sirPaul writes: "PHP 4.1.0 is out @ php.net. "It includes highly improved performance, especially under Windows; A new, and more security-friendly way of accepting form variables; Output compression, and much, much more." Check out the changelog."

An Anonymous Coward writes: "Microsoft has published an online document entitled 'Why Microsoft Windows XP Embedded and Not Embedded Linux?', in which embedded XP is compared to Embedded Linux in eight ways. Given that fact that 'Embedded Linux' is not the product of a single dominant vendor, but rather is the result of the collaborative (and competitive) efforts of an entire market consisting of dozens of large and small companies plus thousands of individual developers, LinuxDevices.com is inviting the Embedded Linux Community to respond to 'Why Microsoft Windows XP Embedded and Not Embedded Linux?' through guest editorials and talkbacks."

Sarah (sadukie) writes: "Hello! My name is Sarah, and I'm the Reviews Editor for ACM Crossroads. Our magazine is for students by students related to things in computing. We have run into a shortage of articles for our upcoming Open Source and Free Software issue, and we're asking to see if anyone in the community may be able to help us out by contributing. More information on this can be obtained by emailing Bill Stevenson, our editor in chief. Thanks to anyone who can help us!"

fsoft writes: "In this interesting article at IBM develWorks, Dr. Edward G. Bradford explains sockets and does some benchmark between Linux and (various flavours of) Windows. Quite interesting results."

Brian Elliott Finley writes: "The purpose of this article is to introduce Single System Image (SSI) Clustering. First we will look at what clustering is and the various problems a clustered platform solves. Then we generally define what a SSI cluster is and look at various forms and degrees of SSI. From there we focus on the Open SSI Cluster Project - the goals, the benefits SSI clustering can bring and the application areas for SSI clustering."

Sunda666 writes "I just got my hands on the Cyclades TS800, which is a terminal server with 8 high-performance serial ports, and 1 fast ethernet port that happens to run MontaVista's Hard Hat Linux. This thing has a small RAM (16Mb) some SSD (8MB), and a PPC@48MHz processor. We plan to develop apps (mostly serial-to-eth gateway software, but anything goes) for it, and I'd like to have some feedback from the Slashdot crowd of sucess/failure histories, hints and stuff. So far I'm loving the little blue thing (embedded webserver, ssh, nfs, and RAS software - almost all open source!) - sweet." Sounds like a sharp little machine. How we do these things perform in production?

Darvin Pope asks: "I have a rather disconcerting problem at work: the environment is uncomfortable. Its not your standard, 'I hate my job' type of uncomfortable, its more of a general physical and mental issue than that. The entire place is done in earthtones, its dark and it can be noisy. My cube is situated across the room from most others, but still, its hard to acquire a peaceful, zenlike state of mind, neccesary for me to write my best code, with all the disturbances around. I was wondering if any of the slashdot folks had any hints - ranging from a change of seating posture to color schemes, desk clutter, music/white noise, herbal suppliments, dietary changes, lighting, and so on. What works best for the rest of you?"

krow writes: "Embedded.com is running an article where the author is making some assumptions of Linux's use in the embedded markets based on the opinion of one consultant and the fact that Lineo had to lay off some people this year. It's still interesting reading though for some insight into a different world for Linux and there is a nice reference in the comments to the interview of Victor Yodaiken of RTLinux fame by by Kevin Fu on the ACM site."

JigSaw writes: "OSNews features a long and in-depth article about the latest version of eComStation OS/2 1.0. eCS 1.0 is developed by Serenity Systems after they licensed the technology from IBM when the latter had abandoned any hope for the success of OS/2. The article also has information about the future version of eCS, 1.10, which it will be branded as Entry level, Upgrade and WorkPlace. The Workplace version will include all the software one needs to run Java2, Win16 & DOS applications 'natively', and it also includes an X11 server plus a full copy of Connectix's Virtual PC that can run any flavour of Windows and Linux. In fact, eCS OS/2 Workplace will include a full Linux distribution as part of its VirtualPC package."

Bob Abooey writes: "SoftwareMarketSolution has an interesting interview of Joel Spolsky, of Joel on Software fame. Joel, a former programmer at Microsoft, discusses some of the reasons he thinks some very popular software companies or projects fail, including Netscape, Lotus 123, Borland, etc." This interview brings out some mild boiler-room stories which sound like they could be the basis of a good book, along the lines of Soul of a New Machine .

Chairman writes: "Sleepycat Software (disclaimer -- I work there) just released version 4.0 of Berkeley DB. This version adds support for replication, so apps can survive single- or multi-node hardware or software failures without interruption in service. With the interest in replication by users of MySQL and other SQL databases, an embedded engine that provides the same services might be interesting to Slashdot readers."

ILikeRed writes: "TrollTech is offering some big prizes, including $10,000 USD for coming up with a hot application for the new Sharp pda previously mentioned." The site says that "entries must function with the Sharp Zaurus SL-5000D and must be compiled with Qt/Embedded, version 2.3.2," but the rules make no demands one way or the other regarding licensing. How about making a GIMP-based ultra-mini photo studio tool?

mike_sucks writes: "The first step to porting Debian to the Win32 platform has been made - dpkg is compiling under Cygwin. Check out the post on debian-devel and the Debian GNU/w32 port's site." Some of the posters on the debian-devel list aren't too pleased with the idea.

OpenGL.org webmaster writes: "Now that the OpenGL 2.0 white papers are in review, we'd like to indicate to the OpenGL Architectural Review Board who is considering taking advantage of these developments. If your hardware or software company is in favor of the direction and ideas behind OpenGL 2.0, please take a few seconds to indicate your support by adding your company name and comments to this survey list."

jodonn queries: "Often software developers are called upon to write code in multiple languages for a single project. For instance, I've had to write Java applications with C hooks into legacy native applications and batch processes primarily in C++ with some additional code in Perl, and of course I have to support the build process for all these things, often across platforms using Make and Ant. I'd like to hear some tips about best practices when laying out the source code hierarchy for situations like these, with an eye toward ease in compiling and deployment."

Tim Finin writes: "Anthill is a framework being developed at University of Bologna to support the design, implementation and evaluation of P2P applications, viewing them as instances of Complex Adaptive Systems, typically found in biological and social sciences. In Anthill, desired properties such as resilience, adaptation and self-organization correspond to the "emergent behavior" of the underlying CA system. An Anthill system consists of a dynamic network of peer nodes; societies of adaptive agents (ants) travel through this network, interacting with nodes and cooperating with other agents in order to solve complex problems. The source code for Anthill v1.0 is available for downloading. MORE on this is at ebiquity.org."

robstah writes: "The installer is the heart of any Operating System, Debian is no different. The mature but ageing boot-floppies installer will rear its head for the last time in woody. In this interview with Adam Di Carlo, one of the lead developers of this system we investigate the past, present and future of the Debian installation system ready for the upcoming release of woody: The next generation of Debian."

hp9000 asks: "I've been asked to work on a project that will involve data migration from Sybase to PostgreSQL. I'd like to know if there's any tool, similar to Oracle's Migration Workbench, or even a shell script, to move all data from Sybase tables to PostgreSQL tables, creating the tables/tablespaces/etc in the process or at least generating a script to do so. Any kind of tool, so to speak, that would allow me to perform the migration will be great. I'm not interested in the sql code migration (that will come later if necessary), only tables, indexes, etc. at this point."

Lisa writes: "Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto talks about Ruby's history, the influence of Perl and Python on Ruby, and his new book, Ruby in a Nutshell. In the article he explains: "When I started the language project, I was joking with a friend that the project must be code-named after a gemstone's name (àla Perl). So my friend came up with "ruby". It's a short name for a beautiful and highly valued stone. So I picked up that name, and it eventually became the official name of the language. Later, I found out that pearl is the birthstone for June, and ruby is the birthstone for July. I believe Ruby is an appropriate name for the next language after Perl.""

Greyfox asks: "I've got a question and it's been bugging me for a while. I'm trying to do some database programming with Java and PostgresSQL. I've got an array of bytes I'd like to store in the database and I can't quite figure out how to do it. I've tried the method suggested in their old documentation (Which involves doing some JDBC thing with a FileInputStream) and some esoteric BLOB thing involving ResultSet.setBytes() and a more esoteric BLOB thing involving their LargeObjectManager and when I'm at my most successful I get error messages back griping about unexpected EOFs from the connection manager or somesuch. The documentation, example code and web searches have all been profoundly unhelpful. Am I going about this the right way and if I am, what am I missing?"