Robby Russell writes "Paper books have a tendency to accumulate dust, take up large amounts of shelf space and be a painful reminder that you need to get rid of stuff when moving time comes and you find yourself packing up the same Pascal book for an eighth time. Granted, the book provides a level of self-accomplishment and it's always great to have your best books out in direct sight of anyone who may come over to your home or office. You know the type; the ones who are observant and notice the books that you want the world to know that you've read, as if you were to say, 'Been there, done that.' You can't tell me that you don't put some of them up intentionally. ;-)" Russell is taken with O'Reilly's floating-rental system called Safari; read on for his review of the system.

Screaming Lunatic writes "The OpenGL2 working group has approved the draft version of The OpenGL Shading Language (glslang). It looks like OpenGL2.0 is getting there."

gmuslera points to this article at KernelTrap comparing available benchmarks for schedulers available for the 2.5 kernel, with the 2.4's scheduler as a reference poin. "In some cases, the new Anticipatory Scheduler performs several times better than the others, doing a task in a few seconds instead minutes like the others."

"Should Open Source developers help the U.S. prepare for war with Iraq?" Roblimo has a piece on NewsForge which addresses that question by showing a specific way that the U.S. military is using Free and Open Source software (in simulator-based training for Blackhawk helicopters), and letting one of the developers involved speak for himself. If software is Free, doesn't that already answer the question of who can use it?

cascadefx writes "There is a great article on writing a Vector Space Search Engine in Perl over at the Orielly Network's Perl.com site. Most search engines, such as Google, use a reverse keyword index algorithm. The article, complete with code, proves yet again that there is (definitely) more than one way to do it. Try your hand. Add improvements and you may have a handy search engine for your site or... the next Google-killer."

mhackarbie writes "Salon has a great story, Artificial Stupidity, about the Loebner Prize, a yearly contest that for over 10 years now has offered a $100,000 prize to anyone who can create a program to pass the Turing Test. The best part is the resulting fiasco that develops between the eccentric philanthropist who started the contest and extremely annoyed AI Researchers such as Marvin Minsky."

SkyLeach asks: "I work for a medical company which wants to provide medical imaging solutions to their clients without having to install software on the clients' machines. We had been using Java, but this is becoming more and more difficult as the Microsoft VM becomes more outdated. According to this FAQ from Microsoft, java will receive no more support at all in the future. Without using a Windows-only solution such as ActiveX, what other options are there? Keep in mind that the only absolute requirement I have been given is that the physicians never be required to install anything on their computers: Sun's JVM and Microsoft .NET, included."

elamdaly writes "Eric Bonabeau, Ph.D, a keynote speaker at the upcoming Emerging Technology conference, is a leader in the field of swarm intelligence and has focused on applying these concepts to real world problems such as factory scheduling and telecommunications routing. The concept itself is borrowed from nature; in this interview, that's where the conversation begins, with ants and other social insects. Dr. Bonabeau takes us from his childhood nightmares of carnivorous wasps to applying the theories of swarm intelligence to solving real problems in the business world."

webengr writes "It seems like the USPO is pretty lenient when it comes to awarding software patents. CVS has been around for a long time, but now Interwoven has been awarded a new patent covering version control of web assets. The claims include, 'The use of a hierarchical file system and an object repository for representing and hosting content and its structure,' and 'The combined concepts of file history, versioning, comparison, and merging as it relates to content, provide an archive of all individual changes as well as collections of changes so they can be versioned and audited.'"

Rorschach1 writes "Many /.'ers are already familliar with APRS, the Automatic Position Reporting System that's been mentioned here numerous times, most recently in the article on the Linux-powered weather balloon. It's one of the coolest things going in ham radio these days, but the APRS message protocol itself is rather hairy and bloated, and suffers from a distinct lack of extensibility. The OpenTRAC project aims to fix it, but we need your help." Read on to find out the details of what sort of help they're looking for as well as some more information about the project generally.

Java World is featuring the first part of a series comparing J2ME and the .Net CF vaporware (ok, it will exist at some point). It does tout the normal Java "features" such as being cross-platform in comparison to the mono-platform reality of .NET CFF. It has a bizarre critique of .Net CLR for being object oriented, and mentions the fact that most of the Linux PDAs coming out now run Java as an advantage for Java. (I love my Zaurus but I can't imagine it being useful for most people.)

TheTheologian writes "In his InfoWorld column, Chad Dickerson says 'there is a level of quiet discomfort between the "scripting" versus "programming" factions in some corporate development environments in which I have participated. In some instances, executive-level technology management has held scripting languages in disdain as not being "real" languages for day-to-day problem solving, which has discouraged highly talented scripters on staff from practicing their craft. In such an environment, scripters are relegated to the lower ranks ... ' He goes on to say that some companies will assign Java and C++ programmers tasks that take them weeks but could be done by Perl or Python programmers in a few hours. Is it true that some companies are so overcome with code bias they'd assign weeks of unnecessary work rather than give it to the scripting untouchables?"

blamanj writes "The Apple Developer's site has an article about Javascript compatibility. They rate the 6 Mac browsers for feature-completeness in the Javascript arena. For those who don't read articles, Mozilla wins by a nose."

An anonymous reader writes "LinuxDevices.com reports that the former Japanese subsidiary of Embedix Inc. announced today that it has been purchased in a management buyout and has changed its name from "Lineo Japan, Inc." to "Lineo uSolutions, Inc." Additionally, the newly independent Japanese embedded Linux supplier is getting set to announce its own embedded Linux and cross-development environment products, including a product aimed at consumer electronics manufacturers, as early as March 2003."

now3djp writes "Interesting article over on CodingStyle that demonstrates how I successfully eliminated wasted time maintaining an MS-Windows computer when I could build natively from my GNU computer! /. has followed other cross compilers in the past. This article is different because I used MS's own compiler! This allowed me to get on with real games porting; with only a proportional increase in compile time. Wine has really come a long way in supporting simple apps, let us hope it reaches a 1.0 soon."

michaelsimms writes "Linux Game Publishing is excited to announce our newest project to increase the appeal of Linux gaming. We are sponsoring the development of a from-scratch Linux title! We are looking for developers to work in a team to produce this game, and we will be publishing the game they make! If you are interested, please follow the link to our detailed announcement and within there you will find the rules, requirements, and application process. If you have wanted to get into the gaming industry, if you love playing games, and if you are a creative thinker, not afraid of a challenge and a bit of risk, then you need to take a look." I don't know whether to be happy about anything that promotes Linux gaming, or disappointed that people are being asked to work on a commercial project without a salary.

An anonymous reader writes "The Embedded Linux Consortium (ELC) formally announced its release of the ELC Platform Specification (ELCPS) version 1.0 this week. This LinuxDevices.com Special Report includes the full text of the ELC's announcement, a whitepaper about the ELCPS standard, a newly updated "frequently asked questions" document, a roundup of news coverage, a poll, a discussion thread, and the spec itself."

TKS writes "It's one of those cases you study that can send a whole network to failure but never really happens. However, this time it did. Today Vodafone's spanish nation wide network stopped working [google Translation / Original Verion] for more than 7 hours leaving eight million clients without service. Allegedly an error updating a node's software expanded to the whole network affecting mobile connections and internet access." The Fish comes in handy if you don't speak Spanish.

An anonymous reader submits "The folks over at artima.com have finished posting a 6 part interview with Guido Van Rossum, Python's creator and Benevolent Dictator for Life. The interview covers topics ranging from Python's origins and design goals to increased productivity to runtime typing." (We linked to this series of interviews before as well.)

JimCricket writes "Does your application need to be usable in multiple countries? Art & Logic has posted a handbook for developers who want to globalize their applications. The handbook gives design and implementation tips, plus code samples for globalization on Windows applications."