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Domain: berkeleydailyplanet.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to berkeleydailyplanet.com.
Stories · 3
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Berkeley Library RFP Asks For Nuclear Free Vendor
beefsprocket writes "RFID tags are not new to libraries. Neither is 3M as one of the larger providers of the Checkpoint circulation and self-checkout system. What is new is a library discarding their current working system used for over 500,000 items because the vendor refuses to submit a required Nuclear Free Disclosure Form (PDF). The specific form is required for anyone wishing to do business with the City of Berkeley per the Nuclear Free Berkeley Act of 1986. This reverses a 2008 exemption that the Library applied for to be able to work with 3M." -
Shouldn't Every Developer Understand English?
Pickens writes "Jeff Atwood has an interesting post that begins by noting that with the Internet, whatever country you live in or language you speak, a growing percentage of the accumulated knowledge of the world can and should be available in your native language; but that the rules are different for programmers. 'So much so that I'm going to ask the unthinkable: shouldn't every software developer understand English?' Atwood argues that 'It's nothing more than great hackers collectively realizing that sticking to English for technical discussion makes it easier to get stuff done. It's a meritocracy of code, not language, and nobody (or at least nobody who is sane, anyway) localizes programming languages.' Eric Raymond in his essay 'How to be a Hacker' says that functional English is required for true hackers and notes that 'Linus Torvalds, a Finn, comments his code in English (it apparently never occurred to him to do otherwise). His fluency in English has been an important factor in his ability to recruit a worldwide community of developers for Linux. It's an example worth following.' Although it may sound like The Ugly American and be taken as a sort of cultural imperialism, 'advocating the adoption of English as the de-facto standard language of software development is simple pragmatism, the most virtuous of all hacker traits,' writes Atwood. 'If that makes me an ugly American programmer, so be it.'" -
Software for the Grass Roots
An anonymous reader writes "In February at the O'Reilly Digital Democracy Teach-In, technologists from the Dean, Kucinich, Clark and Kerry campaigns laid down arms to share tech plans while their respective camps were still battling it out in the primaries. A (private) list and requirements for fall campaign organizing ensued. Just six weeks ago, a few of the developers converged in San Francisco for a show and tell of their emerging free software tools. Today, the AdvoKit project was the first to tag beta, hoping to kick-start the campaign software revolution in time for November 2nd."