cozimek asks: "I've got a question I'm sure many other Slashdot users have dealt with. My startup has been starting programming development with testing from our beta-clients. One of these clients, however, has begun discussing intellectual property rights. They believe that they deserve rights to parts of our software because they have helped give us advice through the development process. We think we own it all, and that they should be happy to have our services, tailored to their needs, for free. Has anyone dealt with these issues? Has anyone created a beta-tester contract?" As with all such issues, the devil is in the details...particularly the contractual ones. If you've had such issues before, from either side, please let us know how things turned out.

MightyMicro writes "According to the Motifdeveloper community site, the O'Reilly Motif Programming Manual and Reference Guide are now available for free download from Imperial Software's site. As Open Motif is also free for Linux (and xBSD), this looks like a valuable resource."

BlackNova writes "Var'aq is "a speculative glance at what a programming language on a Klingon computer system would look like." Make sure to read the Preliminary Specification and the Proposed Extensions."

howardjp writes: "The Perl Mongers have announced that they are starting a new magazine called The Perl Review (not to be confused with the literary journal Pearl). Its first issue was published on 1 February in PDF-only format, but the article 'Extreme Publishing' describes the process by which they plan to expand. With The Perl Journal's future still somewhat in doubt, this is welcome news."

mikera asks: "I'm a pretty experienced programmer but I've just embarked on my first (massively?) multiplayer strategy game. To make things even more interesting, I've decided to write it in C# and pick up a new language at the same time. I've chosen a client-server architecture where the server holds the one 'true' state of the world. The only communication from clients would be commands to units, which is simple enough, but the server will have to propagate game state changes (events) to all clients. I would like to ask Slashdot readers if they have solved a problem like this before or can offer some opinions on the best way to implement a solution."

Stuart of Wapping writes "Even patches are not safe, especially if they come from a closed background (maybe) - An interesting article on why coding, is naturally insecure, from SecurityFocus."

Martin writes: "GNUstep has reached release 0.7.5 of the GUI libraries as well as version 1.1.0 of its base library. Some enhancements include anti-aliased font support, spell checking, a great key-bindings system, a tool for inline Obj-C documentation, further Mac OS X compatibility, and much more ..."

Christopher B. Brown writes: " SAPDB.org reports the release of a new version. It stomps rather a lot of bugs and lists quite a few added features, though few leap out as being worthy of vast excitement. SAP DB was once sold as Adabas-D, and while it's certainly less famous than Oracle, it is likely more nearly comparable from a technical perspective to Oracle than just about any other DBMS available on Linux. Some components are licensed under the GPL, libraries typically under the LGPL. The challenge in its deployment lies in the fact that they use a highly customized set of development tools to script the rather daunting compile process instead of traditional Unix tools like Make. There is a small army of developers from SAP Labs (they're hiring people ) so that this may become increasingly credible as an alternative to the expensive DBMSes over time, and it's available freely already..."

entrox writes: "Paul Graham made his infamous book On Lisp available as PostScript on the web. The book is out of print and the queues for used copies on Amazon are pretty big, so this comes as a godsent for every Lisp programmer and people who would like to take a look at some neat features of Lisp. What sets this book apart is that it doesn't focus on things you could do in other languages, but rather on more extravagant techniques like making the language suit your application and not the other way around."

Michael Coyle writes: "Today ResExcellence interviews Linux/PPC kernel developer Benjamin Herrenschmidt and discusses Apple, Linux, Open Source, and more." A snippet that Michael points is this quote from Herrenschmidt: "It's difficult to decrypt the reasons Apple does things. Regarding drivers for Apple's own hardware, they did indeed 'hide' a couple of them."

InnerPeace Volunteers writes: "David Beazley's Python slides are excellent, and a very popular way to learn Python. However, if you wanted to look something up days later, they was no index. There is now."

geddes writes: "Ambrosia Software, an independent Macintosh shareware developer, has just published an article about the effect Piracy has on thier small business. They recently implemented a new serial number scheme where the software connected to thier server to verify reigistration, and found that in two days, of the 197 of the users trying to verify thier codes, 107 were using pirated ones. Crime always hurts the little guy more."

Pablo asks: "I have to do some programming in Windows (for school, not by choice). To say that I know jack-all about Windows programming would be flattering myself. I never do any programming under *NIX without my trusty copy of Stevens' 'Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment' by my side. I'm wondering if there is an equivalent 'bible' reference book for Windows programming. Does anyone have any recommendations?"

rbolkey queries: "I've been looking for a comparison between Zend's PHP IDE, NuSphere's PHPEd, and Maguma's PHP4EE, but have failed to find any. Does anyone know how these IDEs compare? Are they useful? Are they worth the price?" We last handled this question over a year ago. PHP has changed since then, and I'm sure more development tools for PHP have been released since then. What recommendations do you have for PHP coding environments? What features do you find the most useful?

HiredMan writes: "Wired is running an article comparing the set-up and admin of Linux Beowulf clusters versus Mac based clusters. Slant of the article is that the Macs are easier to set-up, maintain and are more flexible. They note that the Linux "how to" manual is 230 pages while the corresponding Apple document is a 1 page PDF file. Dauger Research of former Appleseed fame is mentioned as well, of course. MacSlash is also covering the article. Let the on-topic (for once) Beowulf comments fly..."

An Anonymous Coward writes: "DeveloperWorks has an interesting article about compiling Java apps to run as native appplications on the target machine without the need for a JVM."

An Anonymous Coward queries: "Is anyone aware of free tools available for embedded digital signal processors? A number of companies (such as, I think, Motorola) used to produce DSP-optimized versions of gcc and the like for their embedded processors, but these days such code seems to be lost. I am a student trying to do homebrew DSP development for some RF apps, and the cost of all the development tools is staggering (not to mention none of them seem to run under Linux). The sole factor in deciding which DSP I use is the availability of development tools -- any suggestions?"

babbage writes:"As the banner above the title of James Tisdall's Beginning Perl for Bioinformatics indicates, this book is 'an introduction to Perl for biologists.' What the banner doesn't mention is that it's also an introduction to biology and bioinformatics for Perl programmers, and it's also an introduction to both Perl *and* biology for people that have never really been exposed to either field. The author has clearly thought a lot about making one book to please these different audiences, and he has pulled it off nicely, in a way that manages to explain basic topics to people learning about each field for the first time while not coming off as condescending or slow-paced to those that might already have some exposure to it." Read on for the rest of his review.

EmilEifrem writes: "Seems like everybody's getting more and more frustrated by Linus' (in-) ability to handle patches. Rob Landley just wrote an "RFC on Penguin Patch Management" wherein he proposes a "Penguin Patch Lieutenant" system that he believes would scale better. The full discussion can be found on the Linux kernel mailing list. Linus seems to dislike it, as usual, source code maintenance tools/organization are for wimps!, but a lot of others find it a good idea. Anyway, it's a very good read."

Noah Vawter writes: "The 2181 EZ-Kit Lite development community will be changed forever after January 31st, 2002. This is because we have heard the price of the kit will increase from $89 to >$200 (for marketing reasons). The kit contains a 40 MIPS DSP and a stereo, CD-quality codec. A group of experimental internet musicians has been developing audio and music software for the kit for years in an open source fasion. They have developed several effects algorithms , a MIDI interface , PalmOS control software , and a Flash File system for it- all of which are free to download with source code. But get one asap if you want to get in on the fun cheaply!"