is detrimental to its chances of attacking Microsoft's home user monopoly. From the article: '...the open source community must recognize that its primary goals: freedom of choice, freedom of source code, and freedom to alter applications, are not the goals of the average user.' In particular he argues that the choice of desktop between KDE, Gnome, IceWM etc, is not one that a former windows user, even a fairly technically competent one, is going to able to make an informed choice on, and that they should not be forced to make that choice in order to get good use out of any applications they might want to use."

InodoroPereyra writes "This article at The Dot indicates that the KOffice developers decided to switch to the Open Office file format (OASIS) for their next major release. Excellent news both for KOffice, which will benefit from OpenOffice's excellent filters, and for the GNU/Linux Desktop users in general, who will benefit from a unified file format standard between these office suites."

honestpuck contributes this review of Sams Publishing's Teach Yourself AppleScript in 24 Hours, writing "The market for books on AppleScript cannot be a large one, since there never seem to be many volumes in it; usually only one at a time is up to date and worth the money. Now that O'Reilly's AppleScript In A Nutshell is showing its age (and wasn't that great in the first place), and Danny Goodman's book is even older, I was pleased to hear that this volume had come along." Read on for honestpucks' mixed impressions of the book.

Hui Zhang writes "The 2003 ACM SIGCOMM (Special Interest Group in Data Communication) conference held in Karlsruhe, Germany is being broadcast live over the Internet. There will be sessions on overlay and peer-to-peer networks, Internet routing and measurement, DoS, queue management and traffic engineering, with presentations by leading researchers from universities and research labs. The keynote speech on the first day, by David Cheriton, is entitled 'The Internet Architecture: Its Future and Why it Matters.' We will also have a re-play for each day's program in time periods that are more convenient for viewers in the U.S. Below is the broadcast schedule." The broadcast is using Quicktime, but the linked page addresses watching with Linux using CodeWeavers' CrossOver.

wiredbeat2000 writes "The part of my brain that led me into the Women's Studies department in college is glowing tonight, after reading about a new computer game camp set up for teenage girls. The News-Gazette Online has a story about the camps, which are called the UI Girls' Adventures in Mathematics, Engineering and Science (G.A.M.E.S.) Camp. The story comes on the heels of today's announcement by Entertainment Software Association that game demographics are skewed differently than you'd expect."

thorgil writes "Guessing about the linux-2.6.0 release date is hard, but here is a new angle (pseudo-scientific): I made a graph (gif) based on errors/warnings from John Cherry's (OSDL) compile statistics for linus' linux bitkeeper tree. My guess is around 12th October, 2003. What is your guess and more important, why?"

An anonymous reader writes "A presentation given by Matthias Ettrich (director of Qt development, author of LyX, and founder of the KDE project), was given to the annual KDE Developer's Conference in Nove Hardy, Czech Republic. In this presentation, Matthias details what's going to be new in Qt 4.0, which will be used as a base for the next version of KDE after 3.2. Apparently, Qt 4.0 will not only include faster startup times and lighter memory usage, but will have sweeping architectural changes, including a splitting of Qt's GUI classes and non-GUI classes."

ap writes "Justin T. Gibbs, of the FreeBSD Foundation, announced today the availability of a native binary release of the Java JDK 1.3.1 for FreeBSD. He also mentioned that more attention will now be focused on providing a release of the 1.4.x JDK. Such developments should allow for FreeBSD to be better suited for enterprise uses."

An anonymous reader writes "Marcelo Tosatti has officially released another stable 2.4 Linux kernel. 2.4.22 was released early this morning and includes a lengthy list of fixes. It follows the last stable kernel in this tree, 2.4.21, by a little over two months."

Adios077 (Ada Shimar) writes "Ok, so I was reluctant when I first picked up and started reading O'Reilly's JavaScript & DHTML Cookbook. After all, I'm fairly proficient in JavaScript already (yes, get in line to hire me!), and if I needed some cool DHTML scripts, I could just visit a good site like Dynamic Drive. However, the book managed to both surprise and impress me, a great combination to have in a book." Find out why by reading the rest of Shimar's review, below.