Brian McGroarty asks: "I work for Midway Games. My new project is budgeted for two more programmers. I'm wondering if I should try finding people in the open/free software community. Selectively creating jobs for this group seems an appropriate way of giving back to the community, but I'm wondering if an attempt to hire free software developers for closed source projects would be considered somehow inappropriate." I don't see why not. As long as the employer has non-draconian contracts and allows those coders to do whatever they want on their own time, such offers would be a godsend to a person wishing to devote their free time for OSS. Do you all agree or disagree?

grit writes: "Hackers at Large, or HAL 2001, will take place in the Netherlands on the campus of the University of Twente during August 10-12. It will feature presentations, workshops and tutorials on subjects such as security and privacy, biometric technology, and content encryption. Well-known speakers such as John Gilmore will present their views, as well as less well-known hackers, techno-activists, and computer enthousiastics. Read more on the website."

Reader Torulf contributed the below review of Jef Raskin's The Humane Interface .Though the book does not spend much time on Open Source software, it emphasizes ideas that every programmer probably ought to bear in mind -- at least if they wants hisprograms to have users. (And yes, he takes explicit exception to some UNIX truisms.)

sumengen writes: "Damian's writing a series of articles parallel to Larry's Apocalypses. These 'Exegesis' articles will show full perl6 programs, with commentary exlaining the new features. The first Exegesis (numbered 2, to keep in sync with Larry) shows a perl6 version of a binary tree program from the Perl Cookbook. Get excited to see things like:
my int ($pre, $in, $post) are constant = (0..2);"

mukul inputs: "I've written a comprehensive article about daemon processes on UNIX systems, and how to program them efficiently so that zombie processes are avoided, and how to maintain the code adhering to the POSIX standard." You may have to grab a copy of the article source because the submittor forgot to replace his angled brackets with "<" / ">" pairs, so things like include statements and other bits of text will get mangled by your browser. Still, it looks to be a decent writeup. What aspects of daemon programming (if any) is it missing that other readers might do well to know?

The Llama King asks: "Our group has an interesting idea for being able to rate different items, then receiving preferences for similar items, a feature found at sites such as NetFlix and Amazon. Unfortunately, we have big ideas and a small budget. I've searched high and low for an open-source version of this kind of algorithm, with no success. Are there any out there worth compiling?" Update: 05/16 10:30PM EDT by C :As it turns out, Jamie has some words on the subject, click below for more.

An Anonymous Coward writes: "Linux 2.4.3 now holds the world record by performance with IBM's DB2 in TPC-H. TPC-H is a decision support benchmark consisting of a suite of business oriented and ad-hoc queries and concurrent data modifications. This is way cool as the world record was held by SQL Server 2000 on Windows 2000 before." Caveats: this is only in the 100GB (smallest) category, and all but 2 of the other entries are several months old. Even so;)

meadowsd123 inputs: "Check out this site that is holding coding competitions online and in select cities. Seems like there is some decent money to be won if you're good and know Java." If you have some time on your hands, and feel that you can compete for potential monetary prizes (and possible employment) then it might not be a bad idea. Are there any users of TopCoder online who would care to comment about it?

Emmanuel Dreyfus writes: "Linux Compatibility on BSD for the PPC platform is a three-part series of articles published at O'Reilly's ONLamp.com. The series is intended to document various parts of the emulation subsystem, and to highlight some architecture-dependent issues that can arise in argument passing, signal handling, and with the way some system calls work. The first article is now available, with the others to follow soon." Though the article cautions that it is intended for the technically astute, it includes a very lucid description of what emulation requires, and how it actually works.

WalterGR asks: "The recent article about Athena and discussion of other home-brew OSs has really gotten me interested in the subject. I'd like to try my hand at it, but I don't want to make just-another-[insert your favorite platform] clone. I'm not striving for compatibility, as I don't want to be hampered by legacy systems. Because compatibility won't be an issue, I'm at liberty to choose any architecture. Which one would be best for a brand new OS? The PC architecture seems to be a mess of backwards-compatibility baggage and afterthought. What is the best alternative, considering speed, availability of hardware, cost, availability of documentation, design, and so forth?"

Borg#9 asks: "I am a Software Test Engineer for a small startup. I came to this company from Microsoft (hence my UserID). When I first started writing test cases, I discovered to my horror and dismay that the tool QA used for testcases was Word. WORD! I threw my hands up in the air and pleaded for a test case database. Finally, due to various reasons (the need to make money probably being one of them), QA has finally been directed to look into automation, test case databases, harnesses, which scripting language(s) to use, the whole nine yards! Since I'm the only person in QA who has experience with automation (and a successful QA structure, apparently), I've been assigned the task of researching this. We are quite literally starting from scratch. If there are Open Source programs that will work, I will push for those. If there is a 'silver bullet' commercial test suite, etc. that will work best for us, I'll push for that. Please give me experiences, recommendations, horror stories, etc. The software that we will be automating will be NT services (with a DOS debug mode). A large part of the validation will be the comparison of various text files."

tadghin pointed out this Newsweek article on bioinformatics, and also notes: "At O'Reilly, we just published our first bioinformatics book last week, Learning Bioinformatics Computer Skills, by Cynthia Gibas and Per Jambeck, and it immediately rocketed to the top of the Amazon Computer bestseller list. This definitely appears to be a new area for the computer industry that's just starting to hit people's radar big time. I've also made the point to VCs looking at distributed computation startups that what I see on sites like slashdot is a lot of movement by hackers towards new and interesting problems. And science looks a lot more interesting than some of the business computing that's been front and center the past couple of years. And the Biological Open Source Computing Conference I spoke at last year was definitely popping with ideas and excitement. Unfortunately, this year's conference is in Copenhagen, right before the O'Reilly open source convention, but I definitely urge slashdotters to check out this area. Demand for perl expertise is especially high."

lshawnaiken asks: "I've been looking for an open source project to help with, so that I can "give back to the community." While I've seen some fine projects, none have grabbed me. The community is doing just fine, battling Microsoft with much abandon. I was thinking of devoting my time to a project that people really do need. Although i haven't heard of any, I bet tehre are projects out there that are creating software for disabled or needy people. Voice programs for the blind. Educational programs for those who need extra help learning. I mean, there must be SOMEONE doing something like that. I'd like to help. And others would too, I bet. So I would like to ask the readers of Slashdot if they know of any Open Source projects like this, what they are, and to provide links to them. I'd really like to help."

Betsy Waliszewski sent in this interview with Mark Lutz, author of Programming Python. He discusses the evolution of Python during its brief history, XML support and .NET, and takes a brief look at the future of Python.

blakestah writes: "Well, it looks like someone on the LKML has taken upon himself to do some benchmarking of ReiserFS, ext2, and XFS using the 2.4 kernel series. It is not a real benchmark test, but kind of interesting nonetheless. See the results (in Spanish) at this LUG in Mallorca. Simple runs of dd, tar, and rm are shown, and for most of the tests XFS is pretty dern fast, beating all the others. The exception is removal of a large source tree (the kernel source), for which XFS is the slowest by a fair amount. See this kernel post for the translations of important words. It will be nice to see more such open benchmarking posted, because benchmarks provide developers goals." The contrast between FAT32 and XFS is particularly interesting to see.

raelity writes: "The O'Reilly Network is featuring An Introduction to Extreme Programming, by Chromatic (of Slashdot and PerlMonks fame). 'The central tenet is, "Find the essential elements of creating good software, do them all of the time, and discard everything else." Programmers should program and make schedule estimates. Managers should make business decisions. Customers should choose the features they want and rank them by importance.'"

An ever-questing Anonymous Coward asks: " I took a compiler design class last fall and found the material to be very interesting. I've recently started to become interested in decompilers. I looked around on the Internet to see if I could find a general description of how a decompiler is designed, and the theory behind them. Unfortunately all I was able to find were sites that had decompilers for some language and not a general discussion of decompilers. Does anyone know of any sites or books that discusses the theory of decompilers their design?"

kitplane01 writes: "Three students and a professor from Northern Michigan University spent the semester benchmarking a bunch of Linux kernels, from 2.0.1 to 2.4.0. Many functions improved in speed, but some did not. Total lines of code have tripled, and are on an exponential growth curve. Read their results here."

JigSaw writes: "BeNews has a very interesting interview with Kurt Skauen, the AtheOS creator and almost its sole developer. In the interview, Kurt is discussing the design of his OS which features a (nearly) micro-kernel, memory protection, 'true' multitasking, real C++ OOP design from the ground-up and all the rest of these buzzwords. AtheOS uses its own GUI, it does not rely on X or KDE libs, so porting Konqueror to his OS was a bit of a challenge."

Philippe Fremy writes: "After the Poll on what kde needs in priority suggests speed is an area of improvement, Core kde developer Waldo Bastian has written an paper where he explains why a C++ (or Kde) application is slow to start and how the community could improve that."