oxgoad writes "Sun Microsystems, Federal Express, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory -- what do they have in common? All have used, or are currently using, the programming language Forth in critical subsystems of their products or processes. 'What is this language Forth?' you ask. Forth has been called 'One of the best-kept secrets in the computing world.' Read on for a review of the book Forth Application Techniques authored by Elizabeth D. Rather."

maitas writes " Acording to this article, now any developer can GPL'd his Java implementation. Can't wait to see C# go the same path..."

numatrix writes "The first major stable version of OpenZaurus was released today. The 3.0 build offers the stability of the official Sharp ROMs, the freedom of open source, and a number of features the Sharp ROMs lack. Most importantly, the built-in 16MB flash ROM area of the PDA is read/write, instead of read-only as the sharp ROM uses it. A community effort, the only piece that isn't open source is the SD driver module taken from the Sharp ROM since no OS equivalent exists. The updated ROM also includes the newest version of Opie, the opensource fork of Qtopia, Trolltech's embedded version of QT, and will soon include PicoGui and X support."

blab writes "I've posted an interview with Bram Moolenaar, of Vim fame, about his very newly released project A-A-P. Find out about 'super-make.'"

Starting yesterday, we received a bunch of story submissions about a performance comparison between J2EE and .Net. It didn't seem all that exciting, and we sort of ignored the story. But as usual, it appears that some people take issue with the methodology and conclusions.

Craig Maloney writes "Linux Programming By Example is a book aimed squarely at programmers learning how to program the Linux and UNIX system for the first time." Read Craig's review of Linux Programming by Example (below) to find his take on whether the book delivers on the promise of its title.

Corbet writes "Linus has just merged the new crypto API and IPSec implementation into his 2.5 BitKeeper tree. This is the first time that serious cryptographic code has made an appearance in the mainline kernel, and it will hopefully lead to more secure communications for all Linux users in the future."

developerWorks writes "Porting existing Windows DLLs to Palm OS has historically been a tedious process. This article introduces you to an interesting technique that makes this process easier by using Perl. It demonstrates a Perl script that analyzes existing C source code and automatically generates many of the source files required for porting. You should be able to use the code outlined in the article to help with your own porting projects."

Mattygfunk asks: "Coming to the submission date of a major university project the other day, myself and another group member coded in XHTML/CSS and ASP (yuk!) for 27 hours straight to complete it. What is the longest Slashdot readers have coded in a single session? Apart from being more organized and having plenty of coffee, do you have any tips on getting through ultra-long coding sessions?"

Erek Dyskant writes "Yahoo has decided to switch from a proprietary system written in C/C++ to PHP for their backend scripting. Here's the notes from a presentation by a Yahoo engineer at PHP Con 2002."

DBOrNotDB asks: "At some of the places I've worked in the past, there have been DBAs who generally insisted that given accurate specifications and enough hardware and software, you could stuff nearly anything you wanted to into a database, manipulate it, and pull it back out again in a reasonable time. The feeling at my current workplace seems to be that very few projects lend themselves to database usage and that a customized one-off data storage solution should be developed for each project. This seems like a violation of many major software engineering principals (e.g. reuse) to me. My question is, what kind of success or horror stories does the community have about trying put different projects into databases? Numbers (# of rows, tables, total data storage, cost, etc) would be nice, but even just anecdotes would be helpful."

Spencerian writes "Mac OS X is a very promising new BSD variant, but how does it rate as a server? Byte.com writer Moshe Bar has made an extensively balanced performance comparison of Mac OS X Server 10.1.5 versus SuSE Linux PPC with the 2.4.19 kernel. Both operating systems ran on the same hardware: an Xserve 1U rack mount server from Apple. While /.ers may guess (correctly) at his results, Mac OS X Server 10.1.5 wasn't as far behind the curve as you might think. Performance might've been better if Moshe had Mac OS X Server 10.2, with its faster GUI and other enhancements, but still, it appears that Mac OS X Server 10.1 was doing pretty good for a 1-year old."

e8johan writes "Linux was originally written as a general-purpose operating system without any consideration for real-time applications. Recently Linux has become attractive to the real-time community due to its low cost and open standards. In order to make it more practical for the real-time community, patches have been written to affect such things as interrupt latency and context switch. These patches are public domain and are becoming part of the main Linux tree. The test results can be found here."

TheThinMan writes "This is the completely updated second edition. Four years ago I made the first edition my constant companion and it has saved me, and any other web developer nearby, weeks of head-scratching since. Back then we had to tussle with Netscape Navigator 4 vs. Internet Explorer 4 while supporting the version 3 browsers. Though the browser war is over and all sides have vastly improved their products, DHTML has moved on. This edition brings home just how much has changed and just how much is new. Most importantly, it helps you to develop web interfaces that will be cross-platform from the outset." TheThinMan's thoughts on the book continue below.

The Mainframe asks: "I visited a nameless college campus recently and was shocked at the degree of specialization within the student body. Of the many CS and other IT-related majors that I talked to, not a single one had any real breadth of experience. Web developers knew Perl, but couldn't tell Apache from MySQL. C++ coders knew their language, as long as it was presented in Microsoft Visual C++. I suspect if I'd asked them to use G++ they would have said 'bless you'. Essentially, I'm worried. I plan to do some very interesting things in the next few years, but I'm not going to be able to pull it off if I have to wade through 100 narrow-minded people for every 1 useful human being. Is this something that other employers and co-workers have been having a lot of problems with? Is the whole world having to show its database developers how to use a copying machine?"

George Kraft (gk4) writes "The LSB is announcing its intention to add PPC32 and IA64 architectures to its certification program; therefore, the workgroup is launching a Certification Pilot for PPC32 and IA64 architectures to evaluate the LSB's runtime conformance test suites. The pilot will continue until Friday December 13th, 2002. This will give Linux distributions and hardware vendors time to evaluate, comment, and get prepared before certification begins in 1Q03. Currently there are seven IA32 Linux releases from four distributions which are LSB v1.2 Certified." Also, "The LSB workgroup has just released for public review its latest LSB v1.3 draft of the generic written specification and for IA32, PPC32, and IA64. The workgroup is soliciting comments from the community until Friday November 8th. (Read on below for details on these changes.)

LightForce3 asks: "I'm a beginning CS student, and in my studies I've come across examples of programmer error causing very large problems, such as the Ariane 5 failure and the Therac-25 accidents, often as tales of caution to beginner programmers such as myself. My (morbid?) curiosity has been piqued, and I'm looking for other examples of programmer error leading to serious problems. After all, it is better to learn from the mistakes of others than from your own, right? ;) What programming-related accidents, incidents, and failures, both well-known and obscure, do Slashdot readers know about, and are there any good resources for researching these?"

naph writes "It seems that as programming languages have developed there has been a steady increase in the level of abstraction they use. Early languages were all very low-level, but successive generations have become higher and higher. Is this trend going to continue, or do you think we've reached a kind of happy medium between power and abstraction? Would developers prefer higher level languages, or is the direct control of things good? I was just wondering what other developers out there thought of this."

like-it-or-not asks: "I'm the network admin for a Mom & Pop chain of warehouses and stores. The owners finally want to take the leap to the 'online market' and have asked me to build them a storefront (catalog and shopping cart, etc.). I haven't done any Web building in several years so I haven't kept up with the many changes in the field. Rather than construct something 'from scratch', I'm wanting to just buy (and then customize) a 'store in a box' (pre-made HTML+CGI+? templates). I've looked around some and wonder what recommendations this community might offer. I have only one requirement: I want to 'own' the software and hardware, not simply use it as a part of renting some space from a provider). Thanks!"

steveha writes "Colin Walters announced that GNOME 2 will go into Sid (the unstable branch of Debian) this Sunday. Good experimental packages have been available for a while, but there wasn't any upgrade from GNOME 1.x; you lost all your settings. Now there are transition scripts, and the Debian GNOME 2 developers would like people to test the transition scripts as much as possible before Sunday... to quote Colin Waters, '...if you haven't helped us out by testing them already, then you will be forced to anyways this Sunday :)'"