An anonymous reader writes "LinuxDevices.com reports that version 1.0 of the Khronos Group's OpenGL ES (embedded subset) graphics API spec for embedded devices is now ready for final review and ratification by Khronos Group members, a process which should lead to its public release in July 2003. OpenGL ES is described as a light-weight, royalty-free embedded graphics standard that provides 3D-capable graphics API profiles for a broad range of embedded systems and devices, including handheld wireless devices, automotive and avionics displays, and multimedia consumer devices such as advanced digital TVs, set-top boxes, and game consoles."

Scott Abel writes "Kurt Ament has hit the nail on the head! His latest effort, Single Sourcing: Building Modular Documentation is a valuable reference for those of us who seek to save time, effort, and money by implementing a productive method of creating information once and reusing it often." It's not a big book -- just 246 pages. Read on for Abel's brief review.

YannH writes "Docs.eu.org is a free documentation portal, trying to gather and to distribute computer science free documentation; we try to stay as open as possible on documentations we include. We gathered an amount of 500 Mo of documentation (linux, programming languages, free software philosophy, and so), some of them are standards that you can find everywhere, some other are more rarely referenced; hope this help. Enjoy :)"

An anonymous reader writes "LinuxDevices.com is reporting that SnapGear has released a free (as in beer) 'commercial grade' embedded Linux distribution that targets secure Internet-enabled products. The distribution supports a range of processors, both with and without memory management units (MMUs), and includes toolchains and library support. Supported non-MMU processors are said include Motorola ColdFire, ARM, and LEON SPARC, while supported processors having MMUs include Hitachi SuperH, Intel XScale IXP425, Intel x86, and other ARM cores."

SEWilco writes "The Register points out that Intel has released code for reading lips from a video image, Audio Visual Speech Recognition (AVSR). They do point out that better results would probably be achieved by combining video and audio recognition processing. I don't know if they have any patents, we all know some prior "art" from 2001, er.. 1968. HAL's accomplishment was also mentioned by CNN during 2001 in an article about this group's work."

Galen Wolffit writes "A chap out in Denmark has brought us an 80386 Assembler for ASP.NET. This interpreter supports about 61 80x86 instructions, though there are a number of limitations. Why? Why not. And when asked about pointers (which are considered evil in .NET), the author simply says 'With 80386 scripting you can still generate memory exceptions and bring the web-server down. It's things like this that make assembler programmers feel powerful.'"

daveho writes "My advisor and I are working on a tool to automatically find bugs in Java programs. One of the interesting results of our work is that we've found hundreds of real bugs in production code using extremely simple techniques. We believe that automated tools, if used more widely, could prevent a lot of bugs from making it in to production systems."

word spreader writes "The Third OSCOM conference on free and open source content management is happening at Harvard Law School May 28-30, 2003. The conference theme is 'Leveraging content with CMS: authoring and syndication towards the semantic web.' It is organized in conjunction with the Berkman Center at the Law School. The keynote will be given by Dave Winer (author and co-inventor of numerous important Internet technologies). A second keynote will be delivered by Jon Udell from Infoworld."

Jeex writes "After its first draft back in '95, the Portable Network Graphics (PNG) format is finally, as of 2003-04-25, an ISO standard under publication. Links: ISO technical programme: JTC 1/SC 24, PNG Homepage."

phillymjs writes "CNN is running a story on software reliability, and how the lack of it may cost more and more lives as technology creeps further into everyday products. It appears a debate is finally starting amongst everyday (read: non-geek) people about vendor liability for buggy software. Some opponents of the liability push are unsurprising: Says the story, 'Microsoft contends that setting [reliability] standards could stifle innovation, and the cost of litigation and damages could mean more expensive software.' The article also says, however, that consumers' favortism of flashy products over reliable ones is partly to blame for the current state of software."

Phs2501 writes "Schemix is a Scheme running in the Linux kernel. It presents /dev/schemix to send Scheme forms to, and has extensions to read and set (C) kernel variables, call kernel functions, and make devices. If you've wanted to prototype your drivers in a high-level language that's 100% in the kernel, here you go."

doormat writes "Accessing another computer's memory over the internet? It might not be that far off. Sounds like a great tool for clustering, especially considering that the new motherboards have gigabit ethernet and a link directly to the northbridge/MCH."

Iman Habib writes "Sanos is a minimalistic 32-bit x86 OS kernel for jbox appliances. A jbox is a JavaOS server appliance running on standard PC hardware. This enables you to run Java server applications without the need to install a traditional host operating system like Windows or Linux. Only a standard Java HotSpot VM and the sanos kernel are needed. The kernel was developed as part of an experiment on investigating the feasibility of running Java server applications without a traditional operating system only using a simple kernel. The kernel implements basic operating system services like booting, memory management, thread scheduling, local and remote file systems, TCP/IP networking and DLL loading and linking. A thin win32 wrapper allows the Windows version of the standard HotSpot JVM to run under Sanos, essentially providing a JavaOS platform for server applications. This enables you to run java based server applications, like Tomcat and Jboss, under Sanos. Sanos is open source under a BSD-style license."

TheSync writes "Ronald Tschalär has set up a Web-based Java compiler service. Just type in your source file names and the JDK you'd like to compiler them with (1.1.8,1.2.2,1.3.1 or 1.4.1), and hit "compile." This makes getting started with Java easier, since you don't have to get the whole JDK."

MCassatt asks: "It's a truism in many fields that breakthroughs come from the edge: the scandalous Impressionists become pretty pictures for posters and umbrellas; the world of science fiction becomes the world of science. The wonderful, the fantastic, and the mad of today are tomorrow's mainstream. Are there examples of this in computer science? Not extreme programming, but extreme programs?"

G3ckoG33k writes "Cache optimization has now been made easy, ok, perhaps easier... The guys working with memory management tool Valgrind (see previous story at /.) are now up to version 1.9.5, and it's stable! Even more, there is now also an excellent GUI tool for using Valgrind for serious cache optimization; check out KCachegrind!!! Besides, who would have thought cache optimization would be not only intellectually but also visually beautiful?"

mindlace23 asks: "Assuming you had some mechanism by which an open source project generated revenue, how would you fairly distribute those earnings amongst the contributors to the software? Rules that most clearly avoid bias would be preferable; Some sort of automated heuristic would be ideal if it's not gameable."

Aldert Hazenberg sent in this note about a Call for Papers: "Papers are being solicited for the second Camp of the Chaos Computer Club e.V., Germany, to be held near Berlin, Germany, on 7/8/9/10th August 2003. The Camp is intended to promote the interchange of technical, social and political ideas and concepts to find ways to make this world a little bit more friendly to intelligent beings."

hoibbes asks: "I was wondering if anyone knew of a C++ program for my Pocket PC. Now, I know that I will probably get quite a few replies saying Embedded Visual C++, and while they would be right, that is not what I am looking for. I am looking for a program that will let me write C++ code on my Pocket PC. So that while I am away on a trip I can still work on my code. I have been searching for a while now and have come up with nothing. I come to ask the help of Slashdot in a final attempt to find what I need."

An anonymous reader writes "The PC/104 Embedded Consortium announced the winners of its first PC/104 Design Contest, at the Embedded Systems Conference today in San Francisco. The awards recognize engineers designing innovative systems and devices based on the consortium's PC/104 and PC/104-Plus standards. Winners were announced in three categories: Commercial for industrial/medical/transportation/other; Commercial for military/aerospace/COTS; and Research Project. Read the full story at Linuxdevices.com. Lots of images!"