ulrikp writes "The vikings have done it again! The Swedes at Linköping University (home of the cool Lysator archives) have released a new version of their Pike scripting language. It is similar to C++ and C#, but is apparently more type-safe than either. It is interpreted, and runs on many OS's, including Linux, Solaris, and Windows. Check it out!"

Stu Lalison asks: "I'm an MBA student (but I'm not evil, I promise!) and am working on a business plan that involves having some custom software written for a handheld computer. I've done some research into estimating the costs involved in software production, but when estimating the time involved in writing the software, it usually says 'judge on past projects.' I'm not a programmer, so I don't have any past projects to judge on. I'm wondering if the Slashdot community can give me some ballpark figures on how long it takes a professional programmer to code different parts of a program. I've identified 3 needs of my application: a front-end user interface, a database w/ search function (of about 10 megabytes of data), and integration of both of these into a (currently existing) commercial mapping application. It seems like these aren't huge tasks, but getting (even a rough) handle on their actual complexity will help me greatly. Also, how much development time would be required to port an application like this from, say, a Palm OS device to a 3G handset? Thanks in advance!"

Mark Wielaard writes "Your friendly neighbourhood GNU did it again. A year ago IBM made much noise about placing $40 million of its software tools under a free software license. Technically these tools, called Eclipse, are great for developing (java) software. There was only one catch, it was build on top of the proprietary java platform. This made it useless for the Free Software community. Luckily the GNU project has two projects that come to the rescue. GNU Classpath, core libraries for java, and gcj, the GNU Compiler for Java. We are now able to run Eclipse on a completely free platform! It is not yet complete, but you can already edit, compile and browse CVS with it. And since Eclipse uses GTK+ it also looks very nice. I setup a page with instructions on how to get this working so you can help us make it work even better or just so you can view a couple of nice screenshots."

Christopher "CJayC" Jenkins writes "Nicola Pero recently announced on the discuss-gnustep mailing list the public release of his GNUstep Renaissance software, which allows for user interfaces utilizing the GNUstep and Apple Cocoa APIs to be specified in XML. While still alpha-quality code, it can be used at the present to replace .nib (and .gorm and .gmodel) files with .gsmarkup files, which can be easily edited by hand. "

rrwood asks: "I'm starting work on what is more or less an open-source 3D modeling application, and I'd like to make it as cross-platform as possible (Linux, FreeBSD, Windows, MacOS, etc.). OpenGL takes care of the 3D rendering I'm going to need, but I also need some sort of widget set, and I'm looking for advice as to what to use in that regard. I've done my Google homework and have come up with the following, but would like feedback from anyone who has already used any of these, or has recommendations about anything I may have missed. Yes, I know about Blender, and be reassured I am not planning on reinventing that wheel, okay? :-) So, here's what I've found so far. As I said, if anyone can add to this list or share his/her experiences actually working with any of these, that would be greatly appreciated."

Nagios (formerly known as NetSaint) is a GPL network monitor software project that's been getting a lot of buzz lately among *Nix sysadmins. Nagios is unquestionably a free software success story even if it's not as high profile as Apache or Linux. Ethan Galstad leads the project. Perhaps he can tell us why Nagios has done so well, so that other free software projects can enjoy similar success. Usual Slashdot interview rules; post your question below, we'll email 10 of the highest-moderated questions to Ethan about 24 hours after this post appears, and publish his answers soon after he gets them back to us.

An anonymous reader writes "There's a story on the Boston Globe's Digital MASS section about Mitch Kapor , the guy who created Lotus 1-2-3. He will reportedly spend about $5 mil to create something competing with MS Outlook. More of the story here." We mentioned this a few months ago as well, and it sounds like any software release is still some time off.

DrC writes "Apple has released a preview update to the venerable Script Editor, rewritten using Cocoa. It looks like an impressive upgrade." The preview release is included with the Dec 2002 Developer Tools as a separate install, too.

SkeeterMac writes "Apple today released the December 2002 developer tools, available for download for ADC Members. Among the list of updates is Project Builder 2.1 with 'better CVS support' -- maybe this one will let me specify the CVSROOT!"

chromatic writes "Rafael Garcia-Suarez has just penned an article about adopting Subversion for multi-user projects. (He also has a previous article on Single-User Subversion). With the recent release of Subversion 0.16 (see the File sharing link), the successor to CVS looks very good."

GrosBill writes "Onlamp publishes one more paper about IRIX binary compatibility implementation on NetBSD. This time, this is about emulating IRIX native multithreading capabilities on NetBSD, which is quite interesting since NetBSD does not support native multithreading for its native binaries yet. The paper also covers some reverse engineering tricks: how to use a debugger to discover everything about IRIX multithreading."

OopChugALug writes "Troll Tech last night released a beta of QSA, which stands for QT Scripting Language for Applications. Download here. As a business apps developer for a major financial institution's trading floor, I know the traders will love this. Hopefully, with QSA, I can get rid of Excel, and give the traders Spreadsheet widgets, with the flexibility of a 'VBA-like' scriptability to boot!"

AltImage writes "Bringing a five-year project to a significant milestone, the World Wide Web Consortium finalized guidelines for building browsers and media players that work better for people with disabilities. Read the full story here."

An anonymous reader writes "DesktopLinux.com caught up with Colin Walters of the Debian Desktop subproject. Launched in late October, the project aims to simplify Desktop Linux. Walters' discusses the project goal to offer 'Software which Just Works' for home and office, new user and expert ... "

Grip3n writes "PHP5 is well under development and a beta is expected out by March 2003 and released summer 2003. One of the more notable improvements which many PHP developers desired is a substantial improvement in PHP's performance. This is due to a new object model PHP5 will be introducing which handles objects by reference rather than by value. Co-creator Zeev Suraski states the new object model is inspired by the book, "Design Patterns"."

jonmason00 writes "Just checked the Transmeta webpage, and discovered that they are now offering a Crusoe TM5800 System Development Kit. It's a bit expensive ($995) and you gotta register before you can buy one, but they need your support." How about an Astro development kit instead? :)

Henry Birdwell contributes the following review of Wrox Press's Professional PHP4. Read on for his impressions, and to see if this book is right for your own dynamic web programming tasks.

Screaming Lunatic writes "Here are some benchmarks comparing Intel's compiler and gcc on Linux. Gcc holds it own in a lot of cases. But Intel, not surprisingly, excels on their own hardware. With Intel offering a free (as in beer) non-commercial license for their compiler, how many people are using Intel's compiler on a regular basis?"

possible writes "Rapid7 has discovered a new class of vulnerabilities affecting SSH2 implementations from many vendors. These vulnerabilities affect a wide variety of SSH servers and SSH clients. Rapid7 designed an SSH protocol test suite called SSHredder. The SSHredder test suite contains a large number of SSH2 protocol binary test cases, and is released under the BSD license. Rapid7's testing has revealed many defects in products such as F-Secure, SSH.com, PuTTY, etc. OpenSSH and GNU LSH are not affected." Some of the affected vendors have released fixed versions, and some say there's nothing exploitable about the reported holes.

chromatic writes "Jerry Cooperstein has written an excellent article summarizing the features removed from the upcoming 2.6 kernel. One controversial change may be tightening restrictions on binary-only modules." And Lovechild writes with some more 2.6 news: "I recently did an inteview with famous kernel hacker extraordinare and all round nice guy Robert M. Love for Tinyminds.org, about kernel 2.6 and what can be expected for desktop Linux users, when the new kernel series is released.