GraWil asks: "Does anyone have advice on purchasing a color laser printer? I'm trying to decide between getting a new small 'personal' color laser or a used/refurbished workhorse. For the roughly the same money, I can either buy a Xerox 6100 or a refurbished Tektronix 740/750 or even a tabloid sized 790. I've had mixed luck with color HP and Lexmark printers but I'm open to any suggestions at this point. There are a fair number of reviews but none of them ever compare new with the old."

johnnyb asks: "I'm curious what everyone's favorite programming language features are. I'm looking for both the general and the specific. I'm especially looking for features that few people know about or use, but are really useful for those who do know about them. What are your favorite programming language features?"

yootje writes "Two articles today on TheOneRing.net about rumours that the extended edition from The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King will come in theaters before the release on DVD. The first article can be found here, the second one here. Both come from people who work in a cinema themselves, one in the UK and one in Denmark."

prostoalex writes "Folks at the Scriptometer conducted a practical survey of which scripting language is the best. While question like that is bound to generate flamewars between the usual Perl vs PHP, Python vs Perl, VBScript vs everything crowds, the Scriptometer survey is practical: if I have to write a script, I have to write it fast, it has to be small (less typing), it should allow me to either debug itself via a debugger or just verbose output mode. sh, Perl and Ruby won the competition, and with the difference of 1-2 points they were essentially tied for first place. Smalltalk, tcc, C# and Java are the last ones, with Java being completely unusable in scripting environment (part of that could be the fact that neither Java nor C# are scripting languages). See the 'Hello world' examples and the smallest code examples. Interesting that ICFP contests lately pronounced OCaml as the winner for rapid development."

honestpuck writes "Paul Graham has delivered final proof that he is a marvelous essayist with his volume of fairly diverse writings, Hackers & Painters. I first came across his writing with his article, "A Plan For Spam," on using Bayesian filtering to block spam and found it a well written and informative technical article. I next came across him some time later when he wrote an essay on his web site entitled "Hackers & Painters," and once again it was well written, informative and (more importantly for an essayist) thought provoking. I was excited to hear he had published a volume of writing and pleased when O'Reilly sent me a copy, despite my pleas that I did not have time to review it." He found time, to your benefit; read on for honestpuck's review.

mAsterdam writes "At his code blog Mark Lentcner writes: "A while back, I saw Larry Wall give a short talk about the current design of Perl 6. At some point he put up a list of all the operators - well over a hundred of them! I had a sudden inspiration, but it took a few months to get around to drawing it..." You might want to take a look at this and think about which operators are yet to be discovered."

Chris Vaughan asks: "Me and my Co-Workers at the Advanced Computing Research Lab are just about ready to release our first Open Source package on SourceForge.net I ask the Slashdot community what hurdles they had to overcome and how much involvement do they still have in their project years later. Also what types of licensing did you pick and why did it suit your project best? Our project, MyPBS is a PHP/MySQL/Perl frontend accounting package for the Portable Batch System (PBS). Which is used to account for super computing usage. I appreciate any comments you may have."

prostoalex writes "The question of the best weblogging system out there arises quite often, especially after the new licensing scheme introduced by MovableType. Here's a rather detailed breakdown of currently popular blogging and content management systems. Out of 11 software packages, 10 run on any server with variations of Perl/PHP and MySQL/PostgresSQL, and one requires Windows and .NET Framework. 4 are licensed under GPL, 3 are under BSD. Mark Pilgrim explains why licensing is suddenly important."

[rvr] writes "Are you a Perl hacker? Do you want a Apple G5 with a 23" screen, a 17" PowerBook, a Thinkpad or iPods? Six Apart, the company behind of Movable Type and TypePad, is running a contest of plug-ins for Movable Type 3.0. The total amount of prizes is $22,000. The deadline is June 18, 2004."

theodp writes "In April, IBM CEO Samuel Palmisano told investors Big Blue hopes to dodge an estimated $6 billion in liability stemming from a judge's ruling that IBM violated U.S. federal age discrimination laws. In May, IBM closes on its $150-$200MM purchase of Indian outsourcer Daksh, whose age requirements for job applicants make Logan's Run seem progressive. On its Opportunities page, Daksh states that Customer Care Specialists should be between 21-25 years of age and Team Leaders should be no older than 27. Early Daksh investors included Citigroup and we-don't-need-no-stinking-unions Amazon."

Despairing Developer queries: "Once autoconf was a great way to make widely portable programs. But now when you have to spend more time sorting out incompatibilities between autoconf versions, breaking battles between autoconf compatibility wrappers and configure.in compatibility functions that tries to outsmart each other, and on top of that see the list of dependencies increase (it's not that fun to compile perl on unicos) and performance diving rapidly, what is your escape plan? Is there a drop in replacement for autoconf? Is there something else out there that is as portable as autoconf to use instead?"

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..."

theodp writes "In a USA Today interview, Intel CEO Craig Barrett pooh-poohs arguments against outsourcing, explaining 'We do not send our basketball teams to compete against the rest of the world, saying the other teams have to play slower because our folks aren't fit enough to run as fast.' He is also fed up with being called a Benedict Arnold CEO (perhaps he'd prefer Unemployed Computer Scientist). Barrett pegs K-12 math and science education as the biggest threat to U.S. employment, but when pressed about U.S. kids who do well in both, attend excellent universities, but have no guarantees of good jobs when they graduate, Barrett remarks 'I don't have a solution to that one.'"

Craig Maloney writes "MySQL (love it or hate it) is one of the most popular databases for deploying websites. Perl (also love it or hate it) was almost synonymous with website programming. Arguably there are different choices for different needs in web development (PostgreSQL, PHP, Java, etc.), but there is no argument that if you are planning on putting together a website, using MySQL and Perl that MySQL & Perl for the Web will aid immensely in that development." Read on for the rest of Maloney's concise review of the book. While not new, he says it's still a valuable volume.

in the trenches asks: "I'm a married, 24-year-old male, and like many posters here on Slashdot I work in the IT industry. I currently work as a website developer (mostly design-related work), but I also do some Perl and PHP programming. As most of you probably have, I've often wondered if I wouldn't enjoy working in a less stressful environment. I've even gone as far as to wonder if I'd prefer some sort of factory job or similar over my current field of work. The problem is this, I LOVE developing websites, but I HATE the stress and responsability that comes with a the job. How do you all cope with the stress and responsability that seems to come hand-in-hand with an IT career?"

herrvinny asks: "What is the best weblog script to use on a personal web site? SourceForge and Google show plenty of weblogging systems available, but I just need a simple, powerful solution. Movable Type has been recommended to me, but I've heard of problems with spam, exploits, and comment flooding. I'd like to have a decently good comments section, where visitors can reply to my ramblings and have a fairly large toolset in which to do so, i.e. smilies, some limited HTML (bold, italic, etc). A small Polling plugin would be terrific as well. Which weblogging systems do Slashdot readers use and recommend? Some complexity isn't a problem; I can work in Perl, HTML, C (among other languages) if I need to. Also, what do people think of adapting Slashcode for such purposes?"

Ade writes "One may now listen and search for Apple iTunes music via this front end or any webserver running the perl script called iTMS-4-ALL, which was written by Jason Rohrer, programmer of the secure filesharing system MUTE who hopes the script 'helps revive everyone's ITMS interfaces.' Music activists Downhill Battle, who organised the Grey Tuesday protests for disseminating censored music, run a copy of the script and say 'this is a cute tool, but it has the potential to become a powerful weapon to fight the major record label monopoly' in the ways they outline. Playing the music requires QuickTime for the ~600kb downloadable MP4 snippets to be heard." Update: 04/19 01:41 GMT by H : Thanks to Aaron at Punboy for sending us a link to a faster server.

rheum101 writes "Larry Wall just released the eagerly anticipated Apocalypse12 . detailing Perl6 OO in all it glories. To quote the author -> 'One other note: if you haven't read the previous Apocalypses and Exegeses, a lot of this is going to be complete gobbledygook to you. (Of course, even if you have read them, this might still be gobbledygook. You take your chances in life...).'"

Shippy writes "Ten years ago today, a pair of Arizona attorneys launched a homemade marketing software program that forever changed the Internet. It was the birth of spam. They did this by whipping up a Perl script that flooded message boards advertising their legal services." Update: 04/14 05:26 GMT by S : That'd be ten years ago, not twenty.

nick0909 writes "Years in the making, the FCC is finally close to deciding if they will allow Nextel to pay for the reorganization of the 800mhz bandplan. In return the FCC will give Nextel a new band in which to operate their phones, where they won't destroy public safety communications. Other cell companies are angry because they had to pay millions for their GHz frequencies, and argue Nextel is getting off cheap. On top of this, if the 800MHz band gets re-sliced, will the FCC continue to push TV broadcasters out of 700MHz, which was supposed to go all to public safety in the coming years?"