Slashdot Mirror

Rodger Crawford writes "Apparently Al Gore has a history of latching on to high-tech buzzword. So much so, that 3 years ago, MIT student played a friendly game of 'Buzzword Bingo' during Gore's graduation speech. " I figured we might as well go with the trend and just continue ripping on the yutz. I've never been so excited to vote against someone before *grin*.

Buddha writes "Ever dream about floating around? We're going to do it, with Linux. Everybody's seen Apollo 13, right? All those shots of Tom Hanks floating around were actually him floating around! The crew rented NASA's Vomit Comet to pull it off. We're a group of 4 MIT students, and we're training to fly on the Vomit Comet -- we're slated to fly in one week. Our testing software is all written for Linux. Follow us as we get ready. "

Buddha writes "Ever dream about floating around? We're going to do it, with Linux. Everybody's seen Apollo 13, right? All those shots of Tom Hanks floating around were actually him floating around! The crew rented NASA's Vomit Comet to pull it off. We're a group of 4 MIT students, and we're training to fly on the Vomit Comet -- we're slated to fly in one week. Our testing software is all written for Linux. Follow us as we get ready. "

Karim sent us a link to a sweet little article on Douglas Engelbart, best known as being the who invented that mouse thing that has completely changed the landscape of the computing world. The article is interesting- about research, and finance, and the industry as a whole. Worth a read.

Matt Lee sent us a story about Lycos hopping on the mp3 bandwagon and creating a search engine to find the controversial music format. The funniest part is that 'mp3' is the second most search-for word on Lycos. After 'sex'. Anyway I'm glad to see it.

David Jao writes "According to this news.com story, Apple computer has begun charging a $1 license fee for every FireWire port that is manufactured. This means an extra $1 is charged for every port in the back of a computer, every port on a device, and every link in a device chain." This article talks about how this is probably not such a hot idea on Apple's part. Royalties on a technology that still isn't really accepted yet?

Jean-Paul Smets has opened his new site Freepatents.org (mostly in English), which encourages Europe to maintain its no-software patents law. This law is apparently under threat. He's also well known for this study of the economics of free software (in french only at the moment, contact me if you can translate it, but you can use babelfish in the meantime). The new site contains the text of a resolution adopted by the french ISOC at its Autrans meeting, which requests that before Europe introduces any patent law a detailed study be conducted to determine the impact of patents on innovation, competition and free software, and that provisions are added to ensure large corporations cannot use patents as a legal manoeuvre to block innovation, competition and free software. The League of Programming cites example of patent misuse and reasons to be against software patents.

Jean-Paul Smets has opened his new site Freepatents.org (mostly in English), which encourages Europe to maintain its no-software patents law. This law is apparently under threat. He's also well known for this study of the economics of free software (in french only at the moment, contact me if you can translate it, but you can use babelfish in the meantime). The new site contains the text of a resolution adopted by the french ISOC at its Autrans meeting, which requests that before Europe introduces any patent law a detailed study be conducted to determine the impact of patents on innovation, competition and free software, and that provisions are added to ensure large corporations cannot use patents as a legal manoeuvre to block innovation, competition and free software. The League of Programming cites example of patent misuse and reasons to be against software patents.

Otter writes " ghost sites is a monthly (?) publication devoted to identifying and cataloging web sites that have been abandoned on their servers. It's the digital equivalent of wandering through a deserted town." Otter found this over at ">Upside.

Jikes has been released as Open Source today, under the following pretty unrestrictive licence, which has been endorsed by Bruce Perens of Open Source. This is a big step since Jikes is a leading Java compiler and is really fast. It also signals the first Open Source license that IBM has crafted, this being their original code. I hope this will be the beginning of a successful relationship between IBM and the Open Source community. Read below the slashdot exclusive nerd announcement from Dave Shields, one of the Jikes co-authors and the open-source contact for Jikes. Jikes is Now Open Source

On behalf of IBM Research, Philippe Charles and Dave Shields are pleased to announce that the IBM Research Jikes Compiler is now an Open Source Project. You can download the source now.

We will continue to work on the compiler, emphasizing -- as we always have -- strict adherence to the Java Language Specification, and will also continue to seek Sun's guidance on the proper interpretation of the specification where we find the intent to be unclear.

All discussion will be carried out in full public view using mailing lists. You can subscribe here.

We look forward to collaborating with the Java and Open Source communities to make Jikes an even better compiler, and will welcome voluntary contributions early in 1999 -- after we've all had a chance to get acquainted via the mailing list before hacking away, and after the two of us take some vacation time.

We wish to thank the many Slashdot readers who gave of their time to respond to our query "Should IBM Release the Source Code for Jikes?" (see the Comment Summary) , and also thank Sengan Baring-Gould (slashdot), Nelson Minar (MIT) and Bruce Perens (opensource.org) -- they helped make this happen.

End of announcement

Ok here are the pitfalls you may encounter in getting Jikes up and running, so beware: the zipped distribution contains text in DOS-format, so gnu make chokes on it. Make sure you unzip with the -a option. The tar.gz version has the files in *NIX format. Also, some distributions, such as Red Hat 4.2 do not have wchar.h which is needed. I got it to compile by making sure the Red Hat (libc5) entry was the last above OBJECTS in the Makefile and executing touch /usr/include/wchar.h as root. Also you'll need the JDK from blackdown.org to compile anything with jikes.

True story: Dave Shields ate out at a Chinese restaurant Saturday. His fortune: "Very soon, and in pleasant company"! That's us ;-)

Otter writes "The Onion seems to be a popular read among Slashdotters. There's a fun article about it in Upside describing the Onion folks as a collection of truly disturbed people. They've swung a $450,000 book deal with Crown and an MTV Christmas special, and are negotiating for a network TV special. " I guess you've arrived when you get your own MTV Christmas special. Pretty cool though. I wouldn't mind a 6 figure book deal. I could call it "Document Contains No Data". Allright, so I oughtta stick to perl *grin*.

After a long night in the darkroom working on photography projects, nothing will make me happier than cleaning out the submissions box. So hit the link below and read the huge flood of stuff that has been accumulating while I've been trying to vanquish my end-of-the-semester projects. There is a ton of cool stuff in there worth checking out. Realcosmo commented that OpenBios Project Is looking for a logo. Visit their page for info. James Keller wrote in to send us an entertaining article about using Microsoft Manuals as Targets . Idan Shoham wrote in to say that the The Linux in business reference page has grown to 300 entries of companies that use Linux in a mission-critical setting. Good PHB data.

jahn wrote in to send us a link to Linus and RMS in a techno remix of Join us Now and Share the Software. I think we mentioned this a few months ago, but probably bears repeating anyway. I'm on a total MP3 craze again (4.5 gigs and growing) so this is entertaining me all over again.

[-SwM-] wrote in to send us a link to an online version of Rock Paper Scissors. Goofy. DaveWhitinger from Linux Today wrote in to say that Linux Mandrake 5.2 is available. Gordon Delp sent a link to a new FreeBSD news site called (appropriately enough) FreeBSD Rocks

acb wrote in to send us an entertaining parody of O'Reilly book covers. Several folks commented that WindowMaker v0.20.3 is now out, and several other folks commented that it has a new logo "Well, as you can see the new official logo has been put in place, and the logo contest is officially over. We appreciate all the logo submissions and the people who took time to vote. You can read about the winning entries here." LynXmaN wrote in to send us a link to Sololinux.com, a Spanish Linux News site. have opened. Ant wrote in to send us a link to Quake 2 Penguin Models for you penguin nuts. YogSothoth writes "I've always been interested in fractals, but what I always thought would be fun would be a scripting language-based approach that would give you a lot flexibility (with regard to choosing equations, bailout conditions, coloring techniques) without requiring a math degree to enjoy. Its hot off the presses but works quite well." you can check out Samples or Source Code. Vorx wrote in to warn everyone that this weeks User Friendly has been featuring a strange Star Wars/Linux/ESR takeoff that folks might enjoy reading. Bain wrote in to send us a link to a company that is selling Tux Stuffed Animals that actually look like tux.

Nate, My roommate and all around swell guy, has put a bunch of his Gimp Artwork online if you're interested in that sorta stuff. Its pretty excellent. Chris DiBona wrote in to send us a link to Chick Magnet which has some cool essays including one that explains that the best place for women to pick up guys is at Linux User Group Meetings. Quite funny. J. David Eisenberg wrote in to send us A response to his article on Linux and the Consumer Market. This addresses comments made by Slashdot Readers. Also, his opinions on the KDE thing which probably isn't all that relevant anymore.

See? Lots of good stuff! Anyway, I'm gonna get some sleep so I can get up nice and early and get back on the grind. The zany thing is that in 340 or so hours, I'm ton. Forever. No more school. Then I can finally finish Slash v0.3, fix the rest of the bugs in Slashdot, and actually start working on all the new stuff thats coming. Yee haw. In the meantime, I just wanna beg folks to go easy on the email. Don't hesitate if its important, but please read FAQ first and save us all some time.

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. "

Andrew Cooke has sent us a review of Harold Abelson, Gerald Jay Sussman with Julie Sussman's book Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. This is not a book for those who are getting into coding for the first time-this is a nice, big MIT press book that assumes you're smart, and that you want to learn. So, if you want to check out what they think you need to do, click below. Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs author Harold Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman with Julie Sussman pages publisher The MIT Press rating 9/10 reviewer Andrew Cooke ISBN summary A huge range of practical computing knowledge, but more tutorial than REVIEW: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs Harold Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman with Julie Sussman The MIT Press

Nutshell
Review: A huge range of practical computing knowledge, but more tutorial than bottled wisdom. With Scheme.
Rating: 9/10 Reviewed by: Andrew Cooke The Scenario

I am a software engineer: it is my responsibility to produce code that works, and that continues to work. I am also someone with no formal education in computing who wants to learn more about the science. My attention was caught by several reviews on the web about this book - it seemed to be one of the recognised classics of computing science - so I decided to educate myself.

What's in it?

By the end of the first chapter (of only five) I had a grounding in Scheme. I guess the book could be used by someone who has never programmed before, but they would have to be pretty sharp - there is little repetition.

The second chapter covers data structures and associated algorithms. Again, a lot of ground is covered very quickly.

After syntax and data comes a chapter on programming paradigms.

The final two chapters look at implementing new languages. Curiously (it makes sense in the context of the book, but how many readers will never have hacked assembler before reading this?), the book finishes with a discussion of register machines.

What's Good?

The range. No other programming book I have read covers so many topics. If I had to pick my three personal favourite Good Ideas, I would choose:

• Functional programming (no state - no assignment to variables - and yes, it does seem strange at first!).
• Closure in data structures (so a subtree looks the same as a tree - how does this conflict with careful typing?).
• (Infinite) streams (using lazy evaluation to generate sequences).

These are not all new to me (although I have always used imperative languages), but in every case this book let me see a lot more than before. No doubt someone else would take away a completely different set of ideas - have a look at the Contents to get an idea of what might interest you.

What's A Necessary Evil?

It is impossible to resist the temptation to review Scheme when reviewing this book. After reading the first few pages I was stunned: what kind of person would enjoy using a language like this?

Imagine waking up knowing you have to go to work fixing the bugs in code written by your colleague down the hall - and you are using a language that does not have static types, objects, or even loops!

After the first chapter I could live without loops and by the end of the book I understood why Scheme had been - and had to be - used. Nothing else I have seen is as flexible and compact (if we rule out J for its illegibility :-)

But I would still hate to use this language at work.

What's Bad?

Ultimately, this is a book written for students. If you have experience in software development then you have to be prepared to skim sections. Maybe I was naive, but the reviews I had read suggested this was pure distilled wisdom - it is not.

If the authors had been able to aim a little higher (already this book could easily be intimidating to a newbie programmer, so why not drop the very basic stuff completely?) then maybe they could have used a less compact, more easily read language, with type safety and multi-threading (I do not have a recommendation, but have a peek at ML).

So What's In It For Me?

An introduction to new good ideas. A reminder of old good ideas. Much thought.

Pick this book up over at Amazon.

Table of Contents

1. Building Abstractions with Procedures
   1. The Elements of Programming
   2. Procedures and the Processes They Generate
   3. Formulating Abstractions with Higher-Order Procedures
2. Building Abstractions with Data
   1. Introduction to Data Abstraction
   2. Hierarchical Data and the Closure Property
   3. Symbolic Data
   4. Multiple Representations for Abstract Data
   5. Systems with Generic Operations
3. Modularity, Objects, and State
   1. Assignment and Local State
   2. The Environment Mode of Evaluation
   3. Modelling with Mutable Data
   4. Concurrency: Time Is of the Essence
   5. Streams
4. Metalinguistic Abstraction
   1. The Metacircular Evaluator
   2. Variations on a Scheme - Lazy Evaluation
   3. Variations on a Scheme - Nondeterministic Computing
   4. Logic Programming
5. Computing with Register Machines
   1. Designing Register Machines
   2. A Register-Machine Simulator
   3. Storage Allocation and Garbage Collection
   4. The Explicit-Control Evaluator
   5. Compilation

Tim Macinta writes "A new site called KMFMS is parodying the artwork of the band KMFDM in a way that takes aim at Microsoft (as you may have guessed from the name). The current artwork was done by BRUTE! (i.e., the same guy who does the artwork for KMFDM) and it features a very mean looking Tux giving Bill Gates a piece of his mind. There is some swag available with the artwork on it - anybody up for making some KMFMS themes? " We mentioned this before, but you can actually get those shirts now.

Nate, resident Everything developer and consumate chef-and book reviewer has written a review of Gary William Flake's The Computational Beauty of Nature : Computer Explorations of Fractals, Chaos, Complex Systems, and Adaptation . This is an excellent book for those interested in more of the theory and philosphy behind nature, and is recommended for all geeks out there. The Computational Beauty of Nature author Gary William Flake pages publisher Mit Press rating 10+/10 reviewer Nate ISBN 0-262-06200-3 summary A remarkable and fascinating tour through aspects of Fractals, Chaos, Complex Systems, and Adaption. The Computational Beauty of Nature is a major work, spanning and relating subjects as diverse as fractals, neural networks, genetic algorithms, infinite sets, and the game of life. Geek/Hacker Gary Flake introduces and explains these concepts in an informal tone, which makes reading it enjoyable and understandable.

A Labor of Love

The author refers to this work as a "labor of love," and it's plain to see that it is exactly that: the expression of a Computer Scientist's love for his work. If you've ever known the exhilaration of realizing a new computer science concept, this book will take you on a whirlwind tour of some of the most fascinating concepts in the field.

Difficulty

This book was engineered so that it can be approached at different levels. Anybody with a solid high school math background, or even a logical mind will be able to comprehend the concepts introduced. Reading this book from page one all the way through would be an ambitious project for a college-level course, but many of the sections are easily read independantly. As a senior Comp Sci major, the book was very enjoyable and easy to read -- though I had to stop reading it before bed because I never wanted to go to sleep. Readers who have not taken a Comp Sci Theory course will probably want to read the first chapter, which covers many of the fundamental ideas that are extrapolated on in later sections.

The author explains that if you hit a concept that you can't easily understand, you should skip and move on. The book is well written to give a good general view of a concept, but also provide specific details for the extremely CS literate. In addition, most sections have references to "further reading" in case you are completely smitten... The diagrams are also extremely helpful for visual learners, since many of the topics have basic graphic representations.

The Format

The book is in a standard textbook format, but this works well because it allows for a plethora of interesting digressions. Much of the time, a digression will reference another section of the book dealing with a completely different, yet strongly related topic. (Of course, in my ideal universe, this whole book would be browsable and hyperlinked, so I could stream-of-consciousness my way to my masters degree.) In addition, many of the examples have corresponding code examples are to play with. (I was impressed, there's even windows binaries...)

Summary

I enjoyed this book immensely, and would definitely recommend it to anyone with a lust for the science behind these ridiculous boxes. But you can't borrow my copy. It's staying in the basement next to my poof chair and my gun...

To buy this book head over to Amazon.

Visit the CBN Web Page which has more info...

--nate

Nate, resident Everything developer and consumate chef-and book reviewer has written a review of Gary William Flake's The Computational Beauty of Nature : Computer Explorations of Fractals, Chaos, Complex Systems, and Adaptation . This is an excellent book for those interested in more of the theory and philosphy behind nature, and is recommended for all geeks out there. The Computational Beauty of Nature author Gary William Flake pages publisher Mit Press rating 10+/10 reviewer Nate ISBN 0-262-06200-3 summary A remarkable and fascinating tour through aspects of Fractals, Chaos, Complex Systems, and Adaption. The Computational Beauty of Nature is a major work, spanning and relating subjects as diverse as fractals, neural networks, genetic algorithms, infinite sets, and the game of life. Geek/Hacker Gary Flake introduces and explains these concepts in an informal tone, which makes reading it enjoyable and understandable.

A Labor of Love

The author refers to this work as a "labor of love," and it's plain to see that it is exactly that: the expression of a Computer Scientist's love for his work. If you've ever known the exhilaration of realizing a new computer science concept, this book will take you on a whirlwind tour of some of the most fascinating concepts in the field.

Difficulty

This book was engineered so that it can be approached at different levels. Anybody with a solid high school math background, or even a logical mind will be able to comprehend the concepts introduced. Reading this book from page one all the way through would be an ambitious project for a college-level course, but many of the sections are easily read independantly. As a senior Comp Sci major, the book was very enjoyable and easy to read -- though I had to stop reading it before bed because I never wanted to go to sleep. Readers who have not taken a Comp Sci Theory course will probably want to read the first chapter, which covers many of the fundamental ideas that are extrapolated on in later sections.

The author explains that if you hit a concept that you can't easily understand, you should skip and move on. The book is well written to give a good general view of a concept, but also provide specific details for the extremely CS literate. In addition, most sections have references to "further reading" in case you are completely smitten... The diagrams are also extremely helpful for visual learners, since many of the topics have basic graphic representations.

The Format

The book is in a standard textbook format, but this works well because it allows for a plethora of interesting digressions. Much of the time, a digression will reference another section of the book dealing with a completely different, yet strongly related topic. (Of course, in my ideal universe, this whole book would be browsable and hyperlinked, so I could stream-of-consciousness my way to my masters degree.) In addition, many of the examples have corresponding code examples are to play with. (I was impressed, there's even windows binaries...)

Summary

I enjoyed this book immensely, and would definitely recommend it to anyone with a lust for the science behind these ridiculous boxes. But you can't borrow my copy. It's staying in the basement next to my poof chair and my gun...

To buy this book head over to Amazon.

Visit the CBN Web Page which has more info...

--nate

Nate, resident Everything developer and consumate chef-and book reviewer has written a review of Gary William Flake's The Computational Beauty of Nature : Computer Explorations of Fractals, Chaos, Complex Systems, and Adaptation . This is an excellent book for those interested in more of the theory and philosphy behind nature, and is recommended for all geeks out there. The Computational Beauty of Nature author Gary William Flake pages publisher Mit Press rating 10+/10 reviewer Nate ISBN 0-262-06200-3 summary A remarkable and fascinating tour through aspects of Fractals, Chaos, Complex Systems, and Adaption. The Computational Beauty of Nature is a major work, spanning and relating subjects as diverse as fractals, neural networks, genetic algorithms, infinite sets, and the game of life. Geek/Hacker Gary Flake introduces and explains these concepts in an informal tone, which makes reading it enjoyable and understandable.

A Labor of Love

The author refers to this work as a "labor of love," and it's plain to see that it is exactly that: the expression of a Computer Scientist's love for his work. If you've ever known the exhilaration of realizing a new computer science concept, this book will take you on a whirlwind tour of some of the most fascinating concepts in the field.

Difficulty

This book was engineered so that it can be approached at different levels. Anybody with a solid high school math background, or even a logical mind will be able to comprehend the concepts introduced. Reading this book from page one all the way through would be an ambitious project for a college-level course, but many of the sections are easily read independantly. As a senior Comp Sci major, the book was very enjoyable and easy to read -- though I had to stop reading it before bed because I never wanted to go to sleep. Readers who have not taken a Comp Sci Theory course will probably want to read the first chapter, which covers many of the fundamental ideas that are extrapolated on in later sections.

The author explains that if you hit a concept that you can't easily understand, you should skip and move on. The book is well written to give a good general view of a concept, but also provide specific details for the extremely CS literate. In addition, most sections have references to "further reading" in case you are completely smitten... The diagrams are also extremely helpful for visual learners, since many of the topics have basic graphic representations.

The Format

The book is in a standard textbook format, but this works well because it allows for a plethora of interesting digressions. Much of the time, a digression will reference another section of the book dealing with a completely different, yet strongly related topic. (Of course, in my ideal universe, this whole book would be browsable and hyperlinked, so I could stream-of-consciousness my way to my masters degree.) In addition, many of the examples have corresponding code examples are to play with. (I was impressed, there's even windows binaries...)

Summary

I enjoyed this book immensely, and would definitely recommend it to anyone with a lust for the science behind these ridiculous boxes. But you can't borrow my copy. It's staying in the basement next to my poof chair and my gun...

To buy this book head over to Amazon.

Visit the CBN Web Page which has more info...

--nate

Christopher Barry wrote in to say "Quite some time ago Slashdot ran the story of the ICPF contest the day that it started. Now we've got the results and some source code: available online"

Sam Sharma writes "MIT has released the code for their exokernel. The exokernel is an absolutely minimal kernel - the only thing the kernel does is securely provide raw resources to applications. No filesystem, no high level networking, etc... . They claim this speeds up a lot of apps, for example by reducing user space to kernel space task swithing. They want developers. I'll help if I can. "

Maciej Stachowiak writes "The recent 0.6 release of The Hunry Programmers' Japhar JVM now supports Open JVM Interface (OJI). This means that you can use it with Mozilla and have Java support. "

Maciej Stachowiak writes "Cygnus announced a new Open Source Real Time Operating System for the embedded market today. A press release is available. Further information, including licensing and preliminary documentation, is available. This is a good thing for the embedded market, which has always needed highly customizable solutions. "

Aaron M. Renn writes "Richard Stallman posted a message on gnu.misc.discuss seeking people interested in re-establishing the League of Programming Freedom. The LPF did not take a position on proprietary vs. free software but instead focused on fighting those things which threated the ability of anyone to write software, specifically software patents and look and feel copyrights. The LPF is now dormant, but if people are willing to step up into a leadership role to work to re-establish this organization, it could become active again. I don't think I need to tell anyone here that software patents are worse than ever, not to mention such monstrosities as WIPO. Stallman's article is not yet on DejaNews, but the message is is 199809161619.KAA25917@wijiji.santafe.edu The LPF web site is archived here "

Gary William Flake has written a book entitled ``The Computational Beauty of Nature: Computer Explorations of Fractals, Chaos, Complex Systems, and Adaptation.'' The book's companion website is located at here. Art & Math can work so well together sometimes. Tom Murphy sent us a link to Chris Wenham os OS/2 E-zine's rant on Conspiracy Theories anf the FSF. Mentions Slashdot for some reason too. alank sent us an article on free software that you might enjoy. Gunfighter wrote in to say that recent User Friendly strips will be of interest to Red Hat users, Finally W. O. Frobozz sent us a link to an article about Gary Kildall of CP/M and DRI fame. Worthwhile read.

Gary William Flake has written a book entitled ``The Computational Beauty of Nature: Computer Explorations of Fractals, Chaos, Complex Systems, and Adaptation.'' The book's companion website is located at here. Art & Math can work so well together sometimes. Tom Murphy sent us a link to Chris Wenham os OS/2 E-zine's rant on Conspiracy Theories anf the FSF. Mentions Slashdot for some reason too. alank sent us an article on free software that you might enjoy. Gunfighter wrote in to say that recent User Friendly strips will be of interest to Red Hat users, Finally W. O. Frobozz sent us a link to an article about Gary Kildall of CP/M and DRI fame. Worthwhile read.

Matt Welland writes "For anyone wanting to show off their prowess in programming the ICFP Functional Programming Contest has started. Great way to kill a weekend!"

Big Dave Diode writes "I don't know if this has been submitted before, but those media lab dudes at MIT have a talking stuffed penguin that runs Linux. Just the thing to get the kids involved in Linux."

Garrett Goebel has written in with a short review of the WP8 demo. He starts off: Well, I have downloaded (bz2 or gz) Corel WordPerfect 8.0 for Linux and have been playing around with it for a couple days now... and I have to say that I'm pretty happy. It is a full featured, intuitive, WYSIWYG. -Oh, and I haven't had a crash or needed to reboot my Linux box yet ;-) I was wondering what experience other people are having?

Personally, if WordPerfect 8.0 foreshadows what is to come with the full Corel Office Suite for Linux, then I'm drooling in anticipation. Corel's Resource Guide for the WordPerfect 8.0 Office Suite covers the functionality we can look for in the Linux version. For your average corporate desktop end user, there will be no reason not to run Linux. After all, if you're used to M$ Word, then switching over is easy (short of rewriting all those macros)

Word Perfect has pretty much the same line up of features as M$ Word, and a couple extras. For instance, the shadow cursor which give you real WYSIWYG point click and type "right there" editing. Another thing: It starts up quicker than M$ Word. One feature I couldn't find much documentation on was "remote window". -Will we be able to telecommute in and co-edit documents?

The benefit of having a full featured office suite for Linux, to which your average PC user can easily convert can not be understated. If Corporate IS ever catches on, they'd realize immense savings in licensing and supporting their PC infrastructure. -Not to mention more uptime.

Garrett Goebel has written in with a short review of the WP8 demo. He starts off: Well, I have downloaded (bz2 or gz) Corel WordPerfect 8.0 for Linux and have been playing around with it for a couple days now... and I have to say that I'm pretty happy. It is a full featured, intuitive, WYSIWYG. -Oh, and I haven't had a crash or needed to reboot my Linux box yet ;-) I was wondering what experience other people are having?

Personally, if WordPerfect 8.0 foreshadows what is to come with the full Corel Office Suite for Linux, then I'm drooling in anticipation. Corel's Resource Guide for the WordPerfect 8.0 Office Suite covers the functionality we can look for in the Linux version. For your average corporate desktop end user, there will be no reason not to run Linux. After all, if you're used to M$ Word, then switching over is easy (short of rewriting all those macros)

Word Perfect has pretty much the same line up of features as M$ Word, and a couple extras. For instance, the shadow cursor which give you real WYSIWYG point click and type "right there" editing. Another thing: It starts up quicker than M$ Word. One feature I couldn't find much documentation on was "remote window". -Will we be able to telecommute in and co-edit documents?

The benefit of having a full featured office suite for Linux, to which your average PC user can easily convert can not be understated. If Corporate IS ever catches on, they'd realize immense savings in licensing and supporting their PC infrastructure. -Not to mention more uptime.

Eaglemoon sent us a link to MITs Orca-1 Submarine which apparently is run by an onboard linux system. It just won a contest that involved deploying a marker at the deepest point of a lake, while running unattended. Oh, the places Linux will go... automated subs, automated cars, the space shuttle. Ain't it cool?

Tim Macinta writes "Google quite possibly the most accurate search engine out there, now has the capability narrow your search focus to search all major Linux sites Give it a try - they use a pretty unique ranking algorithm for search results and it usually results in very accurate results at least for the main search service (I haven't pounded on the Linux search service much yet). It's also interesting to note that the servers which run Google are running Linux. " Several folks have submitted this, but today was the first time that I successfully used Google without it crashing. It looks pretty excellent.

An anonymous reader submitted the following: "Slashdot readers may be interested in the Cilk Programming Language, a small extension to C that makes efficient fine-grained multithreaded programming for parallel machines surprisingly painless. The theory and implementation tricks they use are worth studying. If SMP versions of Linux become standard then a language like this could be useful. "

Karl Fogel writes "Ben Sussman and I have written a demo implementation of Ron Rivest's "Chaffing & Winnowing" algorithm, which we first heard about on Slashdot (it's now also mentioned in the July issue of Wired Magazine). Get the implementation or read Rivest's original paper The ciphertext output is designed to have an appearance closely resembling the packets discussed in Rivest's paper. I wouldn't use this package for your life-and-death, top-secret communications, but on the other hand it's a fun way to send semi-secret messages and use up a LOT of bandwidth in the process. Of course, it's GNU GPL'd, and -- as far as we know -- free of export restrictions. Enjoy!, -Karl Fogel "

Piotr Mitros writes "Remember Gyve, the drawing program from Japan meant to complement Gimp? Well, it's finally reaching a state of early usability. It still core-dumps a lot, and parts of it are awfully slow, but it's already possible to draw, add text, manipulate objects, etc. with it. " Looks quite impressive. When the 36 hour day ammendment passes, I'm going to download it and give it a try.

Tim Macinta wrote in with a very simple question, that I never thought about before. He asks " are there any Linux centric companies which are publicly traded? I've spent several hours looking for one but the closest thing I've found is Netscape. If there are any, I'd like to help them out by buying a little of their stock. Of course this would probably help me out too because I think that this would be a good time to invest in such a company."

Justin Cave writes "CNN's running an editorial on the use of 'hacker' when they mean 'cracker'. Kinda cool. link"

Maciej Stachowiak has written an editorial on MP3s, and the major problem with the format. Now I'm not a huge MP3 freak (althought I have d/l 'em, play 'em, and bought many CDs because of 'em :) but I know a lot of you folks are, so read what Maciej has to say and let's hear your voices on the issue.

The following is an editorial by Slashdot Reader Maciej Stachowiak

MPEG Layer 3 and Software Patents

MPEG Layer 3 format audio (MP3) is seeing a lot of interest and exposure in the free software community. It is a remarkable technology, allowing CD-quality audio to be heavily compressed without loss of sound quality, allowing reasonable storage of large amounts of music on digital media. However, the MP3 format is protected by strong patents. Although the patent holders have allowed certain decoders for the format to be freely distributed, the licensing terms under which the patent is available make MP3 a dangerous standard for the free software community to adopt. This article investigates the broad scope of these patent claims, and explains why we in the free software community, especially those of us interested in music, should seek out alternate formats.

Many people believe that because MPEG layer 3 is a so-called open standard, anyone can implement it. Unfortunately, this is not the case. THOMSON multimedia and Frauenhofer IIS hold a number of patents related to MP3 technology, and have pooled them to be licensed as a unit. Patent restrictions on what is supposed to be an international open standard is a travesty if these patents are not freely licensed to all implementors of the standard - it is irresponsible for any standards body to accept such technology as a standard. The existence of such patents means that even those implementing the technology straight from the standard, without examining the original source code, must pay the licensing fees. But examining the scope of the claims makes it clear that the situation is even worse than it might initially appear. The following discussion is culled from the MP3 Licensing FAQ available at href=http://www.mpeg.org/~tristan/MPEG/mp3-licensing-faq.html

THOMSON and Frauenhofer are relatively generous with the patents for MP3 decoding technology. The licensing FAQ states: "For the FREE distribution of decoders we do not charge a royalty. At the Fraunhofer IIS and OPTICOM web-sites you can find the players we have developed and which may be downloaded for FREE also. Fraunhofer IIS and OPTICOM do not give any technical support for the free players. ... More in general, as long as desktop software decoders are distributed free-of-charge for personal use, no license fee is expected." However, if any money is charged for distribution, or if the decoder is used for more than personal use, a royalty structure automatically kicks in. This leads to two obvious problems. First, no MP3 player may distributed as fully free software; it can only be "free for non-commercial use". This is a big problem in itself - it means that many distributions of Linux or other operating systems will not be able to distribute such software on principle, and that projects like KDE and GNOME that aim to be free software cannot provide fully integrated MP3 support on the desktop. Worse yet, users will never be able to get any MP3 player on CD, even a semi-free one, because the royalties kick in when the software is distributed for any fee, even a copying fee, and even if the software is freely redistributable.

The situation with encoders is even worse. A lot of people have talked about the fact that there isn't any MP3 encoder available for Linux at a reasonable price. The reason is this section of the Licensing FAQ: "Q. OK, I understand that most of the distribution of software decoders is free of charge, is this the same for the software encoders? A. No, while we basically support the freeware concept for software players, for all encoders a license is needed." The royalty for distributing encoders starts at $25 per unit, and carries a $10,000 yearly minimum. Suffice it to say, we will not be seeing encoders at a reasonable price ever. Making music to be distributed in MP3 format will be limited to those who are willing to shell out money, and who are willing to use proprietary software. Composers who are also free software hackers, such as myself, are naturally alarmed.

But the worst part of the MP3 patent is that the patent holders claim the right to receive royalties for any MP3-format data that is distrubuted for a charge, that is broadcast through any kind of "Internet Radio" application, or that is distributed on CD-ROM. I refer the reader to the FAQ for the specific fee schedules, but they are quite high, especially considering how many MP3's you can fit on one CD. This is a serious problem for any hobbyist musician. If MP3 becomes an established format for audio distribution, THOMSON and Frauenhofer will be collecting money on every sale, and only those with connections to a serious record label will be able to distribute their music in a standard format.

Because of these concerns, I urge people in the free software community, any programmers concerned about the increasing danger of software patents, those who believe in the integrity of open standards, and musicians who care about their freedom, to boycott the MP3 format. I also urge everyone to lobby the MPEG group to refuse to standardize any other media formats protected by restrictive patents (this is a serious danger for the upcoming MPEG 4 audio standard as well); to fight software patents in general; and to work on a truly open standard for compressed digital audio.

Maciej Stachowiak has written an editorial on MP3s, and the major problem with the format. Now I'm not a huge MP3 freak (althought I have d/l 'em, play 'em, and bought many CDs because of 'em :) but I know a lot of you folks are, so read what Maciej has to say and let's hear your voices on the issue.

The following is an editorial by Slashdot Reader Maciej Stachowiak

MPEG Layer 3 and Software Patents

MPEG Layer 3 format audio (MP3) is seeing a lot of interest and exposure in the free software community. It is a remarkable technology, allowing CD-quality audio to be heavily compressed without loss of sound quality, allowing reasonable storage of large amounts of music on digital media. However, the MP3 format is protected by strong patents. Although the patent holders have allowed certain decoders for the format to be freely distributed, the licensing terms under which the patent is available make MP3 a dangerous standard for the free software community to adopt. This article investigates the broad scope of these patent claims, and explains why we in the free software community, especially those of us interested in music, should seek out alternate formats.

Many people believe that because MPEG layer 3 is a so-called open standard, anyone can implement it. Unfortunately, this is not the case. THOMSON multimedia and Frauenhofer IIS hold a number of patents related to MP3 technology, and have pooled them to be licensed as a unit. Patent restrictions on what is supposed to be an international open standard is a travesty if these patents are not freely licensed to all implementors of the standard - it is irresponsible for any standards body to accept such technology as a standard. The existence of such patents means that even those implementing the technology straight from the standard, without examining the original source code, must pay the licensing fees. But examining the scope of the claims makes it clear that the situation is even worse than it might initially appear. The following discussion is culled from the MP3 Licensing FAQ available at href=http://www.mpeg.org/~tristan/MPEG/mp3-licensing-faq.html

THOMSON and Frauenhofer are relatively generous with the patents for MP3 decoding technology. The licensing FAQ states: "For the FREE distribution of decoders we do not charge a royalty. At the Fraunhofer IIS and OPTICOM web-sites you can find the players we have developed and which may be downloaded for FREE also. Fraunhofer IIS and OPTICOM do not give any technical support for the free players. ... More in general, as long as desktop software decoders are distributed free-of-charge for personal use, no license fee is expected." However, if any money is charged for distribution, or if the decoder is used for more than personal use, a royalty structure automatically kicks in. This leads to two obvious problems. First, no MP3 player may distributed as fully free software; it can only be "free for non-commercial use". This is a big problem in itself - it means that many distributions of Linux or other operating systems will not be able to distribute such software on principle, and that projects like KDE and GNOME that aim to be free software cannot provide fully integrated MP3 support on the desktop. Worse yet, users will never be able to get any MP3 player on CD, even a semi-free one, because the royalties kick in when the software is distributed for any fee, even a copying fee, and even if the software is freely redistributable.

The situation with encoders is even worse. A lot of people have talked about the fact that there isn't any MP3 encoder available for Linux at a reasonable price. The reason is this section of the Licensing FAQ: "Q. OK, I understand that most of the distribution of software decoders is free of charge, is this the same for the software encoders? A. No, while we basically support the freeware concept for software players, for all encoders a license is needed." The royalty for distributing encoders starts at $25 per unit, and carries a $10,000 yearly minimum. Suffice it to say, we will not be seeing encoders at a reasonable price ever. Making music to be distributed in MP3 format will be limited to those who are willing to shell out money, and who are willing to use proprietary software. Composers who are also free software hackers, such as myself, are naturally alarmed.

But the worst part of the MP3 patent is that the patent holders claim the right to receive royalties for any MP3-format data that is distrubuted for a charge, that is broadcast through any kind of "Internet Radio" application, or that is distributed on CD-ROM. I refer the reader to the FAQ for the specific fee schedules, but they are quite high, especially considering how many MP3's you can fit on one CD. This is a serious problem for any hobbyist musician. If MP3 becomes an established format for audio distribution, THOMSON and Frauenhofer will be collecting money on every sale, and only those with connections to a serious record label will be able to distribute their music in a standard format.

Because of these concerns, I urge people in the free software community, any programmers concerned about the increasing danger of software patents, those who believe in the integrity of open standards, and musicians who care about their freedom, to boycott the MP3 format. I also urge everyone to lobby the MPEG group to refuse to standardize any other media formats protected by restrictive patents (this is a serious danger for the upcoming MPEG 4 audio standard as well); to fight software patents in general; and to work on a truly open standard for compressed digital audio.

Matthew Gray writes "RMS posted to gnu.misc.discuss pointing out that Be's use of some GPL'd code (GNU termcap and the Linux 3c509 driver, specifically) is in violation of the GPL. Of course, it's been pointed out if the copyright holders don't pursue it, nothing may happen. See news:199805100124.TAA12962@wijiji.santafe.edu (It isn't in dejanews yet) "

Corel has announced that they are going to support Linux, by porting all their apps, and opening up the development on their Linux based NetWinder NC. I'm pleased to see Corel throwing its weight behind Linux- the comments they made are amazingly positive, they really are committing themselves to Linux in a quite big way. Very cool. I'm quite excited. This is almost the coolest thing they could do. A log is available of the announcement.

Dewb writes "The guys over at Suck.com, purveyors of all things snotty and true, have finally gotten around to taking on this Microsoft thing,, and they provide some interesting perspective."

Ben Gertzfield writes "Richard Stallman's (in)famous song, "Join Us Now and Share the Software" has been remixed as a jazzy techno-mix song by Matthew Loper. This is absolutely hilarious. Join us now and share the remix. " And since RMS is involved, I got to dig up one of my favorite icons. I love the baby gnu.

Maciej Stachowiak writes " This article at wired explains how Microsoft might leave Java out of it's base browser download for IE 5.0, forcing users to load a separate plugin when they want to view java content. This is an attempt to push java down to the same status as activeX and browser plugins, i.e. most users will ignore it because they have no desire to download additional software. " On the flip side, this means that alternate Java environments (Kaffee? the Sun JVM?) could be coded up as plug-ins to offer a true standard Java implementation that would allow IE users to use a standard Java VM instead of MS's less-than-pure implementation.

Maciej Stachowiak wrote in with this story over at LAN Times where you can read one writers opinion on MS's mutiliation of Java. I read this article and was just amazed by it. The writer has taken the Java Mantra of write once, run anywhere, and just said screw it, Windows is the only platform that matters. Wow. I'm glad that Sun has been having good luck at getting the Java logo of MS products, I just wish it would help convince people that J++ isn't really Java anymore.

Justin Cave wrote in to send us a link to a wired article where you can read about a (windows only) encryption proggie called SynCrypt. The article is hard on PGP for being difficult to use (probably true for the pc novice), but the best part is the way you can get your password back if you forget it. Read the article and get a nice laugh.

Tons of people sent in links to various articles discussing Ronald Rivest's Chaffing and Winnowing technique of 'encryption' that isn't encryption. And it's legally exportable under US laws! Basically the technique multiplexes text from the the actual message with 'other' stuff, and only the intended recipient can sort the mess out. Very interesting. Thanks to Tyson Dowd and Kevin Fu who were the first to send it in.

Tons of people sent in links to various articles discussing Ronald Rivest's Chaffing and Winnowing technique of 'encryption' that isn't encryption. And it's legally exportable under US laws! Basically the technique multiplexes text from the the actual message with 'other' stuff, and only the intended recipient can sort the mess out. Very interesting. Thanks to Tyson Dowd and Kevin Fu who were the first to send it in.

Hot on the heals of 2.8.0 we have 2.8.1. Thanks to Kim Lundgren for telling us that you can grab it at the usual spots.

Piotr Mitros was the first to write in and tell us that the new GTK is out- apparently it breaks Gimp 17, but 18 will be out soon. Hope I'll be able to compile these guys... the last few have been harry and I really want to check out the several improved plug-ins. Grap it off of Gimp.org.

Han-Wen Nienhuys wrote in to let us all know that the 2.8 version of GCC is finally out for public consumption. For those of you who currently haven't already switched to PGCC or EGCS, you may want to grab a copy of it from prep.ai.mit.edu.