Nicholas Carroll writes: "In the continual struggle between search engine administrators, index spammers, and the chaos that underlies knowledge classification, we have endless tools for 'increasing relevance' of search returns, ranging from much ballyhooed and misunderstood 'meta keywords,' to complex algorithms that are still far from perfecting artificial intelligence. Proposal: there should be a metadata standard allowing webmasters to manually decrease the relevance of their pages for specific search terms and phrases."

An Anonymous Coward writes: "Atsushi Kasuya, verification engineer at Juniper Networks Inc., didn't like any of the existing languages used for verification -- so he wrote his own. Now Kasuya is offering his C-like language, Jeda, to the design community on an open-source basis under the GNU Public License."

Microsoft's C# has raised eyebrows, interest and debate since its official announcement last year. The prolific Carnage4Life (Dare Obasanjo) has completed a detailed comparison of C# and Java, outlining the things that are identical, similar, nearly the same, or completely different between the two languages. If you're considering learning or applying either one, you might benefit by reading this paper first. There are some other excellent comparisons to be found linked from the Open Directory Project as well. Update: 11/20 03:35 GMT by T : Note: here's a mirror; interested readers who mirror the mirror get good seats in heaven.

Alex Pilosov writes: "I've announced a bounty for completion of softmodem code (20k$) on linmodems-discuss list. If this is successfully completed, we'll have a completely universal driver for any kind of winmodem without any proprietary code which result in all sorts of kernel version problems." Here's the full text of the announcement and conditions.

Josh Aas writes: "I've been looking for a way to learn PowerPC assembly language for a while now. My search for books only led to extremely out-of-date publications, and the whole ordeal was generally frustrating. I was amazed at the lack of documentation. Even Motorola and IBM's documentation resources (on the web) were lacking anything of use to me. However, it turns out that Apple provides a pretty good free tutorial on the subject. It's tailored for coding in Mac OS X, but I imagine it would be just as useful in any PowerPC environment. For some reason it includes instructions for the Intel architecture. Perhaps this has to do with the fact that Darwin runs on x86 as well."

GdoL writes: "Do you remember Bob? Byte's editor starts his monthly column talking about Bob the OS Interface from Microsoft in the middle 1990s. And he didn't forget either Bob the programming language from a former technical editor of Dr. Dobbs Journal, David Betz. This OO language is widely use on 'DVD players and set-top boxes produced by the likes of Toshiba, Samsung, and Motorola.' Do you remember any other language long forgotten that is still used in the real world?"

TrumpetX asks: "A friend of mine and I have been asked by our boss to do an image extraction from a KV-F510 Panasonic scanning station. The extraction program (which works in a 16 bit environment only) works fine, but it spits out .PBE file formats with some unreadable .INF files. I was wondering if any of the /. readers out there have used one of these dinasour scanning stations before, and if someone could shed some light on how to convert the .PBE files to another format (TIF, GIF, BMP, or anything else readable, really)."

Lisa writes: "Even an open community wireless network needs to keep track of who's using it, says Rob Flickenger, who describes the authentication system used by NoCat in this article." This is at least partially an ad for Flickenger's new book, but since I plan to buy the book anyway... Update: 11/17 14:53 GMT by M : Yep, this is a duplicate. But community wireless needs more participants, so why not read it again? :)

Paul Smith writes: "New Scientist is carrying a story about a redesigned version of the programming language C called Cyclone from AT&T labs. "The Cyclone compiler identifies segments of code that could eventually cause such problems using a "type-checking engine". This does not just look for specific strings of code, but analyses the code's purpose and singles out conflicts known to be potentially dangerous.""

GroundBounce writes: "An article at Advogato uses the recent resignation of Christoph Pfister from the Fink project to analyze and highlight the ways in which the free software community often alienates its leaders, and the differences between the Mac shareware and the greater free software communities."

Danny writes: "infoSync has got a interesting story about a mobile terminal running on Linux, which is supposed to be available in June 2002. From the pictures to tell, it's really cool -- and it supports GSM/GPRS, has a 65K color display and comes with a camera interface and a joystick for playing games." Now mind you such cool devices will take years to get to the U.S., but wow, that's a crazy looking device. Me Like-ee.

bobdinkel writes "While I know it isn't the most glamorous thing, mailing lists are a fact of life. And they gotta be managed by someone. In my organization, that someone is me. For whatever reason (they won't exactly say) the powers that be do not want to use majordomo and sendmail. So I pose this question to you, dear reader: What is the best MLM - MTA combo in the Unix world?" One only needs to shake a stick to see the amount of software available that handles mailing lists. Which ones have suited your needs?

MrHat writes: "Eric S. Raymond's CML2, or 'Configuration Menu Language' -- part of the next-generation Linux kernel build system -- is now officially ready for 2.5. CML2 includes a compiler for a domain-specific configuration language, used to configure kernel subsystems and resolve dependencies between them. CML2 and Linux 2.5 will 'ship' with several different configuration interfaces, including an adventure game, whipped up by ESR during an extended flight. The story from the horse's mouth (or LKML, if you prefer):'This release resolves all known logic bugs and rulebase problems. The only things left on the to-do list are convenience features and some minor improvements in the test/coverage tools. This code is now officially ready for the 2.5 fork.'"

Bradee-oh! queries: "My brother and I were just commissioned to develop a large energy management system for a few big college campuses in the area. It will be written in C/C++. We know that in 6 months, when a preliminary test system will be installed, it will be running on NT/2000 servers. The software will be tested on NT for up to 12 months and a final version will run on NT a year after that. We also know that around that time, it will shift to *nix servers, and we're expected to account for that in development. The question is, what sorts of cross platform libraries will make this as painless as possible? I've never made it a point to code for 2 platforms at once in any language other that Java. Aside from the GUI, which we've already agreed to use QT 3.0 for, we specifically are looking for cross-platform libraries for multi-threading, serial port I/O, and network I/O."

Screaming Lunatic writes: "There is an interview over at codeproject about the future of C++ and .NET. Since I don't really care about .NET, the interesting part of the article is about the quest to standarize Visual C++. If you're going to code for Windows, Visual C++ is one of your few choices for a IDE/compiler combo. (Even though, if I'm not mistaken, you can hook gcc up to the IDE.) M$ seems somewhat in favor of conforming to the C++ standard, which is surprising. They talk about pushing forward with template compliance. I'm still waiting for them to get the variable declarations in for-loops right. They also claim to beat several popular compilers in compliance tests."

Beerwolff writes: "This time I have remembered the link to the Byte article that's a follow-up to two of Moshe Bar's previous articles comparing FreeBSD and Linux--This time with the new Linux VM. His Apache "results show that Linux is better at handling I/O cache than FreeBSD, and that FreeBSD is more efficient at building up and tearing down processes."" As usual, please take benchmarks with a grain of salt, caveat emptor, look before you leap, and so forth.

Isamu Noguchi writes: "The Samsung Linux-powered Yopy is coming back with a fliptop screen and an odd keyboard. A developer unit is previewed at infosync." After a series of design flip-flops, changing release dates, and nice-looking prototypes, could the Yopy actually be released?

masukomi writes: "After watching a recent discussion where someone wondered what the difference was between XML-RPC and SOAP and which to use I set about answering this question for myself. The result was this basic overview of the two protocols (also in acrobat format)."

Kent M. Pitman has already given you his first 11 answers to the questions you asked him about Lisp, Scheme, the creation of programming standards, and much more -- below are his answers to another eight (starting with answer #12). Thanks again, Kent.

An Anonymous Coward writes: "One of the GNU/Hurd developers, Neal Walfield, was recently interviewed by KernelTrap. Nice read."