Slashdot Mirror

Nate writes "Ed Di Cristofaro of HardWire has announced he will extend his hardware testing to Linux along with the usual Windows testing. "It's quickly spreading in popularity and has the potential to fall right behind Windows and into the #2 spot for desktop operating system users." Click below to read on.

Martin Hepworth writes "Looks like SUN are bowing the M$'s 'user-friendly' installation with a deal with Install Shield Software. "

Johan Walles writes "I dunno whether "scoop" is the correct term for this, but anyway: slashdot.org is on tenth place of the site rankings for the "Computers/Internet" category on Sixdegrees link Forty more votes would put Slashdot on third place (before www.linux.org), and 170 votes would put it first (above www.icq.com and www.cnet.com). So if all sixdegrees users reading /. would go "slashdot-effect" the poll, a whole bunch of new readers might very well see the light and come to /. for their daily updates :-)."

James S. Baughn writes "Seeing as how there aren't any good Linux humor sites, I've created Humorix: "All Linux Humor. All Copied Mottos. All the Time."

Exile57 writes "The music industry is trying to end the proliferation of the pirate music scene. Apparently, bootleg CD's are a booming market in other countries. On top of the CD's being pressed illegally, the industry is also a bit miffed at the amount of pirate MP3 sites on the Internet. Here's the story as told by CNN."

Andrew Dalke writes "Python 1.0 was just released It is an implementation of Python (my favorite language :) for the Java virtual machine. With it you get the full power of a very high level dynamic language able to access all of the Java classes, including awt, java beans, swing, jdbc and corba. It includes a binary version of OROMatcher to implement perl5 style regular expressions. I worked with the most recent beta version and didn't come across any bugs. The only problem I had was the startup time, which was about two seconds on my Indigo2 compared to the fraction of a second for the C implementation, but much of that was the JVM starting up. We also needed to sidegrade to Netscape's 4.05 AWT 1.1 Preview release to develop applets. The biggest advantage was the interactive nature of the implementation where I could test new code or examine the behaviour of different Java classes without recompiling. Overall I estimate that it took me about a quarter of the time to implement my project in JPython instead of straight Java. *advocacy on* I can predict people will comment on two things about Python as a language, so let me preemptively address them here: 1) Python isn't as flexible as Perl -- sure, but it is a lot cleaner in general and easier to do OO programming. I rarely notice the lack of the more baroque Perl control features since Python's exception handling and ease of creating helper classes simplify tasks like finalizing resource handling during error conditions. Python's real flexibility is integrating new functionality like Java classes, COM objects or database support in a straight-forward, modular fashion. More to the point of this announcement, you can't get a Perl applet running on top of the JVM. 2) Python uses indentation and newlines for scoping and statement end instead of {} and ; -- most people find it enjoyable once they get used to it (and when using an editor like emacs that understands the language syntax). It is a suprisingly nice feeling to be several blocks in at the end of a function definition and only having to press 'enter' to finish instead of ';enter}enter}enter}' to fulfil the requirements of the parser. *advocacy off* "

Robert Macaulay writes "There is a new CScene up: Issue 5"

ATT Research has introduced yet another picture format, djvu, which claims up to 1000:1 compression ratio. The method employed is to separate the image into to layers. The foreground contains the parts of the picture that have sharp edges, but contain few colours, such as text. It is compressed using a bi-level compression technique. The background contains the parts of the picture that vary smoothely, but contain many colours. This is compressed using wavelets. A linux binary of the compressor is available for download.

Moe Elzubeir wrote in to tell us that the 4th issue of his C Scene E-Zine is now online. It's pretty cool if you're into this sort of thing (I know I am). Moe is also seeking folks to help make sure that this thing keep going. If you're interested, you should contact.

Each of these is pretty important and probably warrents its own post, buuut we've had a ton of articles posted already today, and these are pretty notable, so: I)ruid asked me to plug C Scene, a nice little E-zine devoted to C and C++ programming. Chris Short sent us this link where you can read the results of a shocking government study:After much research (and spending of tax payers money) they confirm that the web is growing! Wow. Amazing.

Andy Tai wrote in to tell us that another Open Source web site has arrived, this one is The Open Source Journal. Is it just me, or has anyone else noticed that there are suddenly dozens of web sites focused on this stuff? It seems like a lot of duplication of effort is occuring. I'm all for variety, but a dozen decent sites could combine forces to create one super site.

Next, Adam Keys wrote in to tell us that Apple Posted a $55 million profit this quarter. Lastly we have this link, sent to us by Dave Blondell, where you can read about Linux at Comdex 98, and a few other related Chicago/Spring Comdex area events.