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Programming

What Tools Do FLOSS Developers Need? 310

Posted by Soulskill from the does-soda-count-as-a-tool dept.
An anonymous reader writes "I am a free software developer; I maintain one relatively simple project written in C, targeted at end users, but I feel that I could contribute something more to the FLOSS community than my project. Instead of focusing on another project targeted at end users, I thought that I could spend my time working on something FLOSS developers need ('Developers, developers, developers, developers!'). The question is: what more do FLOSS developers need from existing development tools? What would attract new developers to existing FLOSS development tools? Which existing development tools need more attention? I can contribute code in C, Python and bash, but I can also write documentation, do testing and translate to my native language. Any hints?"
IBM

Submission + - IBM's DB2 runs Oracle applications, say what? (ibm.com) 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Just in time for the imminent acquisition of Sun by Oracle it seems Big Blue has finally realized that it's in an all out war and they are going for the jugular.
Apparently making DB2 9.7 for Linux, Unix, and Windows understand PL/SQL and extending their own SQL to also
understand Oracle's dialect (down to the dreaded (+) join syntax!) last year was just the opening salvo.
According to an IBM developerWorks article by their SQL Architect those DB2 developers in Toronto have upped the ante and provided an OCI (Oracle Client Interface) compatible client. Makes one wonder: What's next?
Given the importance of Oracle's DBMS to their stream revenue, as compared to the relevance of
DB2 for LUW to IBM in the big picture, I wonder how much room to maneuver Oracle actually has if it comes to an all out pricing-war.
Has anyone tried the "Oracle compatibility features" of DB2 and is
considering a move or extension of an application?
Certainly what's offered is not sufficient to easily port all applications out there.
But for just how many of those apps will what's provided be good enough?
Are we seeing the end of the SQL dialect wars, vendor lock-in, and a commoditization the DBMS market?
Encryption

What's Holding Back Encryption? 660

Posted by CmdrTaco from the cypher-sex-is-a-different-thing dept.
nine-times writes "After many years in IT, I've been surprised to notice how much of my traffic is still unencrypted. A lot of businesses that I interact with (both business and personal) are still using unencrypted FTP, and very few people use any kind of encryption for email. Most websites are still using unencrypted HTTP. DNSSEC seems to be picking up some steam, but still doesn't seem to be widely used. I would have thought there would be a concerted effort to move toward encryption for the sake of security, but it doesn't seem to be happening. I wanted to ask the Slashdot community, what do you think the hold up is? Are the existing protocols somehow not good enough? Are the protocols fine, but not supported well enough in software? Is it too complicated to manage the various encryption protocols and keys? Is it ignorance or apathy on the part of the IT community, and that we've failed to demand it from our vendors?"
Censorship

Canadian Censorship Takes Down 4500 Sites 227

Posted by timothy from the now-that's-what-I-call-political-science dept.
uncadonna writes "According to activist group The Yes Men, the government of Canada has shut down two parody websites criticizing Canada's poor environmental policy. The article goes on to claim that 'In response to Environment Canada's request, Serverloft immediately turned off a whole block of IP addresses, knocking out more than 4500 websites that had nothing to do with the parody sites or the activists who created them. Serverloft was shown no warrant, and never called the web hosting company about the shutdown.'"
Security

Preventing My Hosting Provider From Rooting My Server? 539

Posted by Soulskill from the booby-traps dept.
hacker writes "I have a heavily-hit public server (web, mail, cvs/svn/git, dns, etc.) that runs a few dozen OSS project websites, as well as my own personal sites (gallery, blog, etc.). From time to time, the server has 'unexpected' outages, which I've determined to be the result of hardware, network and other issues on behalf of the provider. I run a lot of monitoring and logging on the server-side, so I see and graph every single bit and byte in and out of the server and applications, so I know it's not the OS itself. When I file 'WTF?'-style support tickets to the provider through their web-based ticketing system, I often get the response of: 'Please provide us with the root password to your server so we can analyze your logs for the cause of the outage.' Moments ago, there were three simultaneous outages while I was logged into the server working on some projects. Server-side, everything was fine. They asked me for the root password, which I flatly denied (as I always do), and then they rooted the server anyway, bringing it down and poking around through my logs. This is at least the third time they've done this without my approval or consent. Is it possible to create a minimal Linux boot that will allow me to reboot the server remotely, come back up with basic networking and ssh, and then from there, allow me to log in and mount the other application and data partitions under dm-crypt/loop-aes and friends?" Read on for a few more details of hacker's situation.
Music

Music While Programming? 1019

Posted by Soulskill from the perl-jam dept.
BubbaDoom writes "In our cubicle-ville, we have programmers intermixed with accounting, customer support and marketing. As programmers, it is our habit to put on our headphones and listen to our portable music players to drown out all of the noise from everyone else. The boss recently sent an email just to the programmers demanding that we do not use our music players at work because he thinks it distracts us from our jobs and causes us to make mistakes. Of course, we've explained to him that prattle from the other people is much, much more distracting, but he insists his policy is the right one. What is the Slashdot community's experience with music at work for programmers?"
OS X

Apple Says Booting OS X Makes an Unauthorized Copy 865

Posted by timothy from the slice-the-ram-nodes-to-find-copy-four dept.
recoiledsnake writes "Groklaw has an extensive look at the latest developments in the Psystar vs. Apple story. There's a nice picture illustrating the accusation by Apple that Psystar makes three unauthorized copies of OS X. The most interesting, however, is the last copy. From Apple's brief: 'Finally, every time Psystar turns on any of the Psystar computers running Mac OS X, which it does before shipping each computer, Psystar necessarily makes a separate modified copy of Mac OS X in Random Access Memory, or RAM. This is the third unlawful copy.' Psystar's response: 'Copying a computer program into RAM as a result of installing and running that program is precisely the copying that Section 117 provides does not constitute copyright infringement for an owner of a computer program. As the Ninth Circuit explained, permitting copies like this was Section 117's purpose.' Is Apple seriously arguing that installing a third party program and booting OS X results in copyright infringement due to making a derivative work and an unauthorized copy?"

Submission + - Apple says booting OS X makes an unauthorized copy 9

Submitted by recoiledsnake
recoiledsnake writes: Groklaw has an extensive look at the latest developments in the Psystar vs. Apple story. There's a nice picture illustrating the accusation by Apple that Psystar makes three unauthorized copies of OS X. The most interesting however, is the last copy. From Apple's brief: "Finally, every time Psystar turns on any of the Psystar computers running Mac OS X, which it does before shipping each computer, Psystar necessarily makes a separate modified copy of Mac OS X in Random Access Memory, or RAM. This is the third unlawful copy." Psystar's response: "Copying a computer program into RAM as a result of installing and running that program is precisely the copying that Section 117 provides does not constitute copyright infringement for an owner of a computer program. As the Ninth Circuit explained, permitting copies like this was Section 117’s purpose." Is Apple seriously arguing that installing a third party program and booting OS X results in copyright infringement due to making a derivative work and an unauthorized copy?

Comment Re:unilkely (Score 1) 560

by Hijacked Public (#29887171) Attached to: Laptop Fires On Airplanes

The airline industry pays for the security theater

The traveling public pays for it, as that is where the airlines get their money. You'd think then that the TSA would not be able to take action without concern of the traveling public, but they seem to be able to do so.

Comment Re:my 2 cents (Score 1) 244

by MemoryDragon (#29887149) Attached to: Comparing the Freedoms Offered By Maemo and Android

Not sure if your assumption is right. First of all the Android VM is an entirely different beast than the standard JDK, it is not a stack based vm anymore but a register based, also the tie in between the vm and the processor is way deeper with the included arms having java accelerating command sets included. Thirdly the bytecode itself is not java anymore either it is post processed and some specific optimization is applied upfront. Third, the class lib provided is huge and a load of methods root directly into native functions instead of trying to implement as much as possible in java.
So so far java as language of choice in the android world works out pretty well, I dont hear complaints that the android development is hard or that you have a speed problem by using java.

Comment Re:ok, so I'll get one then. (Score 1) 145

by Anonymous McCartneyf (#29887117) Attached to: Netflix Coming To Sony PS3
BluRay players will become more common, regardless of how PS3s do. BluRay won the HD war. Stores are stocking BluRay discs, right down to the Walmart and Costco level. Disney is selling kits containing both BluRays and normal DVDs. And they are being advertised heavily.
A PS3 is just a convenient way to get a BluRay player, especially if you already have a game you want to play as well. (The game controller makes an awkward BluRay remote, though.)

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