wilko11 writes "There have been two cases recently where websites have requested the removal of modules from CPAN. These modules could be used to access the websites (EuroTV and Streetmap) from a PERL program. The question being asked on the mailinglists (threads about EuroTV and about Streetmap) is 'can companies dictate what software you can use to access web content from their server?'"

Anonymous Coward writes "One of the most popular Free and Open Source events in Europe takes place this week-end in Brussels. The Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting, entirely organised by volunteers the event has, in three editions, gained much attention from developers. This is a really technical, non-commercial event organised by the Free & Open Source Software community for the community. Take a look at the FOSDEM website, and take a look at the impressive schedule."

Reader yamla writes with the following review of Mike and Phani's Essential C++ Techniques from APress. Yamla finds a few bright spots in this book, but also several weaknesses. Read on to see whether you fit into the group he says would find this book useful.

phreemind writes "There's some news out today on IBM's Power5, which should make an appearance next year. Interestingly, from the sound of this article, they've put a lot of work into power consumption on this processor so that it can go in anything from blades to big iron. This may preclude the need for a specialized low-heat/power version, such as the 970, for anything other than laptops. Oh, yeah, and they hope to use it to wipe Itanium off the map. Check out the article at InfoWorld."

SadatChowdhury writes "Aside from templates as already reported in a past slashdot article , a little snooping around revealed the details of the following newly revealed features in the upcoming release of Java 1.5 (codenamed: Tiger) : Autoboxing , Enhanced-For-Loop, Enumerations and Static Imports . Must read for Java fans."

DavidTurner queries: "My company is developing software to integrate various hardware systems and present a unified interface, plus system-level interaction. Essentially, an object hierarchy plus supporting services - clients, servers and drivers. We wish to replace our proprietary protocol with a standardized distributed object system. The choice has boiled down to .NET versus CORBA+GTK. We want interface contracts, OpenGL support, and embeddable forms (widgets). We also want rapid development. Which would you choose? Has anyone actually field-tested the relative merits of the two paths?"

mvw writes "Wanna go beyond Java, Perl, or Python? Joe Armstrong has published a nice tutorial on implementing robust servers in the functional concurrent Erlang language. Here is the link."

ncostigan writes "Peter Gutmann of cryptlib fame has written a very readable paper on real-world constraints for cryptographers, and points out problems that their designs will run into when attempts are made to deploy them. Also included is a motivational list of extremely uncool problems that implementors have been building ad-hoc solutions for since no formal ones exist."

Augustus De Morgan writes "Five years ago today a brainstorming session in Palo Alto led to the adoption and promotion of the "open source" label. (You can find references to the label much earlier, however.) For some, it was a dark divergence from the free software movement; for others, the beginning of the adoption of key software principles into mainstream. Here's a growing set of resources and stories about the history of free and open source software, and a lament about the decline of altruism in the open source community."

gjb6676 writes "An article over at ExtremeTech is covering recent game development projects on the Atari 2600. The amount of cartridge space they have to work with is a sobering thought: 'A two-word file in Word 2002, for example, requires 20 Kbytes. "That's 20 Kbytes, five times the amount of (ROM) space developers had to work with in the 2600.'"

An anonymous submitter wrote: "A while ago the 16th IOCCC winners were announced. Apparently "releas[ing] the winning source by mid April 2002" actually means "within a year", but you can finally enjoy them here. Or, if you don't enjoy them, you can beat your head against the wall trying to figure out how these programs work ;-)"

SlashChick writes "From a discussion on the freebsd-chat mailing list, it appears that one of the FreeBSD core developers, Matt Dillon, has been barred from committing any changes to the FreeBSD kernel. Dillon was one of the developers 'responsible for making FreeBSD 4.x the most rugged and stress-proof free operating system in existence,' and also contributed to fixing the Linux VM. Unfortunately, there has been little explanation from the FreeBSD core team about why Dillon was thrown out, leading to speculation and worries about the future of the FreeBSD kernel. Does the Slashdot community have any more insight into this situation? Would someone from the FreeBSD team care to elaborate and assuage our worries?" CD Update: Greg Lehey from the core team has infact elaborated in this comment.

Darwin X writes "So, Microsoft will finally put Sun's JRE into future versions of Windows. This article talks about how they're taking the steps to make this happen. The fun part of it is that Microsoft has released a statement that said Windows Customers are NOT required to update their machines with this. Ah, yes...gotta keep it all MS in the house..." Update: 02/03 23:07 GMT by T : However, according to this report on News.com, Microsoft has may be able to backtrack anyhow -- they've gotten a stay from the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, meaning the earlier order to ship Java with Windows doesn't apply, for now.

An anonymous reader writes "X.org, the organization that governs the evolution of the X11R6 specifications, has released a sound server for X, called MAS. According to their site: 'MAS integrates with a compatible X11 server on your desktop. It processes graphic information locally, alleviating the need for network transmission of uncompressed graphical content. Graphic events are easily synchronized with audio events for professional-quality multimedia and accessibility-enabled applications.'" The X.org site describes MAS as an "affiliated technology" rather than "official," but it is released under the same license. "MAS" stands for "Media Application Server," and it's developed by Shiman Associates.

mischi writes "CGI-Shell simulates a shell using CGI. So everybody who has a CGI-directory on a web-server, also has its own shell on it -- comparable with Telnet or SSH. That's really practical, because most webhosters don't offer a shell (for free) -- but do offer CGI. With CGI-Shell you can execute commands, copy files or just explore your webserver. Even a history and auto-completion with tabulator are included. "

brianking writes "I am pleased to announce the Mozilla Track at the Free and Open Source Developer's Meeting (FOSDEM) 2003 in Brussels this coming weekend, 8/9 February. I will be giving a talk on the main Fosdem floor about Mozilla as Application Platform, and there will be other technical talks in the Mozilla room including Native Database Support by Jan Varga, Advanced Bugzilla Use - A Hacker's Guide by Gervase Markham and Cascades: Creating an XUL+JS Based Mozilla Extension by Daniel Glazman. There will be lots of other interesting stuff happening, so if you are thinking of attending, please contact me and we can talk some more." There's more information at the Mozilla site and at the fosdem site.

An anonymous reader writes "Xmingwin makes it practical to generate Windows programs from a Linux server. This column gives a recipe for setting up Xmingwin, outlines the most important reasons for doing so and shows you how to generate executables for multiple platforms -- including Windows DLLs -- from a single Linux source."

mike_stay asks: "Imperative Programming follows closely the 'outline' style of writing most of us were taught in elementary school. Japanese, however, have a very hard time with that writing style, as they've been trained in the concept of kishotenketsu: stories are usually told by bouncing around between various points of view, which necessarily give different accounts; no attempt is made to say what 'really' happened. 'Good writing style' expects readers to draw the conclusions; writing that is too explicit is not valued. The writing, therefore, tends to be inductive: specific examples precede general principles. The closest thing I can think of to kishotenketsu in programming is functional programming or declarative languages, but then, I'm American. Would other readers point me at other languages with this type of 'eastern' feel?"

Ur@eus writes "SVG the w3c format for Scalable Vector Graphics is seen as many as the future of desktop icons as it allows for scaling icons etc. without loss of quality. Dominic Lachowicz has been working hard on fixing bugs in librsvg over the last few days. The result is that librsvg now renders all available SVG icons perfectly. Not only do it render them, but it renders them faster than libpng renders the same images in png format. Together with the gdkpixbuf plugin librsvg offer it means GNOME 2.2 will be able to use SVG images not only for icons or desktop backgrounds, but also for the GUI widgets themselves and the graphics of the window manager. Dom's announcement can be found on the librsvg mailinglist. The librsvg site also offer a GNOME 2.2 metatheme using mostly SVG icons including a nice screenshot."

aelfakih writes "Centipaid.com made available a phpnuke add-on making it possible for anyone with a phpnuke site to collect micro fees for accessing specific sections of the site. The module is released under GPL and it is still beta, but seems to be stable. There is a demo of the micropayment system for phpnuke on http://phpnuke.centipaid.com. There is also a GPL Apache module that does the same thing, but it is intended for system admin with access to the apache server config files, or .htaccess. Links to the phpnuke info is on http://www.centipaid.com/download.html as well as the phpnuke.org site. Links to the apache::centipaid module is on http://www.centipaid.com/download.html and on freshmeat.net "