brlcad writes "After 20 years of active development under a proprietary government license agreement, the BRL-CAD solid modeling suite has just been released as Open Source software. BRL-CAD is one of the many legacies of the late Michael Muuss, author of ping. The package began on the PDP-11 and VAX 11/780--before the emergence of ANSI/ISO C language standards--and boasts one of the first parallel Ray tracers in existence. Today BRL-CAD has over 750,000 lines of source code. It incorporates both 3D modeling and rendering capabilities, and supports an API for user-developed geometric analysis applications. It continues to be developed and maintained by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory and its partners. Various portions of the package are distributed under the GPL, LGPL, GFDL, and BSD licenses."

Retalin writes "It looks like RunUO, the largest Ultima Online Emulator around has decided to opensource their project. It's caused quite a stir in their 40,000+ userbase." From the announcement post: "The RunUO team has collectively decided that we will be open sourcing RunUO's core to the public. At this point for the most part, the core is done and the only things remaining are game layer features. We have totally rewritten the networking piece of RunUO and Factions are pretty stable. We have completed a lot of the Ninja additions to UO and are ready to release the core code to the world."

Unqualified code-monkey Garote submits his annotated version of Neal Stephenson's In The Beginning Was The Command Line, updated to discuss UI design theory and fill in some of the gaps from the last five years. (And yes, he has been granted permission from Neal to do this.) There's plenty more to cover of course: Will the command-line last only as long as the keyboard? How will desktop search technology change our workflow? What about the 3D interface? Scroll to any random paragraph in the essay and you'll find something worth expounding on. What's ahead for the next five years?

A few months ago, the GPL IDE Gambas reached 1.0 release candidate phase, and now reader drfreak writes "Gambas has now hit 1.0 and looks promising as GNU/Linux's answer to Visual Basic. Now, if it ran in Windows too, it would truly crush VB for database applications. Check it out at gambas.sourceforge.net." A 1.0.1 release came out on January 3rd to fix a few bugs.

Years ago, kids could be gradually introduced to computers through learning languages like LOGO and educational computer games. Many of us started our computing careers at our parent's workplace, logged in to a word processor to type away, only to become fascinated with the whole computing thing. So Slashdot, let's hear how you were lured into the digital life. What was it that drew you to a life of programming? How old were you when you first used a computer? What pieces of modern software do you think would be a good way to introduce today's kids to the world of computing?

Pier Luigi Fiorini writes "The Mockup project is a desktop operating system based on GNU/Linux. It has recently released new source code and published both screenshots and mockups. Read the announcement to know where are the source code tarballs and how to compile them. Mockup uses a new lightweight and modern graphical user interface that supports both pixel and vector based graphics. The GUI is based on bleeding edge technologies like Qt 4.0 beta, Elektra, HAL and DBUS. Elektra is a new backend for text configuration files. Instead of each program to have its own text configuration files, with a variety of formats, Elektra tries to provide a universal, hierarchical, fast and consistent namespace and infrastructure to access configuration parameters through a key-value pair mechanism. This way any software can read/save its configuration/state using a consistent API."

sam_christ writes "An article in today's Investor's Business Daily (Google cache) and an article by TV industry pundit/predictions-huckster Philip Swann say the same thing: that Microsoft's Media Center Edition will be a big flop in 2005. Meanwhile, from what I can tell much more powerful alternatives to Microsoft's MCE bloatware are thriving: commercial products like Snapstream (see their 6-tuner Medusa PVR built for about $1200), Showshifter and open-source freeware like Mediaportal and MythTV. From what I've read about Microsoft MCE and all of its DRM and content restrictions, I have to agree with both of these articles."

Demolition writes "The latest release of the iPod-Linux Installer has been reviewed on Accelerate Your Mac!, a popular Mac performance/modification site. As mentioned in previous Slashdot articles, the iPodLinux Project is an open source venture devoted to porting Linux to Apple's iPod. In a nutshell, the reviewer finds that the iPodLinux Project has progressed a long way from its early proof-of-concept days."

Anonymous Coward writes "The best SNES emulator, and the only GPL one -- ZSNES -- has had the first release in almost two and a half years! Looks like those smart coders reverse engineered quite a few new special co-processors for this release as well."

An anonymous reader writes "The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) just announced that it has become a financial sponsor of Tor, an open-source project to help people 'engage in anonymous communication online.' It sounds like a simpler version of Freenet, e.g. 'a network-within-a-network that protects communication from ... traffic analysis.' Like Freenet, the source-code is freely available and binaries exist for Windows, Linux, etc." Read on for more details.

Robert Nagle writes "Over the last year, Zope and Plone have gained mindshare as open source web application servers. In the last few months, two books have come out about how to use, extend and administer Plone. One is Andy McKay's Definitive Guide to Plone (available for free online), and the other is Julie Meloni's Plone Content Management Essentials." Read on for Nagle's review of both books.

Jacco de Leeuw writes "SecurityFocus published an article by Michael Ossmann that discusses the new generation of WEP cracking tools for 802.11 wireless networks. These are much faster as they perform passive statistical analysis. In many cases, a WEP key can be determined in minutes or even seconds. For those who have switched to PPTP for securing their wireless nets: Joshua Wright released a new version of his Cisco LEAP cracker called Asleap which can now also recover weak PPTP passwords. Both LEAP and PPTP employ MS-CHAPv2 authentication." Update: 12/22 00:14 GMT by T : Michael Ossmann wrote to point out his last name has two Ns, rather than one.

Torrey Clark writes "NitroOnline is a project that is currently being developed that will allow Nintendo DS owners to play Wireless enabled games via the internet. It will require a wireless router, and a wireless card in your PC or laptop to communicate with your Nintendo DS."

carlmenezes asks: "I volunteer when I can to help a poor educational institution in India with their computing needs. As you can imagine, most computers are from donations and very little money (if any) can be spent on software licensing. Therefore, the installed software is all Open Source and I do all of the software installation by myself. I have already installed Linux on 16 PCs, with Firefox. The default desktop is KDE and the kdeedu package (klettres in particular) has several loyal fans. Incidentally, the kids don't find it hard to use at all and the lack of 3D doesn't bother them in the least :) I would like to ask the community about a good source code analysis tool. I have already installed Source Navigator. Is there any other comparable open source tool?"

J. Karl Rove writes "Nikita Borisov and Ian Goldberg (of many, many other projects) have released Off the Record Messaging for Gaim. Encrypt an IM, prove (at the time) that it came from you, and deny it later. The authentication works only when the message is sent; anybody can forge all the messages he wants afterwards (toolkit included). Captured or archived messages prove nothing. And forward secrecy means Big Brother can't read your messages even if he wiretaps you AND grabs your computer later on. All the gooey goodness of crypto, with none of the consequences! They have a protocol spec, source code, and Debian and Fedora binaries."

A not-so anonymous Anonymous Coward puts this tough issue up for discussion: "There seem some more determined efforts underway currently in some corners of the KDE project to port substantial parts of the software stack to the MS Windows platform. These efforts are now met by fierce resistance on the part of some of their core developers. Aaron J. Seigo summarizes his reasoning in his blog: 'If the applications people want are available on Windows, they will tend to stick with Windows...by porting software to Windows, we eliminate the majority of the competitive advantage of Free Software desktops in the eyes of the overwhelming majority of consumers while Microsoft has all the rope they need to shut the door once again on us ... Free Software desktop applications on Windows represent a no-win situation for Open Source, but Open Source desktops on Free Software operating systems do.'" (Read more below.)

Cymage asks: "I usually do my charitable contributions in December, and so I am looking at organizations to give to. I try to give to organizations with different areas of focus. Here are some of the ones I have given to in the past/am considering: Basic Needs (Atlanta) - Food Bank and St Vincent, Promoting Self-Sufficiency - Habitat and Heifer, and Digital Rights/Software - EFF, Mozilla, SourceForge, and BitTorrent. What other organizations, especially technical ones, do you give to and why?"

TuringTest writes "Interface designer and IE ex-developer Scott Berkun writes an essay on basic principles of web browser design, moved by the recent presence of Firefox and Opera in the headlines. Gives plenty of design constraints and guidelines, some insightful, some debatable. Personally some features that I'd like to see in my browser include colaborative filtering (a.k.a. del.icio.us integration), a unified tool for history+bookmarks in a single list (filtered by keyword tags), and automatic generation of keywords for the bookmarked pages (something that Open Text Summarizer can do)."

Martin Ecker writes "Two-dimensional user interfaces (UIs) have been around for a long time, and people are accustomed to using them. However, 3-dimensional user interfaces have not yet received as much exposure. Only a select few applications utilize 3D UIs, some with more success than others. The book 3D User Interfaces: Theory and Practice (published by Addison-Wesley) attempts to give a broad overview of the field of 3D user interfaces. It discusses the hardware devices and the software techniques required to build successful 3D UIs and gives a number of design guidelines to follow when having to develop new 3D interaction techniques for specific applications." Read on for the rest of Ecker's review.

morrison writes "A little over four years after moving to SourceForge at a current rate of several hundred downloads every day, BZFlag has finally "gone platinum". With over 1,000,000 SourceForge downloads, BZFlag looks to be the third game (following Tux Racer and StepMania) to go 'sf platinum'. While this doesn't include the many tens of thousands distributed prior to the project's migration to sf.net during the SGI days, it's a momentous occasion for open source gaming regardless."