Slashdot Mirror

gordoste writes "After announcing this past weekend that the WorkPlace line of products would support the OpenDocument set of standards, IBM has sent a letter to Massachusetts' governor promoting the software. They point out that the software was built in Massachusetts and that the French tax agency saves 10% on their IT budget as a result of moving to open standard software." From the article: "Designed at IBM's development lab in Westford, Massachusetts, the IBM Workplace Managed Client will help protect an organization's investment in corporate data by promoting consistency, reliability and open accessibility of its documents. As you know, Massachusetts is recognized across the globe as an incubator for software development ... What you may not know is that software is major growth engine for IBM, and solutions being developed at these IBM locations are being built on open standards because our customers are demanding choice and control over their information technology."

duffbeer703 asks: "My employer runs alot of desktop and laptop computers -- something in the neighborhood of 40,000 PCs. Currently they are all Windows 2000 & XP managed by Active Directory and other big, complicated enterprise management tools, all of which can support Linux in one form or another. I'm looking for ways of making Linux (and maybe Unix or even Apple desktops) an option as we replace or add PCs. The problem is, most of the resources that you find online about deploying Linux focuses on server environment, and the articles that I do find about desktop Linux focus on standalone developer workstations, the IBM conversion to Linux (which doesn't seem to have happened) or things like LTSP, that won't integrate well with our infrastructure. Is anyone out there successfully using Linux for regular users? How did it go, and how did your IT and user communities adapt to the new kid on the block?"

Slashback tonight brings some correction, clarifications, and updates to previous Slashdot stories, including more news from the BlackBerry case, a follow up on the South Korean Cloning pioneer, China promising a strong continuation in space exploration, a behined the scenes look at Smart Hotel technology, a change in direction for the Massachusetts OpenDocument war, and a slightly different approach to the intelligent design in schools question. Read on for the details.

BlackBerry closer to a shutdown. WebHostingGuy writes to tell us MSNBC is reporting that Research in Motion Ltd, the company who makes the BlackBerry is nearer now to a shutdown of their US mobile email service than ever due to the recent ruling handed down. From the article: "U.S. District Judge James Spencer Wednesday ruled invalid a $450 million settlement between RIM and NTP Inc., a small patent holding firm of McLean, Va., that maintains the technology behind the popular BlackBerry infringes on its patents."

Cloning pioneer admits to wrongdoing and resigns. moraes writes "The first research group to clone human embryos ran into some ethical difficulties concerning the source of the eggs - allegations were made indicating that the eggs were taken from junior research assistants. The South Korean pioneer, Hwang Woo Suk, has since resigned his official posts and apologized for lying about the sources of eggs used.."

China on the moon by 2020. IZ Reloaded writes "China will send its astronauts to the moon by 2020 according to the Deputy Commander in Chief of China's manned space flight program. Hu Shixiang said that the goal is subject to the government's funding and their ability to build a rocket with 25 tons capacity."

Behined the scenes with Cisco. molotov writes "Cisco installed the system described in the recent Slashdot article about Smart Hotel Rooms in New York City and has a great video about the technology used in a similar project for the Mandarin Oriental Hotel."

Massachusetts gives Microsoft a second chance. An anonymous reader writes "CNet is reporting that Massachusetts is considering adopting the MS Office XML format as a standard to be used to store the state's documents now that it is under review as an ECMA standard. From the article: 'The commonwealth is very pleased with Microsoft's progress in creating an open document format. If Microsoft follows through as planned, we are optimistic that Office Open XML will meet our new standards for acceptable open formats.' Microsoft still does not intend to support the OpenOffice standard." IBM also took the time to weigh in on the issue with a recent letter to Thomas Trimarco.

University sued for supporting evolution. Hikaru79 writes to tell us that two parents are suing the University of California-Berkeley based on the contents of a website aimed at educating teachers. From the article: "Jeanne and Larry Caldwell, the couple bringing the suit against the site, claim that the site delves improperly into religion. While most debates center around whether or not Intelligent Design is "religion in the classroom," the Caldwells are looking to spin it the other way."

Shell writes "The IBM Full-System Simulator for the Cell Broadband Engine (Cell BE) processor, known inside IBM as codeword Mambo, is a key component of the newly posted offerings on alphaWorks. Meet some of the members of the team that pulled it together, and hear about the simulator in their own words."

Shell writes "The IBM Full-System Simulator for the Cell Broadband Engine (Cell BE) processor, known inside IBM as codeword Mambo, is a key component of the newly posted offerings on alphaWorks. Meet some of the members of the team that pulled it together, and hear about the simulator in their own words."

An anonymous reader writes "Open source licenses provide the legal foundation for propagation of open source code. This article explores the two most popular forms of open source licenses -- the academic license and the reciprocal license -- and describes the obligations of licensees that accept the terms of each."

BlueMoon writes "The Free60 Project wiki and developers mailinglist has been launched. The project aims to port open source operating systems like GNU/Linux and Darwin to the Microsoft Xbox 360 gaming console. The site already contains some interesting details about the Xbox 360 security: per-box key stored on CPU, boot ROM will be on CPU too and a hypervisor verifies the running state of the kernel."

An anonymous reader writes "IBM DeveloperWorks is running a paper from the MPR Fall Processor Forum 2005 explores programming models for the Cell Broadband Engine (CBE) Processor, from the simple to the progressively more advanced. With nine cores on a single die, programming for the CBE is like programming for no processor you've ever met before."

An anonymous reader writes "IBM DeveloperWorks has an article from a little while back that takes a look at the impact of schema evolution on the application. The narrative walks the reader through a usage scenario to illustrate the ease of setting up a PHP environment and integrating DB2 native XML functionality with PHP applications including web services written in PHP and XQuery."

An anonymous reader writes "The widespread adoption of programmer testing over the past five years has been driven by the demonstrable productivity and quality of the resulting code. Find out why and how to do it, as this article introduces you to the benefits of testing aspect-oriented code and presents a catalog of patterns for testing crosscutting behavior in AspectJ."

An anonymous reader writes "Making effective use of shared memory in high-level languages such as C++ is not straightforward, but it is possible to overcome the inherent difficulties. This article describes, and includes sample code for, two C++ design patterns that use shared memory on Linux in interesting ways and open the door for more efficient interprocess communication."

An anonymous reader writes "IT professionals can automate IT management tasks by delegating them to the system, and can plan the degree of automation that is right for them and how manual managers and autonomic managers work together. This article discusses the role of the humans, or lack there of, in autonomic systems. The article claims that isn't about replacing people with machines." How have other readers experienced the use of autonomic code both good and bad?

derek_farn writes "IBM has released an SDK running under Fedora core 4 for the Cell Broadband Engine (CBE) Processor. The software includes many gnu tools, but the underlying compiler does not appear to be gnu based. For those keen to start running programs before they get their hands on actual hardware a full system simulator is available. The minimum system requirement specification has obviously not been written by the marketing department: 'Processor - x86 or x86-64; anything under 2GHz or so will be slow to the point of being unusable.'"

derek_farn writes "IBM has released an SDK running under Fedora core 4 for the Cell Broadband Engine (CBE) Processor. The software includes many gnu tools, but the underlying compiler does not appear to be gnu based. For those keen to start running programs before they get their hands on actual hardware a full system simulator is available. The minimum system requirement specification has obviously not been written by the marketing department: 'Processor - x86 or x86-64; anything under 2GHz or so will be slow to the point of being unusable.'"

derek_farn writes "IBM has released an SDK running under Fedora core 4 for the Cell Broadband Engine (CBE) Processor. The software includes many gnu tools, but the underlying compiler does not appear to be gnu based. For those keen to start running programs before they get their hands on actual hardware a full system simulator is available. The minimum system requirement specification has obviously not been written by the marketing department: 'Processor - x86 or x86-64; anything under 2GHz or so will be slow to the point of being unusable.'"

An anonymous reader writes "IBM DeveloperWorks has an interesting article on operator ad hoc polymorphism (operator overloading for the uninitiated). With the increase in Java popularity and their banning of operator overloading (among other things) the author decides to show some of the great benefits that operator overloading can bring, as long as it is served with a 'healthy dose of caution.'"

Monta writes to tell us that IBM DeveloperWorks has an interesting article about the pros and cons of 'adopting a standard before it becomes one'. From the article: "Whether a standard will succeed and be widely adopted is ambiguous at first, regardless of who endorses it -- a major player or a fringe element. So if most people don't like to welcome the new guy, why would they put all their eggs in a standards basket when that basket might not exist tomorrow?"

An anonymous reader writes "IBM Developerworks is running an article that introduces using the Ruby Development Tools (RDT) plug-in for Eclipse, which allows Eclipse to become a first-rate Ruby development environment. Ruby developers who want to learn how to use the rich infrastructure of the Eclipse community to support their language will benefit, as will Java developers who are interested in using Ruby."

vincecate writes "Traditionally the key chips that have allowed companies to scale multiprocessors to large numbers have been proprietary. Some examples are the Cray SeaStar, SGI NUMAlink, HP sx1000, and the IBM X3/Hurricane. This proprietary paradigm is about to change to a more open one. Two companies have developed key chips for building large Opteron multiprocessors, and they will be commercial off-the-shelf parts. PathScale has released InfiniPath which can be used with an Infiniband switch to make a high-bandwidth low-latency interconnect for a supercomputer cluster. The other company is Newisys, which will soon release the Horus chip. This chip will make it possible to build 32 socket (64-core) shared memory Opteron systems."

slashbob22 writes "IBM has decided to contribute portions of the Rational Unified Process to the Eclipse Foundation. From the article: 'RUP is a vast collection of methods and best practices for promoting quality and efficiency throughout software development projects. IBM's donation will also provide a foundation architecture and Web-based tools for the industry to engineer, collaborate on, share and reuse software development best practices.'"

HockeyPuck writes "On Tuesday, IBM Research celebrated it's 60th Birthday "IBM inventions and discoveries include the programming language Fortran (1957), magnetic storage (1955), the relational database (1970), DRAM (dynamic random access memory) cells (1962), the RISC (reduced instruction set computer) chip architecture (1980), fractals (1967), superconductivity (1987) and the Data Encryption Standard (1974). In the last 12 years, IBM has received 29,021 patents--more than any other company or individual in the world.""

An anonymous reader writes "IBM developerworks is running an article that describes the Mobile 3D Graphics API and introduces you to 3D programming for Java mobile devices. Sony's PSP has shown the graphics power you can put into a mobile device and mobile gaming. Although the average mobile phone is technologically behind this specialized game machine, Java seems to be helping to drive the market in a very definite direction."

Lana writes "This article walks you through various materials and techniques you can use to physically build a robotic prototype. See how to build a fast and easy prototype that can be disassembled, reconfigured, and reassembled. This article builds on a previous articles, entitled 'How to drive your wireless robot.'"

Lana writes "This article walks you through various materials and techniques you can use to physically build a robotic prototype. See how to build a fast and easy prototype that can be disassembled, reconfigured, and reassembled. This article builds on a previous articles, entitled 'How to drive your wireless robot.'"

An anonymous reader writes "Programmers agonize over whether to allocate on the stack or on the heap. Some people think garbage collection will never be as efficient as direct memory management, and others feel it is easier to clean up a mess in one big batch than to pick up individual pieces of dust throughout the day. This article pokes some holes in the oft-repeated performance myth of slow allocation in JVMs."

An anonymous reader wrote to mention an article on the IBM site entitled Mono brings .Net Apps to Linux. From the article: "Mono gives open source developers the programming power and flexibility to build applications for Linux while maintaining cross-platform capabilities, using a variety of .NET-compatible languages. One of the great advantages of Mono for current .NET developers is providing an easier migration path to Linux. The Mono project has a very open and active development community and provides both developer tools and the infrastructure needed to run .NET client and server applications. Perhaps the most important benefit of using the Mono architecture is that you gain language independence. Mono lets you leverage any existing code from languages supported in the .NET runtime. "

An anonymous reader writes "Logical partitioning provides POWER processor-based servers with the capability to do server consolidation and optimize system resources. Dynamic logical partitioning enhances this capability by providing control of the allocation of the resources without impacting the logical partitions availability. Linux on POWER supports dynamic LPAR for changes to physical I/O, virtual I/O, and processor resources."

An anonymous reader writes "In most development organizations, software reuse occurs on a regular basis in at least an ad hoc manner. Code is shared across projects in an informal manner. SOA provides the mechanism for more formal reuse. So what are the issues? This article examines some of the challenges associated with the creation and usage of reusable services."

An anonymous reader writes "High Performance Computing (HPC) has become easier, and two reasons are the adoption of open source software concepts and the introduction and refinement of clustering technology. This first of two articles discusses the types of clusters available, uses for those clusters, reasons clusters have become popular for HPC, some fundamentals of HPC, and the role of Linux in HPC."

An anonymous reader wrote to mention an IBM article examining the role that older workers, experienced with legacy systems, should play in system maintenance. From the article: "Many enterprises still execute critical business operations ... via older software systems that run on large, mainframe computers rather than individual PCs. To meet changing business needs, these companies continually update, extend, and integrate their systems. Paradoxically, many of these companies also have policies that threaten the single greatest source of knowledge about their older systems: their most senior personnel. Although the aging workforce represents a vast pool of talent and experience, these businesses neither actively recruit senior workers nor provide incentives to retain those on staff.1 Instead, they mistakenly assume that they can hire younger, lower-paid people to perform the same tasks."

An anonymous reader wrote to mention an article on IBM's site detailing the fundamentals of Java-based Ajax. From the article: "This article gives you a good understanding of the fundamental principles of Ajax, and a nuts-and-bolts knowledge of the client and server side components that participate in an Ajax interaction. These are the building blocks of a Java-based Ajax Web application. In addition, you will be shown some of the high-level design issues that come with the Ajax approach."

An anonymous reader writes "OptimalGrid is a self-contained middleware designed for developers to create grid-enabled parallel applications without themselves becoming experts in grid or high-performance computing (article). The Linux compatible middleware now includes automatic distribution and provisioning on to Grid nodes. See how the first release of Quake II was made massively multi-player [pdf] by running on a Grid. Get modified Quake II from Sourceforge to run with OptimalGrid and let the massive Grid games begin." Update: 09/19 16:12 GMT by Z : Marked the pdf as such.

An anonymous reader writes "IBM developerWorks is running an interesting article dicussing the difficulties faced by e-books and what it might take to help them to 'break out'. What are some other ways to give books a 21st-century facelift?"

An anonymous reader writes "Elliotte Harold, proclaimed 'obsessive code tester', took an early look at JUnit4 and shows how to best utilize the framework in your own projects. Many feel that this is one of the most important third-party Java libraries ever developed. It promises to simplify testing by exploiting Java 5's annotation feature to identify tests rather than relying on subclassing, reflection, and naming conventions."

corso64 writes "Ohio Linux Fest 2005, a free conference/event for Linux and OSS enthusiasts, looks to be every bit as good, if not better than Ohio Linux Fest 2004. Last year, IBM, Novell, Apache, Beowulf, Mozilla, along with Jon "Maddog" Hall made Ohio Linux Festival 2004 a huge success along with tons of swag, freebies, and door prizes (including a Linus-autographed cdrom of the original source release of Linux). This year IBM, Novell, Apache, Digium, KDE and others will be doing sessions on Asterisk, KDE, Digital Forensics,Unified Threat Management, Ubuntu, Server Farms and lots of other topics. Check it out this October 1st!"

We've had many submissions about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. It doesn't come easy writes "From 'the end justifies the means department', the BBC is reporting that bogus emails about the current situation in New Orlean contain links to websites that promptly infect the concerned reader's computer. From the article: 'The separate virus and fake donations bogus e-mails have been discovered by computer security firms SophosLabs and Websense Security Labs. They are similar to previous fraudulent e-mails connected to last year's Indian Ocean Tsunami.'" Less cynically, an anonymous reader writes "A Linux developer is organizing volunteers for a public 'web station' project to assist Hurricane Katrina victims. The plan is to create numerous Linux-based public kiosks that boot directly into the Firefox browser and display a special home page with links to various services. In addition to offering disaster relief information and news, the kiosks will provide basic email capabilities via Yahoo!, Gmail, Earthlink, MS Hotmail, and other web-mail services. They're looking for donations of time and money. If you're looking to donate more directly, tech companies across the country are maintaining pages with ties to respected charities. Yahoo is maintaining the Red Cross donation page, and everyone from Microsoft to IBM has a message on their frontpage."

I writes "The revolutionary Cell Broadband Engine Architecture (CBEA) is the result of collaboration among Sony, Toshiba, and IBM. The following papers define the Cell specification and will be posted to the IBM Semiconductor Solutions Technical Library in September. You can access them early as long as you have a current IBM ID."

Francesca writes "What utility do practically all Linux users use, regardless of their job or expertise? A boot loader. In this article from IBM, see how a boot loader works, meet two popular loaders -- LILO (LInux LOader) and GNU GRUB (GRand Unified Boot loader) -- and review the pros and cons of each." From the article: "Most simply, a boot loader loads the operating system. When your machine loads its operating system, the BIOS reads the first 512 bytes of your bootable media (which is known as the master boot record, or MBR). You can store the boot record of only one operating system in a single MBR, so a problem becomes apparent when you require multiple operating systems. Hence the need for more flexible boot loaders."

BBCWatcher writes "The three main partners in the Cell Processor initiative announced technical details of the new architecture. IBM's documents are particularly revealing. There's much more information on how developers, including open source developers, can access the SPUs (Synergistic Processor Units). As reported earlier, Sony will put the Cell into every Playstation 3 game machine, due early next year. And yes, Cell runs Linux."

An anonymous reader writes "IBM developerWorks is running an article outlining the strengths and offering some helpful advice on the Python framework 'CherryPy'. CherryPy uses the same concepts as CGI to bind a web server to a web application, but it improves performance and gains persistence across requests by handling all its requests within a single process."

Heather writes "The encryption scheme you rely on today might be full of holes just a few years down the road. Learn how far we've come in the last few decades, and why your apps need to be ready for change. This article builds on a previous article about Enigma, Germany's WWII-era encryption system."

Heather writes "The encryption scheme you rely on today might be full of holes just a few years down the road. Learn how far we've come in the last few decades, and why your apps need to be ready for change. This article builds on a previous article about Enigma, Germany's WWII-era encryption system."

An anonymous reader writes "Want to assess security vulnerabilities on your Linux system without lengthy installation and configuration efforts? This article introduce four packages -- Auditor, Whoppix, Knoppix-STD, and PHLAK -- that bring you that ability through the magic of LiveCD. These four LiveCD offerings specialize in nailing down vulnerabilities."

PabloHoffman writes "Have you ever wondered what would it take to make your (unfortunately) IE-only web app to work on Firefox?. IBM published an interesting article about migrating Internet Explorer specific web applications to Mozilla-based browers. It covers basic cross-browser development techniques, and some developing strategies for overcoming the differences between both browsers."

deepexplorer writes "Japan wants to gain the fastest supercomputer spot back. Japan wants to develop a supercomputer that can operate at 10 petaflops, or 10 quadrillion calculations per second, which is 73 times faster than the Blue Gene. Current fastest supercomputer is the partially finished Blue Gene is capable of 136.8 teraflops and the target when finished is 360 teraflops."

JuiceMan wrote to mention an article that goes into the the specifics of setting up a Wireless Internet Service Provider (WISP) using Linux and a few easy scripts. From the article: "Wireless clients will have questions, and the Linux-based management tools I'll discuss will help you answer them. Here are some quick examples of how you can answer typical user questions - Question: 'Is the Internet down today? Why can't my browser find www.flakyhost.com?' Solution: First, check your wireless network with the scanap script; it will tell you about the wireless signal quality of all associated clients, including the one that's giving you problems. Then, check IP connectivity with the pingall script; it will tell you about the latency to your ISP's gateway, the DNS, and all your clients, including the problematic one. If these two scripts establish that your network is OK, try www.flakyhost.com."

An anonymous reader writes "Taking things apart is just plain fun, but there's also a lot to learn about how to build a foolproof Linux-based appliance. Break out your Torx drivers and take a closer look at TiVo's inner Linux workings. Examining the TiVo system reveals how one company made the transition from desktop operating system to embedded system."

An anonymous reader writes "The FreeBSD operating system is the unknown giant among free operating systems. Starting out from the 386BSD project, it is an extremely fast UNIX-like operating system mostly for the Intel chip and its clones. In many ways, FreeBSD has always been the operating system that GNU/Linux-based operating systems should have been. It runs on out-of-date Intel machines and 64-bit AMD chips, and it serves terabytes of files a day on some of the largest file servers on earth."

Wayne writes "Ruby on Rails is a relatively new Web application framework built on the Ruby language. It is billed as an alternative to existing enterprise frameworks, and its goal, in a nutshell, is to make your life -- or at least the Web development aspects of it -- easier. This article will contrast the Rails framework against a typical J2EE implementation using common open source tools that are regularly found in enterprise applications."

boarder8925 writes "'Big Blue has hammered the final nails into OS/2's coffin. It said that all sales of OS/2 will end on the 23rd of December this year, and support for the pre-emptive multitasking operating system will end on the 31st December 2006.' IBM has posted a migration page to help OS/2 users easily switch to Linux."