Daniel Grund writes: "I noticed Macromedia has an SDK to help programmers write software that can generate SWF files. So, being curious, I skimmed their licensing agreement to see what I could see. Amusingly enough, sections 3f and 3g actually give the SDK user the legal obligation to debug their code! Of course, only bugs that cause the SWF files to be erroneous are required to be fixed. However, in theory, if you wrote a program that makes buggy SWF files, you could be sued by Macromedia (but only if you do it using the SDK I guess.) How's that for pressure on the Quality Assurance people; you not only annoy the customers if you fail, you also get the company sued."

Twintop writes "Taken from the PHP.net homepage: 'A Beta version of PHP for NetWare is available on the Novell Developer Kit site. This version is based on the 4.0.8 (development) version of the PHP source code.' --- Well, even if it is an old version, it's better than nothing for NetWare peeps."

Jeremy Andrews writes "KernelTrap has spoken with Larry McVoy, BitMover founder and primary BitKeeper author. BitKeeper, a distributed source control system, has been adopted by Linux kernel creator Linus Torvalds and condemned by free software icon Richard Stallman. In this interview, Larry looks back through the years, describing his exposure to computers and Linux. He also discusses the history of BitKeeper, from writing NSElite for Sun (which turned into their still used SCM, Teamware), to his desire to keep Linus from burning out, to the present day solution. The choice to not license BitKeeper under the GPL is also explained. Larry discusses much beyond Bitkeeper as well, exploring some of his other interests. Find the full interview on KernelTrap."

Mday4F writes "Konqueror maintainer, David Faure, introduces you to the core KParts concepts of read-only and read-write parts, and shows you how to create and deploy KParts components."

jimmcq writes: "After two years of active development the long awaited stable release of FreeCraft is available. FreeCraft is a free cross-platform real-time strategy gaming engine. It is possible to play against human opponents over LAN, internet, or against the computer. The engine can be used to build C&C, WC2, SC and AOE-like real-time strategy (RTS) games. It successfully runs under Linux, BSD, BeOS, MacOS/X, MacOS/Darwin and MS Windows. Souce code and binaries are available from SourceForge."

mpawlo writes: "How much do you know about free software licensing? Time to find out! In a quiz presented by the Free Software Foundation you can test your abilities. How should Joan license her web browser?"

the_real_tigga writes: "Well, the day is almost over, and still today's release of version 2.5.18 of the Linux development kernel tree has not yet hit Slashdot. It is out, the official site is of course kernel.org, but be sure to check your local mirrors (usually www.country.kernel.org). Here is the long Changelog, major changes include suspend-to-RAM, more IDE and VFS fixes, and kbuild. Linux Weekly has the news too, and a summary of the changes."

An Anonymous Coward writes: "Breaking news today on the Transgaming website. Today they announced an alliance with the company Transitive. Here's their headline: 'Los Angeles, Ca. TransGaming Technologies, in partnership with Transitive Technologies, unveil their game-porting technology that can allow Windows-based x86 games to be simultaneously released onto multiple platforms. These include the Sony PlayStation 2, Apple Mac OS, set-top boxes, PDAs and wireless devices.'" There's more info on the Transgaming Site. Since Transgaming has ported The Sims already, it's a lot easier to believe that this isn't just vapor.

An Anonymous Coward writes: "Palm Info Center reports that POSE (the Palm Os Emulator) has been ported to the Sharp Zaurus using the QTopia palmtop environment. See the QPOSE homepage for more information." This could make a Zaurus a much more attractive device to those of us with lots of important info on Palm Os devices, but according to other readers' submissions it does require a Palm ROM image to function.

ClickNMix writes: "The latest version of PHP has been released here. With improved DomXML and Apache 2 support in with the usual bug fixes and improvements." There is still no production support for PHP or for that matter mod_perl in Apache 2.0 yet though.

GonzoJohn writes: "Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller for Linux Orbit: 'If you have followed GNU/Linux for the last few years you know that GNOME has long been a stronghold of C, Perl and Python GUI programming. With Ximian's work on Mono, C# seems also to be a language that will see wide use in GNOME. Sun's involvement should also make Java applications integrate strongly with GNOME. But what about C++? Even in the GNU/Linux and Unix world this language has received many advocates and developers. I sat down with Murray Cumming, lead developer on the gtkmm and gnomemm C++ bindings for GTK+ and GNOME to get some information on the status of C++ development in GNOME.'Read the Interview."

Linux Freak writes "May 22 marks the official release of Sony's PS2 Linux kit in North America and Europe! To give you something to do while waiting for your package to arrive in the mail, Codingstyle has conducted an interview with several people in the PS2 development community, including two people from Sony Computer Entertainment America, Inc. (SCEA) and Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, Ltd. (SCEE), as well as official kit and PS2DEV hobbyists."

Isle writes: "Another good story found via OSNews. Scott Robert Ladd has updated his GCC vs Intel C++ compiler benchmark. Now you can find gcc 3.1 benchmarked against gcc 3.0.4 and icc 6.0. The summary must be that gcc 3.1 is a lot faster than gcc 3.0.4 for very abstract C++ code, but icc is still slightly faster overall."

joeyslopp writes: "Finding documentation on an open source project such as FreeBSD is usually quite easy. In fact, the project relies heavily upon user support. However, tracking down a good article that illustrates how to setup a .jsp (java server pages) environment using Tomcat has been difficult. Devshed came close with their article Slapping Together A JSP Development Environment , but lacked specifics on JDK for FreeBSD -- their article was more specific to Linux. The studs in #freebsd on undernet enlightened me a bit more, but still I lacked concrete documenation. Where can one find descriptive help in setting up Tomcat for FreeBSD? Dun dun dun dun *cheesy superhero theme* Enter Victoria Chan's article seemingly tailor-made for my Tomcat woes. The article, also located here, actually appears on www.freebsd.org as well...imagine that :) Hopefully other newbies to FreeBSD will read this and shorten their search time for a good article on the setup of Tomcat."

mbadolato writes "Use.perl is running an interview with Larry Wall and Damian Conway, in which they answer questions about Perl 6. Questions were selected by the ten highest rated questions posed by readers last week."

siduri writes "Udi Manber, chief scientist at Yahoo!, gave a great talk on the kinds of hacks that Yahoo sees at the IEEE's Symposium on Security and Privacy. I wrote an overview of his talk for Dr. Dobb's Journal. While some of the message is well-known stuff (like that people will spend a lot of time hacking the most trivial things), the details of what Yahoo has to deal with are really pretty interesting."

WannaBeGeekGirl queries: "What exactly is well-commented code anyway? Can anyone suggest resources with insight into writing better comments and making code more readable? After about six years in the software development industry I've seen my share of other people's code. I seem to spend a lot of time wishing the code had better (sometimes _any_) comments. The comments can be frustrating to me for different reasons: too vague, too specific, incoherent, pointing out the obvious while leaving the non-obvious to my imagination, or just plain incorrect. Poorly or mysteriously named variables and methods can be just as confusing. In a perfect world everyone would follow some sort of coding standards, and hopefully those standards would enforce useful comments. Until then, any suggestions for what you, as a programmer, consider to be good/useful/practical comments? Any suggestions for what to avoid? Also, I usually work with C++ so any resources/comments specific to that language would be too."

Ustaad asks: "We are running some sort of a club in our University which has members who are interested in programming and related stuff. With many sites like TopCoder and Valladolid Online Judge providing heavy machinery practice equipments to programmers, the level of competition in programming contests like ACM ICPC have gone really high. However, we are finding it really difficult to motivate new entries to join our club. There are few key questions that we face from our members. Firstly, how important are these programming contest techniques for solving the real-world industrial problems? Secondly, Do employers really care about the achievements in programming contests while recruiting? And thirdly, what other advantages does one gain by venturing into these contests?"

dipfan writes "The latest beta version of the Linux kernel 2.5.16 is out, with some comments by Linus here, who was kept 'personally somewhat busy' by 'the interesting Intel SMP-P4 TLB corruption bug, which ends up being due to some very funky asynchronous speculative TLB fill logic'. Woo hoo. Mirrors, etc." We haven't been keeping up with the 2.5.x series, but a slow Sunday is a good excuse to catch up.

stereoroid writes "

It appears as if the Sun Java 2 Runtime Environment, version 1.3.1_02 and later, is reporting usage statistics to a company called RedSheriff, presumably on behalf of Sun. This was the Win32 version, but other versions probably have the same "feature". If you load up the Java Console, you see multiple messages like this: