J. Random Luser writes "Groklaw is carrying a story about Microsoft quietly engaging a French company to develop Open Document filters for Office 12, due out mid-2006. The SourceForge project claims to be an import filter for MS Office, and that is how the developer describes it. But ZDNet quotes Ray Ozzie as talking about an export filter from MS Office, and this french blog takes Ozzie at his word. Ostensibly the tarball unpacks as OpenOfficePlugin, and SourceForge has the WindowsInstaller.msi listed as 'platform independent'." From the ZDNet article: "Ozzie told me that supporting ODF in Office isn't a matter of principle. Microsoft isn't opposed to supporting other formats. The company just announced support for PDF, and he added that the Open Office XML format has an 'extremely liberal' license."

norburym writes "Mark G. Sobell is well known for several comprehensive and well-written volumes: A Practical Guide to Solaris; A Practical Guide to Red Hat Linux: Fedora Core and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (2nd ed.); and A Practical Guide to the Unix System (3rd ed.). It seems only natural for the author to follow these exceptional examples with yet another excellent book entitled A Practical Guide to Linux Commands, Editors, and Shell Programming . Read on for Norburyms' review.

Flashless Dancer asks: "Despite numerous online campaigns, blogs and forum postings, Macromedia has failed to release a 64 bit version of it's popular Flash Player for 64 bit architectures. Growing outcry in the Linux community recently spawned the online petition at PetitionOnline, but this seems to have fallen on deaf ears. A recent posting to Macromedia's technotes, back in September, offers this explanation and advice to users and developers who are growing increasingly concerned that users with 64 bit architectures are unable to view online content created with Flash. It explains that users must downgrade to 32 bit browsers and use the 32 bit plugin. This simply isn't a good option for most users, in fact many Linux distributions, including FC2/3/4 install 64-bit browsers with their 64-bit distributions. This seems to breathe new life into the old GplFlash Project which is now back, after some time on the back burner. Future development of GplFlash2 promises support for Flash 6/7 but remains in development for now. Open speculation in chatrooms and web forums alleges all sorts of conspiracy theories but, what I'd like to know is: What's the real difficulty here for Macromedia?"

UltimaGuy writes "While it's way too soon to say Sun is back on track, the return of Bechtolsheim, aggressive improvements in products and a healthy dose of humility among Sun's executives mean the troubled company and its investors have more cause for optimism than they've had in years." Of course, Sun's problems are still out there - dealing with projects like Geronimo for some of their base infrastructure, and of course other companies promoting Linux as the solution.

UltimaGuy writes "The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce the results of its participation in Google's "Summer of Code". After Google announced this program to introduce students to the world of open source software development at the beginning of June, the NetBSD Project was happy to join the approximately 40 other open source groups as a mentoring organization and compiled a list of suggested projects. I personally think the Project tmpfs: Efficient memory file-system as the most successful one."

Nuclear Elephant writes "After six months of development, DSPAM v3.6 has been released. The most notable change is the series of new features added to make an anti-spam gateway appliance possible (Knoppix anyone?). Version 3.6 also includes a highly accurate alternative to Bayesian filtering known as Markovian discrimination, based on Bill Yerazunis' research. Other significant enhancements include trusted sender whitelisting, integrated Clam Antivirus and LDAP support, a centralized spam training alias, and a new dependency-free storage driver. Much of the documentation has also been rewritten to make installation easier. A change log and release notes are also available. Slashdot has recently featured a review of the author's book, Ending Spam and an interview as well."

astrab writes "According to Dirson's blog, Google's just hired Sean Egan (the main developer of Gaim open IM client), just the same day Yahoo! and Microsoft plan to link their respective proprietary IM networks." From the post: "While Yahoo! and Microsoft link their proprietary networks for Instant Messaging, Google bets on Open Protocols to make information universally accessible ... Currently, Google uses XMPP/Jabber specs, but they claim to be supporting open server-to-server federation, and work "to hear from other people in the communications industry about how best to build a federation model that is open, scalable". In fact, there are this month several tests with firms like EarthLink, Sipphone or PeopleCall. "

i_c_andrade asks: "Apple and other tech companies were in the past called to task for the lack of Hispanics and African-American's on their Board of Directors, so after doing some research I came to the conclusion that I just did not know a lot of named IT/OSS/Web/CS innovators/developers that were not white (or American) specifically Hispanic or African-American. The first (and only) name that I could think of was Miguel de Icaza, and well I can only blame my own ignorance for not knowing any more, or are there? I know there is a big BSD movement in Brazil (they created the The FreeBSD LiveCD Project; but where else are there developers 'of color' and what are they working on?"

macklin01 writes "The LA Times is reporting that box office executives are finally fessing up and taking the blame. Poor box office receipts over the summer weren't caused by surging fuel costs, changes in audience preferences, or anything else. As Slashdot readers might have put it (and as it comes out in the article), 'It's the movies, stupid.'"

PhairOh writes "Toms Hardware has an article about improving Windows with free and Open Source Software. It features everything from the obvious like Gimp and OpenOffice and also some interesting choices like Virtuawin. From the article: 'The average Windows user tends to be less than satisfied with Windows. And that's no surprise, either, given the rather woeful state of its default applications.'"

goombah99 writes "The Open Voting Consortium has announced that California Secretary of State Bruce McPherson is forming a panel to investigate using open source software in elections. Suggested Panel members include Security expert Bruce Perens and Python guru David Mertz who is associated with the sourceforge EVM2003 voting machine project. This is big since a favorable outcome could help fund prototypes of true open source election equipment and systems."

After 8 years of my nasty, crufty, hodge podged together HTML, last night we finally switched over to clean HTML 4.01 with a full complement of CSS. While there are a handful of bugs and some lesser used functionality isn't quite done yet, the transition has gone very smoothly. You can use our sourceforge project page to submit bugs and we'd really appreciate the feedback. Thanks to Tim Vroom for putting the HTML in place, Wes Moran for writing the HTML in the first place, and Pudge for writing the code to convert 900k users, 60k stories, and 13 million comments to comply. And for the brave, download the stylesheet and start experimenting with new themes and designs for Slashdot: some sort of official contest to re-design Slashdot is coming soon, so you can get a head start now.

daveperry writes "The Google Blog has a post about their use of prediction markets to forecast certain events that are relevant to their business. From the article: "Our search engine works well because it aggregates information dispersed across the web, and our internal predictive markets are based on the same principle: Googlers from across the company contribute knowledge and opinions which are aggregated into a forecast by the market. Sometimes, just feeling lucky isn't enough, and these tools can help." In related news, some software was recently open sourced that enables people to set up their own prediction markets."

An anonymous reader writes "OptimalGrid is a self-contained middleware designed for developers to create grid-enabled parallel applications without themselves becoming experts in grid or high-performance computing (article). The Linux compatible middleware now includes automatic distribution and provisioning on to Grid nodes. See how the first release of Quake II was made massively multi-player [pdf] by running on a Grid. Get modified Quake II from Sourceforge to run with OptimalGrid and let the massive Grid games begin." Update: 09/19 16:12 GMT by Z : Marked the pdf as such.

fanboyslayer writes "Switchfoot's new album Nothing Is Sound shipped from Sony with copy protection software on the CD, much to the dismay of thousands of iPod-wielding fans. The band posted a response on their official forum apologizing for the protection and detailing ways to circumvent the protection and rip their songs to PC. Switchfoot linked to open-source program CDex's download page with instructions on disabling the autorunning protection and ripping the files to MP3. Many of Switchfoot's fans have been upset by the copy protection measures, and it's nice to know the artists seem to care about the issue."

Lost&Confused writes to tell us Slyck News is reporting that most of Methlabs.org administration and development staff have been forced out of their own website. For the time being PeerGuardian is being hosted on sourceforge. However, users are advised to stop using the Methlabs.org and Blocklist.org hosted blocklists in favor of the Bluetack list until they can sort things out.

burtdub asks: "With the amount of raw text data available, there seems to be no shortage of ambitious language projects on the horizon, from Universal Language Translators to Junk Email Filtering. However, the mess that is the English language still seems to elude commercial attempts while being relatively ignored by the open source community. What would it take to make a useful, functional grammar checker?"

AugstWest asks: "I've been doing some research into what the available clustering options are for pooling CPU resources, and it looks like most of the solutions I've found require that programs be re-written to take advantage of the cluster. Since there are virtualization apps like Bochs and VMWare, where the applications just make use of a virtual CPU as if it was a real CPU, why aren't there clustering solutions that do this as well?"

After almost 8 years, Slashdot's HTML is finally getting an overhaul. For now the changes are almost entirely under the hood, as we migrate the current skin to CSS. Slashdot itself will migrate in the next few weeks, but for now, we'd appreciate it if people who understand CSS could take a look at Slashcode. If you use a browser that lets you select a stylesheet, you can take a look at that site with the Slashdot CSS Skin. Keep in mind that Slashcode doesn't look exactly like Slashdot, so there will be some differences between that site, and the final version that will appear on Slashdot. We're mainly looking for feedback on compatibility issues and blatant bugs. You can use our our SF bug tracker to submit bug reports. Thanks for your help. Once we move Slashdot, work will begin on a new look & feel. If you have ideas, you could start playing with the CSS stylesheets now!

Martin Ecker writes "The Red Book, also known as the OpenGL Programming Guide, is back in its fifth edition. It received the name Red Book because of the nice red book cover, and possibly also because it has remained the standard introductory text on the OpenGL graphics API for years, and always referring to it as "OpenGL Programming Guide" is too long. This fifth edition now also covers new features introduced with versions 1.5 and 2.0 of the OpenGL standard. So let me take you on a tour through the pages of this book to see what it has to offer." Ecker's review continues below.