Slashdot Mirror

macnigel writes "DOE tries to find a good warning sign for the nuclear waste dump out in Nevada. This is one of those scary yet true things our government actually does; research into finding what exactly can be interpreted as "dangerous" 10,000 years from now." I was sure we had run a story about this before, but I don't see it in the archives. The report on how to mark the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (complete version in pdf 19.5Mb) makes chilling, yet somehow inspiring reading, and IMHO is much less deserving of mockery than the Salon author makes it out to be.

rrwood asks: "The company at which I work is about to overhaul an existing application. Strangely enough, we're primarily Macintosh-based, but are casting an eye towards cross-platform development (i.e. Windows, though I'm hopeful that an X/Linux-based version is also a possibility). Given that the app is to be a fairly rich GUI front end that talks to a database backend, I'd be interested in hearing any recommendations or advice anyone out there has to offer." Read on for more information on the toolkits currently under consideration (feel free to offer more suggestions), but we are talking toolkits here. The topic of cross-platform languages got a rather thourough treatment in a previous article.

"It's pretty much a necessity for the solution technology to include a RAD tool.

With respect to using a portable C++ core and platform-specific GUI layer (or even portable GUI layer-- keep reading), there are a few toolkits around that seem promising:

• GLUI, an OpenGL-based GUI
• Whisper, a Mac/Windows application framework
• WxWindows, a framework which supports Windows 3.1/95/98/NT, and Unix with GTK/Motif/Lesstif, and MacOS
• YAAF, Yet Another Application Framework, offering suport for Macintosh OS, Windows 95 and Windows NT, and X Windows
• CPLAT, a framework for developing MacOS and Windows (Linux soon) applications
• Ardi's Carbonless Copies technology, which is a portable rewrite of much of the MacOS API

Additionally, these URLS have a lot of info on Platform Independent GUIs:

• GUI Toolkit/Framework Page
• PIGUI FAQ Page
• C++ User's Journal PIGUI Page"

BluSkreen asks: "I've got a site that runs Matt's WWWBoard, with most of the available mods added, the counter file lock sub routine, and most of the other hacks various people have done. The site regularly serves 60,000 plus requests a day, sometimes more. There are generally 100 or so posts a day. The last two months we have served about a million pages a month." The gist of it is that he's now having problems and looking for alternatives. Click below for more.

"Aside from the security concerns of the script, we are having problems with the script supporting that many users (up to 30 to 50 concurent, during peak times). During peak times, we can get 3 to 6 requests a second, which is fine for veiwing static pages with our configuration, but when multiple people try to post, the script can't support it. It sits on a T-1 all by itself on a Cobalt RAQ2, with 256 MB RAM. I like the "slash" package, but I've not been able to make it run on the RAQ2 just yet.

I'd like to "Ask Slashdot", what software/ hardware combination would you recommend? Is there a way to modify Slash so that the main articles are generated by the users, instead of submitted by the moderators? And lastly, has anyone been able to get Slash to run on a Cobalt box."

Anyone have other alternatives for WWWBoard software? I'm sure there are plenty out there, but how well do these packages work (especially under heavy loads)?

Ry Jones writes "The brits have found a way to maximize the best part of a chicken. " The scary thing is that I suspect this is going to get a lot wierder...

wardk wrote in to send us linkage to a PCWeek artcile that Linux 2.2. It starts off by saying that Linux is Enterprise Ready. Talks about corporate support and improvements in SMP. Check it out.

Clayton Wheeler writes "According to This MacWeek article, Apple is declaring Rhapsody 1.0 a dead end. Because of the Mac community's lack of interest in porting everything to Yellow Box, Apple is instead emphasizing MacOS X and the Carbon APIs. Yellow Box is relegated to being a long-term idea and "part of [Apple's] larger Java strategy." Development of Yellow Box for Windows will continue, but no Intel ports of MacOS or Carbon are planned. "

By the end of this year, there will be 7 somewhat incompatible versions of Windows. In addition to the current four x86 vendors there will many more, among which Imes, CPU Tech, Metaflow, Rise, Transmeta ( ? ), and Exponential (??). While new hardware ages computers before they are sold, M$'s bloatware obsoletes them within a year. To compensate, consumers are turning to cheap "disposable" computers. But this trend driven by Microsoft's feature-adding strategy, risks back-firing. As component cost is driven down, and specialised vendors disappear, more application specific devices will emerge. Just like Cyrix's MediaGX, they will be geared towards providing the maximum bang for the buck in a specific environment. This will slowly push the single-OS-for-all paradigm to the side. Indeed, as hardware cost goes down, the direct and indirect price of using Microsoft increases: Windows/Office costs money, it also costs a very powerful environment: memory, harddrive, etc. And if computers are application specific, the choice of an OS becomes irrelevant, and each new feature is clearly costed.

The articles just don't seem to stop today! Tom Christiansen (I've bought his books and he still has kicked/banned me from #perl for asking honest question *grin*) of Perl fame has written an article entitled White Hats and Black which examines Netscape, Apache and of course Perl and the future of the Net. Good reading from a good author. Thanks to Dean Collins for sending it in.