Slashdot Mirror

An anonymous reader writes In the recent Slashdot discussion on the D programming language, I was surprised to see criticisms of Pascal that were based on old information and outdated implementations. While I'm sure that, for example, Brian Kernighan's criticisms of Pascal were valid in 1981, things have moved on since then. Current Object Pascal largely addresses Kernighan's critique and also includes language features such as anonymous methods, reflection and attributes, class helpers, generics and more (see also Marco Cantu's recent Object Pascal presentation). Cross-platform development is fairly straightforward with Pascal. Delphi targets Windows, OS X, iOS and Android. Free Pascal targets many operating systems and architectures and Lazarus provides a Delphi-like IDE for Free Pascal. So what do you think? Is Pascal underrated?

ingwa writes "The KOffice team today released version 1.6 of its office suite. Among other things, this release contains an improved Krita which can now handle color spaces like CMYK. This makes it the only free image editor that can be used in professional pre-press work. Together with the other improvements, this release probably makes it the best free image editor in the world. The release also contains improvements in Kexi, the MS Access like database application, and a new scripting framework which makes it extremely simple to script applications that handle OpenDocument data. With this release KOffice also surpasses OpenOffice.org in some ways, e.g. it handles over 70% of the W3C MathML test suite while Openoffice.org only handles 22%. See the KOffice homepage for more information."

ingwa writes to tell us that the KOffice team has released version 1.5 which offers, among other things, default OpenDocument file format, new project planning tool KPlato, professional color support and adjustment layers in Krita and the long awaited Kexi 1.0. From the announcement: "KOffice was the first office suite that announced support for OpenDocument and now the second to announce it as the default file format after OpenOffice.org. This makes KOffice a member of a very select group and will lead to new deployment opportunities. Great care has been taken to ensure interoperability with other office software that also use OpenDocument."

assassingod writes "Have you been disappointed with your Half-Life 2 Collectors Edition box? Troja881 was, so he decided to do what anybody else would do in his situation - he made cookies based on the Half-Life 2 logo. Personally i'm waiting to see some NDS shaped cookies."

megmag writes "A really cool project using a Linux P4 machine for automatic parking of a Volvo S60 was presented last week. Take a look at the video. That's how your parking problem should be solved. It is a final-year student project within the mechanical engineering department at Linköping University, Sweden."

megmag writes "A really cool project using a Linux P4 machine for automatic parking of a Volvo S60 was presented last week. Take a look at the video. That's how your parking problem should be solved. It is a final-year student project within the mechanical engineering department at Linköping University, Sweden."

megmag writes "A really cool project using a Linux P4 machine for automatic parking of a Volvo S60 was presented last week. Take a look at the video. That's how your parking problem should be solved. It is a final-year student project within the mechanical engineering department at Linköping University, Sweden."

megmag writes "A really cool project using a Linux P4 machine for automatic parking of a Volvo S60 was presented last week. Take a look at the video. That's how your parking problem should be solved. It is a final-year student project within the mechanical engineering department at Linköping University, Sweden."

Anlan writes "A Swedish student wrote her Master's thesis about current fingerprint technology. After a thorough literature study some live testing took place. Simple DIY fingerprint copies were used (detailed how-to in the thesis). Have current commercial products improved as much as proponents claim? Well, this qoute from the abstract says it all: 'The experiments focus on making artificial fingerprints in gelatin from a latent fingerprint. Nine different systems were tested at the CeBIT trade fair in Germany and all were deceived. Three other different systems were put up against more extensive tests with three different subjects. All systems were circumvented with all subjects' artificial fingerprints, but with varying results.' You can guess how happy the sales people at CeBIT were - most systems claim to be spoof proof..."

globbe writes "3D Festival in Copenhagen, Denmark announced the winners of the second Annual International 3DAwards this Wednesday (5/5). Take a look at the nominees and winners! 3D Festival, Game Developers World and Architectural Visualization Conference is an annual joint conference/expo combining interests in 3D-graphics and visualization.""

An anonymous reader writes "Today version 7.6 of the Swedish programming language Pike was released. Some of the noteworthy additions are support for the Bittorrent protocol, the OBEX protocol (to communicate with cellular phones), IPv6, PGP and Bz2. If you want to beat the crap out of your Python/Perl program speedwise, try porting it to Pike..."

lnixon asks: "As a recent Slashdot article mentioned, the latest trend in spamming is to use cracked Windows machines for sending spam and hosting spamvertised web sites, 'spacking', as Wired terms it. A couple of weeks ago, I started tracking one of these cracker rings down, carefully documenting the trail as I went.Mostly through luck, I actually found the originating server. This information should seriously put a crimp in their activities...if only I could get the law interested. I have tried to get the attention of CERT, of FBI and of my local police authorities, but nobody seems to be interested. Now, what should I do? Organize a posse?"

lnixon asks: "As a recent Slashdot article mentioned, the latest trend in spamming is to use cracked Windows machines for sending spam and hosting spamvertised web sites, 'spacking', as Wired terms it. A couple of weeks ago, I started tracking one of these cracker rings down, carefully documenting the trail as I went.Mostly through luck, I actually found the originating server. This information should seriously put a crimp in their activities...if only I could get the law interested. I have tried to get the attention of CERT, of FBI and of my local police authorities, but nobody seems to be interested. Now, what should I do? Organize a posse?"

skookum writes "After last week's OpenSSH patch-fest, a lot of people suggested GNU lsh as a replacement. Unfortunately, it seems that the lsh team has recently discovered a heap overflow bug of their own that can lead to compromise. An exploit was posted to BugTraq two days ago. Happy patching."

skookum writes "After last week's OpenSSH patch-fest, a lot of people suggested GNU lsh as a replacement. Unfortunately, it seems that the lsh team has recently discovered a heap overflow bug of their own that can lead to compromise. An exploit was posted to BugTraq two days ago. Happy patching."

skookum writes "After last week's OpenSSH patch-fest, a lot of people suggested GNU lsh as a replacement. Unfortunately, it seems that the lsh team has recently discovered a heap overflow bug of their own that can lead to compromise. An exploit was posted to BugTraq two days ago. Happy patching."

Magnus Cedergren writes "Which are the driving forces behind the creation of Open Content? What value is created? That is the major questions I try to answer in my paper in the journal First Monday. I would like to thank all you people participating in my study in different ways."

Gernot Ziegler writes "After having read a report on the fusion of Art and Technology, I somehow ended up on Perry Hoberman's page. I don't know this guy, but I've always been fascinated by techno art, and these ones are clearly intriguing. There is the Workaholic, a pendulum with a bar code scanner over a carpet with bar codes and an attached projector that overlays images on the carpet, or the ZOMBIAC (Zone Of Monitor-Based Inter-Amnesiac Contact) that lures the visitors into thinking that the machines react to them directly. You might also want to have a look at this weird auction (that's where I got this link from) ! :)"

ulrikp writes "The vikings have done it again! The Swedes at Linköping University (home of the cool Lysator archives) have released a new version of their Pike scripting language. It is similar to C++ and C#, but is apparently more type-safe than either. It is interpreted, and runs on many OS's, including Linux, Solaris, and Windows. Check it out!"

ulrikp writes "The vikings have done it again! The Swedes at Linköping University (home of the cool Lysator archives) have released a new version of their Pike scripting language. It is similar to C++ and C#, but is apparently more type-safe than either. It is interpreted, and runs on many OS's, including Linux, Solaris, and Windows. Check it out!"

ulrikp writes "The vikings have done it again! The Swedes at Linköping University (home of the cool Lysator archives) have released a new version of their Pike scripting language. It is similar to C++ and C#, but is apparently more type-safe than either. It is interpreted, and runs on many OS's, including Linux, Solaris, and Windows. Check it out!"

ulrikp writes "The vikings have done it again! The Swedes at Linköping University (home of the cool Lysator archives) have released a new version of their Pike scripting language. It is similar to C++ and C#, but is apparently more type-safe than either. It is interpreted, and runs on many OS's, including Linux, Solaris, and Windows. Check it out!"

pinkunicorn writes: "Perdido Street Station (2000) is new British writer China Miéville's second novel (the first was King Rat (1998), his latest is The Scar (2002), a sequel to Perdido Street Station). Perdido Street Station is the coolest fantasy novel I've read for a good while, if a fantasy novel is what it is. The protagonist of the book, Isaac Grimnebulin, is a scientist and there are a number of high-tech things in the book, but there's also magic (though it's called thaumaturgy)." Read on for the rest of pinkunicorn's review. Perdido Street Station author China Mieville pages 867 publisher Pan rating 8 reviewer pinkunicorn ISBN 0345443020 summary Fantasy with science and an attitude

The action takes place entirely in a city, New Crobuzon, and it's a large city.

There are loads of things here that are taken from outside the standard fantasy mould. Lots of the inhabitants of New Crobuzon are not human. This isn't revolutionary in itself, but they are far from the normal Tolkien-influenced critters. There are khepri, a weird species that doesn't even look the same for both sexes. The males are rather small and look like beetles while the females are as large as humans and look like a mixture of humans (lower half) and beetles (upper half). They can't talk, but communicate with scents and sign language. There are garuda, which are a kind of bird men. There are walking cacti. There are vodyanoi who live in water and can shape it to sculptures.

One day, Isaac Grimnebulin get a visit from Yagharek, a garuda who has had his wings taken off for some offense that he doesn't want to talk about. He wants Isaac to help him fly again. Isaac takes on the job in a very thorough way and starts investigating various other animals that can fly to find out how it's best done.

This is different from most fantasy. Normally, magic is the only science there is (and often that isn't treated like a science either). In New Crobuzon this isn't the case at all. There is magic, but it isn't the only thing. There are also photography (of sorts), printing presses for underground newspapers, intelligent cleaning robots, air ships and mechanical computers, all together. As if all this wasn't enough to make you think of science fiction, towards the end there's even an example of prime Star Trek technobabble, but in a fantasy mode.

In spite of its bulk, Perdido Street Station is a pretty fast read. The plot as such isn't too complex, but it drives the story forward nicely. What I think really stands out are the descriptions: China Miéville is very good at conjuring moods and environments and getting the reader to realize exactly how something looks, even in an entirely alien environment. China Miéville claims Mervyn Peake as one of his favorite authors, and the similarities to Gormenghast in feel are sometimes striking.

Perdido Street Station feels quite a bit like cyberpunk in a fantasy setting. Most of the common signs are there: a somewhat run-down city environment, technology development in a guerilla manner, drugs, computers, body modification (through surgery and magic instead of gene technology, but still) and quite a bit of attitude. I'm looking forward to see if this book will leave as much of a footprint in the fantasy genre as Neuromancer did in the science fiction genre.

You can purchase Perdido Street Station at bn.com. You can read your own book reviews in this space by submitting your reviews after reading the book review guidelines.

Gernot Ziegler writes: "One of my professors (Stefan Gustavsson) has written a good summary that explains the history & technical background/innovations that Doom, Quake & Unreal brought with them when they were released. Check it out." It's a pdf file. Gustavsson ends with a list of hopeful questions about where such games can go, after nearly a decade of running and violence. What I'd really like to see is a goal-free 3D world like the Snowcrash Metaverse, but it will take games to get there ;)

Gernot Ziegler writes: "One of my professors (Stefan Gustavsson) has written a good summary that explains the history & technical background/innovations that Doom, Quake & Unreal brought with them when they were released. Check it out." It's a pdf file. Gustavsson ends with a list of hopeful questions about where such games can go, after nearly a decade of running and violence. What I'd really like to see is a goal-free 3D world like the Snowcrash Metaverse, but it will take games to get there ;)

Gernot Ziegler writes: "One of my professors (Stefan Gustavsson) has written a good summary that explains the history & technical background/innovations that Doom, Quake & Unreal brought with them when they were released. Check it out." It's a pdf file. Gustavsson ends with a list of hopeful questions about where such games can go, after nearly a decade of running and violence. What I'd really like to see is a goal-free 3D world like the Snowcrash Metaverse, but it will take games to get there ;)

The Swedish High Court has rejected the appeal in the Zenon Panoussis case, where Panoussis was accused of distributing certain documents of the Church of Scientology in violation of their copyright. The case has been ongoing for some time and has more twists and turns than I can possibly summarize here, but we can cut to the chase: Panoussis lost, and lost big. There is apparently one more court in Sweden which can be appealed to, so it's not entirely over yet. Here's the report from the trial. The submitter provided many more links and information, included below.

leto writes "The Swedish High Court upheld the ruling today in the case of Scientology vs Panoussis, where Scientology accuses Panoussis of copyright infringement of religious trade secrets. Panoussis believes the public should be warned against Scientology, and is therefore trying to legally publish various materials that would warn people against Scientology. He is the guy that submitted the secret OT's to the Swedish parliament, which caused quite a diplomatic incident when the US interfered with the Swedish legal system because the Swedish Offentlighetsprincip then caused these documents to be available to everyone, but has also done other things as reported by slashdot such as protecting the Flashback site as reported by slashdot before.

Having lost now means that apart from needing to pay the (minimal) damages of $2000 for copyright infringement, he needs to pay an additional $40,000 on legal costs for the Scientology lawyers, on top of the $150,000 of legal costs that were the results of the previous episodes in this court case.

There was a minority opinion from one of the judges. She regards the OTs to have been legally published, something Panoussis focussed on in this case, because in Europe, the right to 'fair use' depends on the texts having been published. Panoussis has already appealed to the Supreme Court.

Regardless of which party is right, this case shows clearly that anonymity is a right you need, to fight the denial of services practices that large institutions apply towards individuals in the current legal systems. Though Panoussis will disagree with me on this. He has always told me that if you believe in something, you should be willing to make the sacrifice, or as he put it, you need to defend freedom, and not take it for granted, but I can't help but feel that it should not be necessary for one person to sacrifice his life for other people's freedom.

If we only had micropayments properly working, I'm sure he would be able to pay the legal costs from contributions all over the net.

More information can be found either here, here, here and in the newsgroup alt.religion.scientology Panoussis's latest project is an advanced search engine to help locate information about Scientology at search.freewinds.cx."

Rayban writes: "Just noticed on news.gnome.org that the Linux framebuffer support for Gtk+ is now in CVS. This means that you can now write a quick Gnome app that doesn't require X at all! Imagine a Gtk+-based distro installation that can run solely off the framebuffer! No more VESA hack and a significant disk space savings - maybe even a Gtk+-based bootloader? The screenshots are here, here and here." Obviously the screenshots aren't very special, but I'm having no problem thinking of interesting, useful tasks for this.

Rayban writes: "Just noticed on news.gnome.org that the Linux framebuffer support for Gtk+ is now in CVS. This means that you can now write a quick Gnome app that doesn't require X at all! Imagine a Gtk+-based distro installation that can run solely off the framebuffer! No more VESA hack and a significant disk space savings - maybe even a Gtk+-based bootloader? The screenshots are here, here and here." Obviously the screenshots aren't very special, but I'm having no problem thinking of interesting, useful tasks for this.

Rayban writes: "Just noticed on news.gnome.org that the Linux framebuffer support for Gtk+ is now in CVS. This means that you can now write a quick Gnome app that doesn't require X at all! Imagine a Gtk+-based distro installation that can run solely off the framebuffer! No more VESA hack and a significant disk space savings - maybe even a Gtk+-based bootloader? The screenshots are here, here and here." Obviously the screenshots aren't very special, but I'm having no problem thinking of interesting, useful tasks for this.

xemu writes: "This 670 m small robot designed to manipulate single cells inside your body reminds me of the noocytes in Blood Music by Greg Bear. Both the complete article from Science and an abstract are available online; the first link xemu points out has Quicktime videos of the beast in action, for those so equipped. According to the article, "[t]his microrobotic arm can pick up, lift, move, and place micrometer-size objects within an area of about 250 micrometers by 100 micrometers." That's small.

pinkunicorn writes "The teen sued for linking to MP3 files has been freed by the local court (the article is in Swedish which Babelfish doesn't grok). The court says that he's still guilty of assisting copyright crimes, but since that wasn't what he was accused of he will be let off. " Update: 09/15 10:29 by H :Thanks to Martin Wickman for a quick translation/summary-click below to read it in English.

7 year old free from charges in swedish mp3-case

The district court of Skövde announces today that the 17-year old who had using links to mp3-files on his homepage, is now acquited. Justification being that the 17-year old had only been directing to, not distributing the actual files. The classification was "crime against the copyright law through digital mp3-technics".

Even though he is now acquited, the court thinks he is guilty of complicity to crime against the copyright law. But since he was never prosecuted for that crime, he is released.

This is the first time in Europe a mp3-case has been brought to court. Its the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) who prosecuted the 17-year ord. The organisation has charged him with fines, but crimes against the copyright law can result in up to two years in prison. IFPI has not yet responded if it will appeal against the judgement.

Hedonick writes "Seems like a combination of maturity on Linux behalf and bloat on Microsofts part has prompted GM to investigate the possibility of replacing their NT based solution with a Linux based for it's dealerships according to ComputerWorld The whole plan seems to be a bit tentative at the moment but the guy they interviewed, David E. Hutka, is the operations manager for GM:s dealership network and makes some good points on why Linux would be a good (and bad) choice." Unfortunately, it looks like they have a lot of legacy code that may require porting, but it's still good news.

hedonick wrote in to let us know that SGI will be releasing XFS under the terms of the GPL. It looks like they want to use it to replace ext2 under Linux. Since XFS is a journaling filesystem, this is something I'm personally looking forward to.

fACTOR writes "The Robot World Cup is an initiative to encourage research in artificial intelligence and robotics by applying the new technology to the world's most popular sport - soccer. If this idea takes off, maybe pro sports salaries will drop, and there will be a new kind of job created: "sports robot programmer."

redhog asks this question dealing with the viral nature of the GPL: "I have a program that interprets a set of documents, and outputs text according to the commands and text in this document. The output consists partly of code hardcoded into the program. If the program is GPLed, then that part of the output would be, too. Here is where the problem arises: The program must be able to generate proprietary output from proprietary input, and it is technically impossible to separate the program and the code being output. Is it possible to GPL parts of a program? The best would be if the program (including the code that is output) was GPLed as a program, but its output not; i.e. as long as the code to be output is in the program, it is GPLed, but as soon as it is isolated, it is not (And may use a BSD-style license). Is there any way to acomplish this?" I think I can clarify this a bit. If your interested, hit the link for more.

What I think redhog is describing is similar to a situation like this: A GPL'd program is designed to take input from a macro or markup language and convert it into another macro/markup language. To facilitate this conversion, the program defines its own macros, which are included in the output to simplify matters (this is the hardcoded portion that can't be removed from the GPL'd program). Can proprietary output be built on the included GPL'd macros? Or will the viral nature of the GPL extend to the whole output violating the IP of the corporation using it?

AT writes "The new Mozilla Gecko display engine has been embedded into a GTK widget. This means that you can embed webpages into your application, just like you might with an ActiveX control under Windows. " Can I embed mozilla in mozilla yet?

JariK writes "Linus Torvalds will recieve an honorary doctorate from the University of Stockholm Mathematical Department. The information can be found, regrettably in Swedish only. " Well, my Swedish is rusty - anyone post a translation below?

Thorbjorn Jemander wrote in (as an update on a previous story) to tell us that Jean-Louis Gassée, CEO of Be Inc is offering BeOS at zero-cost to any OEM that will install BeOS completely on its PCs: BeOS must be a boot option or launchable from the other OS, something that Microsoft apparently prohibits. He does not expect OEMs will take up the offer because they will not want to lose Microsoft's Windows Rebate. His argument also applies to Linux: Despite the slew of announcements that Tier-1 manufacturers were going to sell computers pre-installed with Linux, it's revealing to see that the computers discussed were either servers, or in the case of IBM, PCs on which Linux is installed by the reseller (not IBM). News.com also reported on this Thomas wonders if this offer will provide the DOJ with unrefutable proof of Microsoft's monopoly.

alexl writes "The winner of the best of COMDEX award in the "Best Internet Software" class is... Roxen Platform. A less known fact is that the core part of the platform, the Roxen Challenger webserver, is free software, licenced under the GPL. There is even a pointer to it in the official Gnu archive. "

Per Lewau writes "I was scanning the GGI mailing list archives and appearently SciTech have decided to Free their graphics library MGL. Appearantly this lib was used to create Hexen II and WinQuake." Here is the post, here is the license, and don't forget to visit The MGL Site.