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| C++: The Ugly Useful Programming Language |
| By David Adams, submitted by IndigoJo on 2008-10-11 16:48:04 |
| Eric Raymond is working on an essay, putatively titled "Why C++ Is Not My Favorite Programming Language". In his announcement, he calls it "an overcomplexity generator", "bloated, obfuscated, unwieldy, rigid, and brittle", and alleges that these characteristics appear in C++ applications also. I contend that many of the complaints about C++ are petty or are aimed at specific libraries or poor documentation and that many of the features commonly regarded as unnecessary (and excluded from intended replacements) are, in fact, highly useful. C++: the Ugly Useful Programming Language |
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| OpenVMS 8.4 Roadmap Announced |
| By David Adams, submitted by poundsmack on 2008-10-11 16:38:37 |
| HP has released a roadmap outlining future development of OpenVMS, the operating system that commercialized many features that are now considered standard requirements for any high-end server operating system. (Such as Integrated networking, Symmetrical, asymmetrical, and NUMA multiprocessing, including clustering, distributed file system (Files-11), Integrated database features, support for multiple computer programming languages, hardware partitioning of multiprocessors, etc). With over 30 years of development, OpenVMS has stood the test of time and has continued to evolve as one of the most secure and trusted mission critical OS's of our time. |
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| OS and Virtualization or Virtualization and OS? |
| By special contributor Rahul on 2008-10-11 04:47:38 |
| We each behave according to our nature. It should come as no surprise, then, to learn that while a virtualization supplier believes that the operating system is, effectively, a feature, an operating system vendor would argue that the converse is true. The philosophical differences between Red Hat and VMware could not have been more apparent during their respective events - September’s VMworld gathering in Las Vegas and yesterday’s Red Hat analyst day held at the New York Stock Exchange. |
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| Mozilla Labs Introduces Geode Geo-location Software |
| By special contributor Rahul on 2008-10-11 04:43:43 |
| Mozilla Labs recently offered a sneak peak and download of Geode. Geode is one of the first applications to use the new W3C geolocation specification API. It is currently available as a plug-in for Firefox 3 (and seems to only support Windows and Mac systems at this time). Mozilla Labs indicates it will likely be a new feature integrated in an upcoming browser release. |
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| KpackageKit: Future of Package Managers on Your Desktop |
| By special contributor Rahul on 2008-10-11 01:53:01 |
| PolishLinux has an interview with the KPackageKit developers. PackageKit is a abstraction layer over the different Linux package management tools. It is primarily designed to unify the graphical tools and provide a consistent distribution neutral framework for application developers to install add-ons as well. This project was initiated and continues to be maintained by Red Hat developer Richard Hughes who also wrote the initial GNOME frontend to it, called gpk-application. Multiple backends currently exist and it is the default for Fedora and Foresight Linux already. Other distributions including Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, Mandriva, and Gentoo are actively participating in the development of different backends. A KDE interface has been under rapid development recently and just did a 1.0 release last week. This interview provides more details. |
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| Measuring the True Success of OpenOffice.org |
| By special contributor Rahul on 2008-10-11 01:39:03 |
| Michael Meeks who leads the OpenOffice.org development team within Novell has taken a
detailed look at contributions associated by metrics to OpenOffice.org and makes the case that Sun's tight control over the codebase and the lack of enough volunteer contributors leaves the development slowly stagnating over a period of time. Michael Meeks has recently started strongly advocating the position that Sun needs to setup a more independent OpenOffice.org foundation or otherwise allow more relaxed policies for commit access and be less rigid about assignment of copyright to itself for the development community of Openoffice.org to thrive beyond Sun developers. |
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| Linus Blogs About 2.6.27 Release |
| By special contributor Rahul on 2008-10-10 23:06:39 |
| Linus Torvalds who has recently started blogging, writes about the new 2.6.27 release. The developer's viewpoint on releases tend to be different from end users. Some interesting bits... |
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| Linux 2.6.27 Released |
| By Thom Holwerda, submitted by diegocg on 2008-10-10 09:06:50 |
| Linux 2.6.27 has been released. It adds a new filesystem (UBIFS) for "pure" flash-based storage, the page-cache is now lockless, much improved Direct I/O scalability and performance, delayed allocation support for ext4, multiqueue networking, data integrity support in the block layer, a function tracer, a mmio tracer, sysprof support, improved webcam support, support for the Intel wifi 5000 series and RTL8187B network cards, a new ath9k driver for the Atheros AR5008 and AR9001 chipsets, more new drivers, and many other improvements and fixes. Full list of changes can be found here. |
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| Rethinking User Account Control |
| By Thom Holwerda on 2008-10-09 21:46:26 |
| The Engineering 7 blog continues its trend of detailing the real issues that people deal with when it comes to Windows. We have already covered their insights, usage data, and mea culpas concerning the taskbar, as well as their musings on window management. The latest entry on the E7 blog deals with a controversial Windows issue: User Account Control. The usage data has some interesting results, to say the least. |
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| Python 2.6 Released |
| By Thom Holwerda, submitted by ganges master on 2008-10-09 21:04:40 |
| Python 2.6 has been released on October 1st. The major theme of this release is preparing the migration path to Python 3.0, a major redesign of the language. Whenever possible, Python 2.6 incorporates new features and syntax from 3.0 while remaining compatible with existing code by not removing older features or syntax. See the what's new docs for more details. |
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