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Welcome to O'Reilly's Developer News site, where we will be featuring what we feel are the most interesting and important news stories of the day.
Feel free to submit stories for consideration. We want your feedback, so please if you find this site helpful, or what else you'd like to see here.
Python 2.3.3
Python 2.3.3 has been released. "This is a bug-fix release for Python 2.3 that fixes a number of bugs, including a couple of serious errors with weakrefs and the cyclic garbage collector. No new features have been added in Python 2.3.3. The 2.3 series is now in bugfix-only mode." [Python.org |
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Copyright Laws Do Not Allow the RIAA to Subpoena ISPs
On Friday a federal appeals court handed down a ruling to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) saying that copyright law does not allow the RIAA to subpoena ISPs for customer information. "We are not unsympathetic either to the RIAA's concern regarding the widespread infringement of its members' copyrights, or to the need for legal tools to protect those rights. It is not the province of the courts, however, to rewrite (copyright law) in order to make it fit a new and unforeseen Internet architecture, no matter how damaging that development has been to the music industry." [C|Net News |
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Apple XCode Update
Apple has updated XCode. Version 1.1 "provides overall stability and performance enhancements to the Xcode IDE. Also added are improvements to debugging, workflow, the Xcode build system and CodeSense, which helps developers maintain up-to-date source code indexing and code completion." Apple recommends the update. [MacCentral |
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Wal-Mart Opens Online Music Store, Cuts Prices.
Walmart has carried through on their plan to open their own online music store. It has also done exactly what you would expect. It has undersold the competition. $0.88/song. "The site has 'hundreds of thousands' of songs, available in WMA (Windows Media audio) format. The songs can be transferred to compatible portable devices, burned to a CD or played on Windows-compatible PCs, the company said." Ironically, one of the top 10 downloads has been First cut is the Deepest by Cheryl Crow. [Wired News |
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Sun Funding SETI@Home
Sun will be funding the second generation of SETI@Home. The new generation architecture for SETI is Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) and is aimed at opening "the doors to inexpensive, shared computing to a diverse range of academic computing projects." SETI@Home thus far has a total cost of approx. $500,000, but generates more computer power daily (15 Teraflops) than IBM's $110 million ASCI White system (12 Teraflops). [C|Net News |
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Linux 2.6 Kernel Released
The stable 2.6 Linux kernel has been released. Linus wrote to the kernel list last night, "This should not be a big surprise to anybody on the list any more, since we've been building up to it for a long time now, and for the last few weeks I haven't accepted any patches except for what amounts to fairly obvious one-liners.
Anyway, 2.6.0 is out there now, and the patch from -test11 is a swelte 11kB in size. It's not the totally empty patch I was hoping for, but judging by the bugs I worked on personally, things are looking pretty good." [Linux Kernel Mailing List |
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IBM and Harvard Developing University-wide Grid
IBM and Harvard are collaborating to develop a university-wide computing grid. The grid is being developed to "enable data sharing, student and faculty research, collaboration in life sciences, engineering and applied sciences," and will also extend to be part of the Massachusetts biotechnology grid. Dubbed the "Crimson Grid", it will be based on Open Grid Services Architecture (OSGA) and the resultant reference implementation will be made available to other groups interested in developing a similar grid. [InfoWorld |
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Konfabulator to Land on Windows Desktops
Mac favorite Konfabulator is making its way onto Windows desktops in the near future. Since this year's February launch the app has had millions of downloads not to mention kudos from mac-heads. The beta version for windows was released last night and developers Perry and Rose expect a stable release within four to six weeks. [C|Net News |
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Union Gearing up for Fight with IBM over Offshoring Jobs
It was bound to happen somewhere. The union representing some 5,000 IBM employees whose jobs are planned for offshore outplacement isconsidering taking on the company and asking employees to refuse to train their replacements. "'We are working with our members to organize to fight this anyway we can,' said Linda Guyer, president of Alliance@IBM, an Endicott, N.Y.-based union of roughly 6,000 IBM workers (up by more than 1,000 members since this past spring). 'We think it's not only unfair to the employees; it's unfair to the U.S. economy.'" [InfoWorld |
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SPF Closing in on Becoming RFC
SPF (Sender Permitted From), which verifies email sender domains against IPs to prevent email address forgery, a common spammer technique, is closing in on becoming an RFC. "You are encouraged to publish SPF records and thus to hasten the beginning of the end for annoying spam forgeries. Independent client implementations in C and Python have begun. MTA plugins for Sendmail, Postfix, and Exim are available for download." [SPF: Sender Permitted From |
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Joel on Software The Art of UNIX Programming
Joel Splosky has written an article based on Eric Raymond's The Art of UNIX Programming. It's part review and part exploration of the differences that separate programmers for *nixs and programmers for Windows. "Suppose you take a Unix programmer and a Windows programmer and give them each the task of creating the same end-user application. The Unix programmer will create a command-line or text-driven core and occasionally, as an afterthought, build a GUI which drives that core. This way the main operations of the application will be available to other programmers who can invoke the program on the command line and read the results as text. The Windows programmer will tend to start with a GUI, and occasionally, as an afterthought, add a scripting language which can automate the operation of the GUI interface. This is appropriate for a culture in which 99.999% of the users are not programmers in any way, shape, or form, and have no interest in being one.... When Unix was created and when it formed its cultural values, there were no end users." [Joel on Software |
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KDE and Debian Collaborating on UserLinux for the Enterprise
A group of KDE and Debian developers are calling for close collaboration between the two massively successful software projects with the aim of bringing UserLinux to the Enterprise. Outlined within their proposal are four central issues to center efforts on to make UserLinux successful on the desktop. They are: how to leverage the KDE core's enterprise enhancements, providing a graphical installer and system tools, acknowledging the importance of toolkits outside of KDE and integrating them, and tying OpenOffice and Mozilla closer within the KDE environment. [EntLinux.com |
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P2P Downloading Deemed Legal In Canada
The Copyright Board of Canada has deemed that downloading copyrighted material from peer-to-peer networks is legal. In a session designed to answer the previously ambiguous question of whether downloading was legal in Canada the board found that it was so, but that uploading said content is illegal. The decision appears to center around the personal rights of content use. "In its decision Friday, the Copyright Board said uploading or distributing copyrighted works online appeared to be prohibited under current Canadian law. However, the country's copyright law does allow making a copy for personal use and does not address the source of that copy or whether the original has to be an authorized or noninfringing version, the board said." [C|Net News |
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Apple Developer Conference 2004 Details Emerging
Apple has begun posting details for its 2004 Worldwide Developers Conference. The conference is slated for June 28th to July 2nd and will be hosted at the Moscone West Convention Center. Also available on the site are viewable key sessions from last year's conference including Mac OS X State of the Union, Power Mac G5 Overview, and Intro to Apple Developer Tools. [Apple Developer Connection |
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Virginia Files Felony Spam Charges
Attorney General Jerry Kilgore of Virginia has filed the first felony spam charges under the state's anti-spamming laws. Mr. Jeremy Jaynes, aka "Gaven Stubberfield", was arrested yesterday. Jayne's associate Richard Rutowski has also had an arrest warrant issued for him, but is not yet in custody. "According to antispam organization Spamhaus, 'Stubberfield' is well-known for pornographic and "get rich quick" offers online and was ranked No. 8 on the group's top 10 spammers list for November." [C|Net News |
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Biggest, Baddest Database Survey.
Winter Corp. has ranked the top ten "biggest, baddest databases" in the world. the survey measures actual database size『meaning the total disk used for user tables, indices, summaries and aggregates預nd not total storage.』 France Telecom took first place with a whopping 29.2TB using Oracle in the Unix and open source environments. First place in the Windows environment was ComScore Networks with 8.9TB running Sybase. [eWeek |
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Jon "DVD" Johansen's Second Trial Ends, Verdict Dec 22.
Jon "DVD" Johansen's second trial over his DeCSS DVD-decryption program has ended with prosecutors demanding a suspended 90-day jail term. The final verdict is expected on Dec 22. In his first trial, "the Oslo district court established in January that Johansen could do whatever he wanted with DVDs that he had legally bought. It also said prosecutors had failed to prove that his program--called DeCSS--had been used for illegal copying." Jon's defense attorney has been focusing on consumer's rights to do with products they buy as they wish. [C|Net News |
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