raindog2 writes "After two and a half years of development, Gambas has become the first Visual Basic-style environment for Linux to enter release candidate status. Anyone who has been frustrated by a lack of production-quality free RAD environments should give it a try."

SuperBanana writes "After what seems like an eternity, Netatalk (an Appletalk server suite for unix) has caught up with the latest version of the Apple Filing Protocol (aka Appleshare). This means long filenames, files larger than 2GB, and other goodies that will bring much happiness for Unix sysadmins supporting Macintosh users (check out the human-friendly release notes for the full list). As with any major release, even though this has been through several release candidates- read the gotchas, review the known bugs in their bug tracker, test it out on something non-critical...and help stabilize the release by reporting any bugs you find. Of course, make sure you read a guide to reporting bugs first!"

jaaron writes "Ever wanted your own personal SourceForge? If so, then be sure to check out GForge which just released version 4.0. GForge is a fork of the original GPL'd SourceForge code and like sf.net provides forums, mailing lists, revision control via CVS or Subversion (yes, Subversion!), issue trackers and much more for any number of teams and projects."

jaromil writes "Speaking of human/computer interface, so simple, so neat, a usb knob to switch among desktops can give us quite some feeling about operating a machine... how about such controls around the monitor?" The knob in this case is switching between different effects possible with EffecTV. This make me wonder what creative uses people are putting Griffin's PowerMate to.

Futurepower(R) writes "Which VNC software do you think is best, and why? There are several free programs, for example, TightVNC, RealVNC, UltraVNC, and TridiaVNC. Or, is it better to pay for VNC software, like Tridia VNC Pro or Radmin? Which is fastest, most secure, and the least hassle? Which has video resolution scaling of the remote desktop?"

CherryBS writes "The CherryOS emulator, claiming that it could seamlessly run Mac OS X at 80% the speed of the host computer on standard x86 hardware (covered here previously), has created some controversy about stolen code. It turns out that CherryOS's emulation engine is nothing more than that of PearPC, an open source GPL project to create a PowerPC motheboard emulator." Read on for more details.

hajokirchhoff writes "The first public release of The Lit Window Library (for C++) is now available at from LitWindow itself. The goal of The Lit Window Library is to speed up C++ GUI coding by a factor of 10. It greatly reduces the amount of work needed to code user interface requirements. This is not just another "better widgets" library. The library introduces two new, different concepts to UI coding: a data abstraction layer (reflections) and rule-based programming."

Nuclear Elephant writes "After four months of development DSPAM v3.2 has been released, bringing many new enhancements and filtering technologies. These include distributed computing support, implementation of Bill Yerazunis' Sparse Binary Polynomial Hashing algorithm (from CRM114), and v1.2 of Bayesian Noise Reduction. Other enhancements include SQLite support and many significant performance enhancements for PostgreSQL. DSPAM's official release is next week, but you can download the preview release now. Users of the project have also contributed towards creating a new logo for this release."

grugnog writes "The Election Incident Reporting System (EIRS) is an integrated set of tools to assist Election Protection Organizations and their members to record and react to election day incidents and irregularities. Volunteers are needed to both code the EIRS system (which is based on open source systems: AdvoKit, PHPSurveyor, MapServer, and geocoder.us) and to volunteer technical expertise to logic & accuracy testing of voting machines and poll watching through the Verified Voting Foundation."

Daniel Horn writes "In a flash of inspiration coming from the Obfuscated C code contest and the current E-voting scandals, I wondered if there shouldn't be a similar code obfuscation contest based on obfuscating voting results, that is, C code that appears correct but does the wrong thing when counting votes. Submit your obfuscated vote-counting code now, and the two winners will be selected on November 2 and will receive a free Vega Strike CD. Obviously incorrect code, however, is not welcome."

NTK was kind enough to point out the Inkulator 9000, software to render pen-and-ink style drawings from 3D meshes. NTK also points to a number of other handy tools and papers.

colonist writes "Tit for Tat, the reigning champion of the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma Competition, has been defeated by a group of cooperating programs from the University of Southampton. The Prisoner's Dilemma is a game with two players and two possible moves: cooperate or defect. If the two players cooperate, they both have small wins. If one player cooperates and the other defects, the cooperator has a big loss and the defector has a big win. If both players defect, they both have small losses. Tit for Tat cooperates in the first round and imitates its opponent's previous move for the rest of the game. Tit for Tat is similar to the Mutual Assured Destruction strategy used by the two nuclear superpowers during the Cold War. Southampton's programs executed a known series of 5 to 10 moves which allowed them to recognize each other. After recognition, the two Southampton programs became 'master and slave': one program would keep defecting and the other would keep cooperating. If a Southampton program determined that another program was non-Southampton, it would defect." Update: 10/14 15:08 GMT by J : If anyone wants to try writing their own PD strategy and see how it fares in a Darwinian contest, I'll host a tournament of Slashdot readers. Here are the docs, sample code, notes on previous runs, and my email address.

EqualSlash writes "The Windows installer for the upcoming MySQL 4.1 release will be built using Microsoft's first ever open source project - Windows Installer XML toolset(Wix). According to an InternetNews report, they are using Wix to convert the MSI file designed using InstallShield into XML to achieve greater control over the installer. Of course, they are simply using it because it's Open Source (CPL license) and in good faith. Earlier this year, when Microsoft surprised everybody by releasing the Wix project under an open source license, some were cautious about using it, as the specific XML schema it uses might be patented just like the Office xml schema. Whatever.. Rob Mensching, Wix's lead developer, is very happy about MySQL choosing to use Wix for their installer."

BlueMoon writes "After almost 2 years of silence a new version of OpenXDK (the open source, free and legal development kit for the Microsoft Xbox) has been released. It has now a complete libc replacement, multimedia support (video, joysticks and event handling) using the Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) and it migrated to a GCC-based toolchain. To demonstrate the capabilities of the framework, the SDL port of Doom is able to be compiled and executed."

WWWWolf writes "Ultima VII is quite well emulated using Exult. Exult folks have added quite a few handy additions to the game, but nothing they have done quite matches their newest feature: Exult in 3D. There is talk about support for actual 3D models in future. Being an alpha-quality work at the moment, the source is not available, but there's a load of screenshots and a Linux binary to try."

AtheOSParrot writes "Version 0.5.4 of the Syllable operating system has been released. The lightweight, BeOS-alike is aimed squarely at finally realising the dream of bringing an easy-to-use, free software desktop to everyday users. 0.5.4 is a significant milestone in this direction with the integration of the new desktop, which is completely unimpeded by any legacy X-Windows foundations or toolkits beneath. This is no tin-pot bootloader with bitmaps snapped on; other features include SMP, networking, ATA/ATAPI, audio & video, 2D acceleration, GCC, USB & a 64-bit journaled FS with attributes. With desktop Linux still not having dented the 1% mark, will Syllable be the one to do to Windows what Firefox has done to IE? Also reported on OSNews.com, Golem.de and Linuxfr.org."

rgovostes asks: "I've been looking around for a (hopefully low-cost) Linux-based handheld device with WiFi capabilities for some network testing and security evaluation. I need to be able to ping, list nearby WiFi signals, and run Ettercap. I'd also like it to be Mac OS X compatible without much work. I found handhelds.org (Coralized), which has some information, but I'm not very handheld-savvy, so it isn't too helpful to me. Am I asking for something unrealistic or is something like this possible? Any advice on the matter would be appreciated."

Last Thursday you got to Ask Questions of the Green Party's US Presidential nominee, David Cobb He answered 12 of the most highly rated comments. A thanks goes to Mr.Cobb for taking the time to explain some of his positions to us. Read on to see what he has to say.

Ravalox writes "AA Helper Library, which is a set of libraries to assist in the development of AA-Lib games/applications, has made its initial release. It currently provides a few graphics primitives and a render-to-frame function so you can get a normal image out of AA-Lib. If like me you are an ascii video fan another helpful ascii library is libcaca which is currently supported in Video Lan Media Player and Mplayer."

TodLiebeck writes "The Echo framework, which is used for creating web applications that approach the functionality of rich clients, has received some significant updates since its last showing on Slashdot. The community-developed EchoPoint component library has hit v1.0 and now provides more than 50 components such as a chart container and a rich text editor. The recently released version 1.1 of Echo is now available under the Mozilla Public License (in addition to the LGPL). More information can be found in these two announcements on TheServerSide, and this recent article in the SDTimes."