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Hmm, I beg to differ.

POWER is not an older artitecture, but a contemporary server architecture, in contract to PPC's desktop architecture.

This article, linked from the Power Architecture Resource Center site, imples that the PPC970, aka G5, is derived from the POWER4 artictecture:

... Sinharoy noted during his presentation that the PowerPC 970, the processor that drives Apple's G5, was derived from the Power4 design, suggesting that such a step would be logical again as IBM engineers refine the Power5 design. The PowerPC 970 strips one processor core from the Power4 design and also includes several other connection and multiprocessing sacrifices to make the chip small and affordable enough for desktop use.

Therefore, porting from PowerPC (G5) to POWER (5) would be like porting to run on the PPC G6+, which sounds useful to me, at least!

I just love stupid trolls that can't even use Google.

Tsearch2 - full text extension for PostgreSQL
DevX: Implementing Full Text Indexing with PostgreSQL - about Tsearch2.

Tsearch2 is included in the postgresql-contrib package of at least Debian and Novell/SuSE. Is that "out of the box" enough for a clueless MySQL user?

ASP.NET might be nice, but in web/database programming, I prefer to keep the actual appearance and elements of the program seperate from the code - this was one of those basic programming ideals that seems to be taught a lot and I've found it to be very helpful.

You can do that with ASP.NET as well. You're free to create your own classes that handle program elements (like in any .NET program), and simply use ASP.NET forms as the bridge to the resulting HTML. The UI stuff then remains only in the form classes.

What sort of HTML templating features does ASP.NET have? That might make it be a lot more attractive if the actual code is removed from any reference to any HTML object.

Good question. I'm unfamiliar enough with ASP.NET to not know the answer to this one. In my experience style sheets have been sufficient in controlling page appearance, but I haven't tried templating page layout. From what I've seen people resort to manually outputting HTML, which negates the benefits of ASP.NET. However, this can be done on a high level, so I believe you can implement chunks of the page as ASP.NET controls, and at a high level render those to HTML and plug that into an HTML template.

Essentially I don't think ASP.NET supports HTML templates; the closest feature I can think of are ASP.NET 2.0 master pages, but those don't seem as flexible as the type of HTML templates I have in mind.

As a seasoned PostgreSQL user I'm very excited about this release, I especially like the new Savepoints feature (described in this article). This wonderful feature finally makes it possible to roll back only part of a transaction. Sweet!

Other than the obvious mySQL and PostgreSQL, I have tried two others... CA's Ingres and IBM's Cloudscape (which is an embedded DB).

Ingres was originally intended to compete with the likes of Oracle and MS SQL Server, but never had the power or client base. OpenSourcing Ingres looks like CA's attempt to beef up both in one shot. It's not a GPL license, just a chance to peek at the source and maybe help out. The interface that ships is very much like Oracle's.

Cloudscape is nice, but not even as powerful as PostgreSQL.

I think there is a huge market still untapped for open source DB's... especially RDBMS, but alas, large companies are (of course) slow to adopt.

Yes, PostgreSQL can do fulltext searches.

With the tsearch2 module, you can even order results by relevance/accuracy rather than just return in row order.

You are indeed do not know what you are talking about. JRockit supports 64 bit addressing just fine. http://www.devx.com/Intel/Article/17457

Seriously, can you - or anyone else - name one major incompatiblity between MSVC's implementation of C or C++ and the most commonly used ANSI standard?

Uh, Microsoft themselves admit that VC++ is not ANSI compliant. For example from http://www.devx.com/cplus/Article/16860/1954?pf=tr uehttp://www.devx.com/cplus/Article/16860/1954?pf= true>

"Q: It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that very little has been done to bring Visual C++ to full ANSI/ISO compliance since the release of Visual C++ 5.0 in 1997. However, Microsoft has recently announced its commitment to bring Visual C++ .NET into compliance with the C++98 standard. What is the cause of this change of heart? When will we have a fully standard-compliant version of Visual C++?

A: Microsoft definitely does intend to ship a fully standard-compliant version of Visual C++. It won't all be in this next incremental release that we have in early beta right now, but the majority of the conformance improvements will be in there, including partial specialization. It's certainly conformant enough that the most modern C++ community libraries, particularly Loki, Lamba and Boost, compile in-house without workarounds today. Few shipping compilers on any platform can do that--those libraries are well known as "compiler busters." Only the strongest compilers can handle them correctly."

In the interests of fairness however I'd like to point out that vertially no C++ compilers are currently ANSI complaint. GCC certainly isn't, although it is better than VC++.

There is one fully compliant C++ compiler who's name escapes me right now. Anyone?

That's what PHP-GTK is for! :)

NTFS has hard links, actually.

They didn't just pick green for fun, green on black provides very good contrast with little eye strain.

Blue's a good background colour too, lots of Dyslexia associated sites recomend it.

Honestly, I use google 75% of the time. I also use w3schools, and frequent alistapart, Microsoft,
Builder.com, and my favorite devX.

... pixels of red, green, and blue material are applied.

[...] All colors of the visible spectrum are available

PHP is not object oriented, therefore making it teh ghey.

Yes it is.

At least I have never seen it before.

Look at the AMD 64 ("Opteron", etc) CPU. Linux support is here, but native versions of Microsoft Windows are still yet to be released.

to build similar UI's on a PC is very tedious. You want text boxes that expand with the window, tie a text box to one corner, place a button so it is always in the bottom right hand corner of a window. All of these things are a simple click away. No complex code to get all these things moving around.

While this used to be tedious in VB6, and certainly in dialogs, .NET has two new features, docking and anchoring, that solve the problem. Give 'em a try.

Some people don't have time to rewrite a nicely worded article, so they post a link to someone else's. I think your also forgetting about sites that provide their own content like Ars Technica and HardOCP which were smallfry's a few years back. The number of "E-zines" and blog sites are continually growing, so people will less and less quote from the Times, The New Scientist or the BBC because they'll find the news elsewhere. And more so if the big fish want to inconvenience their readership with registration.

And then you'll have content that noone has written something up for, so that gives the reader his/her chance to be famous for a day. Look!!! I just found a nice layout of a Terra V rocket. Some people might find this interesting, regardless of the credibility of me or the site. Or take someone's writeup of RoboSapien, or someone else plugging his own webblog because he received a check from the RIAA, or someone plugging their personal coverage of the CodeCon conference, etc. This notion of credibility-by-link should have been shattered as soon as you saw this troll get posted.

Your statement is analagous to the trustworthiness of proprietary code because the corporation is credible or well known. Which means on the flipside that because many open-source coders aren't "credible", then the code should not be trustworthy. Both are bad logic, and sometimes slashdot mods are like that after going through a mind-numbing XY,000+ submissions per day, but it doesnt hold true enough to call it law.

"Linux? Good god no, man! Didn't you see what happened when just a bit of the Microsoft source code got leaked? I thought you were up on these things!"

Ha, that reminds me of a recent article on devx. This guy demonstrates how being a little stupid and misinformed can lead you down all kinds of wrong paths.

His argument is that some crazed open source hacker is going to put a back door in an open source program. Further he presents this as a disadvantage of open source when compared to closed software. Because, of course, it is so much easier to hide backdoors in programs that EVERYONE HAS THE SOURCE CODE TO. No one could even hide a backdoor in a program that nobody except the developers have seen the code for. That is unpossible. Right.

Monoculture or Diversity?

The AP ran a story this weekend, captured by Yahoo, talking about Dan Geer and his thoeries of how the Microsoft Monoculture endangers computer security. I have concerns.

Although I know this won't fend off the zealots who just need to speak their mind, else their puny little heads explode off of their shoulders, atrophied from lack of lifting their hands any higher than a keyboard, I offer this caveat: What I'm about to present is merely philosophical rambling, curious wonder, nothing more than an innocent what if. It is, in no way, intended to offer an argument, solution, opposition, or anything else that would offend (other than those puny headed, shoulderless freaks).

Just the facts, Mam

I found it intriguing that, as the AP article mentioned:

"Steven Cooper, the Homeland Security Department's chief information officer... acknowledged [monoculture] was a concern and said the department would likely expand its use of Linux and Unix as a precaution."

Why hasn't Mr. Cooper, the media, and suposed security experts who promote U/Linux as a safe alternative, acknowledge that U/Linux also have their share of security advisories? Take a look at Secunia and their product listing. Doesn't anyone care that Solaris 9 had more advisories (42) in 2003 than Windows 2000 Server (36)? Doesn't it scare anyone that, while Windows XP Home edition had 32 advisories, Red Hat 9 had more than twice as many with 72? Debian 3 had 186!

Doesn't Open Source claim to have a better development model by throwing more eyeballs at the source code, thereby eliminating - or minimizing - security flaws earlier?

Missing the forest for the trees

Take a look at this, also from the AP article:

"Mike Reiter of Carnegie-Mellon University and Stephanie Forrest, a University of New Mexico biologist who has been gleaning lessons for computer security from living organisms for years, recently received a $750,000 National Science Foundation (news - web sites) grant to study methods to automatically diversify software code.

Daniel DuVarney and R. Sekar of the State University of New York-Stony Brook are exploring "benign mutations" that would diversify software, preserving the functional portions of code but shaking up the nonfunctional portions that are often targeted by viruses."

Are these people frickin bonkers? We're barely capable of securing the simplest SMTP and FTP services. Software is already beyond our comprehension. What makes us so arrogant as to assume we can write software that makes other software more secure - without breaking it, without opening unforseen security breaches? We are decades away from being that intelligent.

Of course, on the plus side of this approach, as software gets more complicated, it will be too obfuscated for the Puny Heads to understand and, therefore, will be a great deterrent for attacks! (Yeah, sarcasm)

Miopic Intelligence

Dan Geer likes to compare the information world to that of biology, equating computer viruses with biological viruses. I have one problem with this way of thinking. Biological viruses simply exist, have always existed and will always exist. They don't have an agenda. They don't have malicious intent. They aren't scheduled or targeted. They are nature. It's the way the system works. The global ecosystem is s

Case in point.

More importantly -- and as I continually addressed in the letter I sent to Mistah Russell -- is the implicit assumption that governmental security review processes are automatically going to be less trustworthy than other security review processes. Russell does all he can to talk about the poor government, how terrible that they can't just buy something off the shelf. Buying something is no guarantee of security, and if I'm going to pay tax dollars for government employees to purchase software they're too busy killing interns to write themselves, they damn well better scope said software out. It's not enough that the guy's points are just wrong -- he goes one step further and insults those paying for crappy government by telling them that their crappy governments should buy crappy software in crappy ways.

The accusation of bias at the end does open source no credit; someone writing for O'Reilly could be accused of bias as easily as someone writing for DevX. Stone would have done better to leave that out, and read one of the advocacy FAQs instead. DevX itself hosts a better rebuttal than his.

Click here.

I cringe and winge when I read articles such as these (the original FUD article, not the rebuttal). This guy is either an idiot who actually believes this stuff or it's M$ sponsored FUD. I don't know which is worse.....

All the rebuttals are well argued, but unfortunately, most PHB's eyes glaze over when you start making points and talking about "straw men". Their eyes light up though when you start talking about how the evil Open Source will cost you money. The M$ ads right next to the article just show how much bull$hit all this is..

Sorry, I know you've all read this before, but it feels to preach to the /. choir.....

Open Source Is Fertile Ground for Foul Play Average Rating: 1.2/5

The rebuttal "Who's Guarding the Guards? We Are" , also hosted at devx. Average Rating: 4.9/5

I think it's somewhat sad that some nobody bashes Linux in a little article and it gets slashdotted. I mean sure it's nice to know not everyone loves Linux, but remember the source people...

The fact that this comes out right on the heels of this quote just makes me laugh:

"I'm not naive enough to think that proprietary commercial operating system software doesn't have the same sort of vulnerability, but the barriers to implementing them are much higher, because the source is better protected."
--A. Russell Jones, "Open Source Is Fertile Ground for Foul Play".

(Granted, the context was policing code insertion.)

A rebuttal has been published on the DevX web site. It pretty much sums up what is being said here.

Hidden under their tiny Open Source section:
rebuttal

Looking at the list of topics in their menu, and the predominance of MS products, it's obviously a biased site.

Russell Jones editorial piece on DevX, "Open Source Is Fertile Ground for Foul Play", represents his view ... but not DevX's view as a whole. I've worked at DevX for a few years and have often championed Open Source within the company. After seeing Russell's piece last night, I couldn't sleep until writing this rebuttal.

Russell Jones editorial piece on DevX, "Open Source Is Fertile Ground for Foul Play", represents his view ... but not DevX's view as a whole. I've worked at DevX for a few years and have often championed Open Source within the company. After seeing Russell's piece last night, I couldn't sleep until writing this rebuttal.

Furthermore, you can visit their
forum. No replies yet as of this posting. Somebody should write a well thought retort.

"Think Russell is dead wrong? How does the open source community prevent against the issues raised in this opinion? Tell us in the Talk to the Editors discussion forum."

Email the author. I just did, rebutting two of his "points". rjones@devx.com

Hey Russel,

Just two obvious points of rebuttal.

1. Your question:

Who's Watching the Watchers?

Makes a cold chill run down my spine, when I think of closed source
software. In fact, many of your statements, such as the rogue coder,
holds just as true, for CSS. The difference? You (as a consumer)
cannot see the code. At atmosphere, which breeds closedness, and
non-disclosure of hacker attacks, is far more scary, then one (such
as Debian), which openly announces, that it has been hacked. Imagine
a hacker gaining access to Microsoft code. Imagine MS catching him,
and removing the malicious code. But ... did they get it all? Only
the hacker will ever know.

Your statement, that "core" members, will port the code, just doesn't
make sense. Assuming we're not into the old chicken and egg problem,
with the bootstrapping compiler, an Open Source project, is defined
as having the source open. If you compile a program, and it ends up
different, then the one you downloaded, then something is very
wrong indeed.

2. In academia, and security circles, full disclosure, to be able to
repeat trials, and be able to uncover weaknesses in software, is the
norm. Hiding behind binary code, does not a very powerfull brickwall
make. Hiding behind a wellthought out design, which is not open to
attacks (confirmed by peerreview), and relies on algoritmic
defences, makes a strong brick wall.

I am sorry, but all in all, a very poor article.

Regards,
Svend

In another article, the same author claims:

The point is not so much that open source is copycatting Microsoft but rather that open source vendors understand that Linux users, especially the great mass of potential Linux users, aren't any different from Windows users. They want the same applications, with the same features, the same ease of use, and largely, the same look and feel. As Linux moves beyond the hobbyist and server space into the corporate and home desktop space, there will be an increasing number of Linux users who genuinely don't care whether their applications are open source, and in fact would probably rather use their familiar Microsoft applications, if they are available, than retrain on unfamiliar and less mature applications. "

/me thinks that he has missed the point with Open Source completely...

On the other hand, he has a point concerning Linux while quoting Pavlicek's Top Ten list in yet another article:

The multiple-GUI problem illustrates a basic difference in Windows and Linux. Windows has one general GUI interface which has served many millions of people and works for many millions of different applications. The Mac (another successful consumer OS) is similar; one general GUI works across all Mac applications. Why is Linux different? [...]
Give them the real thing, Microsoft. Give them choice. Port the applications and development tools [to Linux]. Turn the millions of Microsoft developers loose on Linux, and let them build the future on both platforms.

Provided they do so with Open Source, that is!

In another article, the same author claims:

The point is not so much that open source is copycatting Microsoft but rather that open source vendors understand that Linux users, especially the great mass of potential Linux users, aren't any different from Windows users. They want the same applications, with the same features, the same ease of use, and largely, the same look and feel. As Linux moves beyond the hobbyist and server space into the corporate and home desktop space, there will be an increasing number of Linux users who genuinely don't care whether their applications are open source, and in fact would probably rather use their familiar Microsoft applications, if they are available, than retrain on unfamiliar and less mature applications. "

/me thinks that he has missed the point with Open Source completely...

On the other hand, he has a point concerning Linux while quoting Pavlicek's Top Ten list in yet another article:

The multiple-GUI problem illustrates a basic difference in Windows and Linux. Windows has one general GUI interface which has served many millions of people and works for many millions of different applications. The Mac (another successful consumer OS) is similar; one general GUI works across all Mac applications. Why is Linux different? [...]
Give them the real thing, Microsoft. Give them choice. Port the applications and development tools [to Linux]. Turn the millions of Microsoft developers loose on Linux, and let them build the future on both platforms.

Provided they do so with Open Source, that is!

I just emailed the author and his editor, and suggest any interested folks do the same:

Author: rjones@devx.com
Editor: lpiquet@devx.com

I just emailed the author and his editor, and suggest any interested folks do the same:

Author: rjones@devx.com
Editor: lpiquet@devx.com

The advantages you've listed just aren't that important against C++:

• Compex numbers aren't built-in, but who cares? C++ classes let you do anything you can do with a primitive type, both as far as optimizations are concerned and syntactically (through operator overloading)
• Likewise, multidimensional arrays can have all the syntactic sugar you want, through magical things like boost::multi_array.
• I don't know as much about the parallel stuff, but obviously a lot of thought has gone into doing that kind of thing in C++. Intel also has a compiler that will auto-parallelize C++ (and Fortran), though I've never played with it.

It's very commonly said that Fortran is faster than any other language. I don't think that's actually true. This article, written back in July '97, talks about a lot of other techniques possible in C++ to close the performance gap and even outperform Fortran. And in the seven years since, C++ compilers have improved greatly, and these techniques have been widely adopted. There are a lot more papers here.

Its not just HTML. Its way more XHTML. Its really more like saying: "We choose GTK or we choose QT for our cross platform development". Longhorn and Mozilla: Birds of a Feather

"Mozilla has a complete, separate, and enhanced implementation of Microsoft's COM, called XPCOM. XPCOM has its own QueryInterface() method, which acts just like the equivalent method in traditional COM. The 3000 object-interface combinations are due to over a thousand XPCOM components, most of which are bundled with the platform in compiled form.

To support these components, the basic infrastructure of the platform consists of several pieces:

* A fancy application-level GUI display system called Gecko. This is a layout and rendering engine.
* A very high-level networking library, called Necko
* Comprehensive XML support for various standards like XHTML, MathML, SVG, RDF, SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI. Additional support for several unique XML dialects, particularly XUL and XBL, which are used to define GUIs.

Mozilla binds these pieces together in several ways:

* By use of XPCOM and JavaScript at the object/code level
* Using data models expressed as XML RDF and by systems that exploit these models at the XML level
* By programmers using XUL and XBL as a starting and integration point for applications.."

This link seems to have some relevant info.

DevX.com has an interview with Dr. Ernest J. Friedman-Hill inwhich he talks about its (JESS) development and what the next steps are.

DevX.com has an interview with Dr. Ernest J. Friedman-Hill inwhich he talks about its (JESS) development and what the next steps are.

If "code generation" isn't a familiar term to you, this enthusiastic overview on devx.com is a concise introduction to what code generation is about, though it makes no pretense of ambivalence about its importance as a programming tool.

Of course it's an "enthusiastic overview" on devx.com.

That article was written by Jack Herrington.

The author of the book being reviewed is Jack Herrington!

Hardly an objective overview!

Code Generation is for people who don't understand or are too lazy for abstraction

The article that timothy suggested as background reading (here) points out that code generation is most useful when you're forced to use a framework that requires lots of simple-minded "scaffolding-style" code. EJB is the prime example.

In other words, I agree with you --- if code generation is useful, it's probably because the infrastructure you're using was poorly designed. But that doesn't mean you don't have to use it. Managers who have no idea what J2EE is require you to use J2EE. So you use code generation.

I don't agree about C# being an inferior Java clone. First things that come to my mind is that Java doesn't support properties, indexers, enums, attributes and multi-dimensional arrays.

Also, C# way of handling events is just so much simpler and powerful ! Listeners are a pain in the ass IMHO.

About defining a UI in XML, it will be part of Longhorn release whatever when that be. Microsoft developped their own XML definition and named it XAML. Read more on Devx here.

No site that breaks online articles into arbitrary pages should be allowed to run articles on "usability."

Feh.

Single page link to the article.

That said, what this person is asking for is already done. In practice most Linux installs are using a packaged distribution. An increasely large number of users just stick with whichever window manager and desktop environment the distribution provides. The big who desktop environments and toolkits, KDE and Gnome, are working together increasingly well. The big distributions are all working to minimize the differences between KDE, Gnome, and other applications for end users. For interoperability most distributions just ship Gnome, Motif, and KDE; they coexist happily. My Red Hat 9 box works great, I run a mix of Gnome, KDE, and other applications without thinking about it, they all look and behave similarly.

The author simply got distracted by the choices. You don't need to look at them and your distribution provider is likely happy to pick some reasonable defaults for you.

Type t = typeof(System.Int32);
MemberInfo[] m = t.GetMethods();
foreach(MemberInfo m1 in m)
{
//Do some reflection
}

According to the uspto web site this patent was filed in September 1999. I remember reading an article in Java Pro magazine around the same time on how to build a test flexible testing web-app using servlets, and xml.

A quick google search produced this article by Claude Duguay in April 1999. Six months before "Inventors" Anderson and Stack filed their patent.

The article is a bit dry, but provides excellent instruction for anyone considering to build an online testing application. The original magazine publication included all the source code. (The online version requires you to be a JavaPro subscriber to download the code.)

"Chastise? Read my post again. I said it was a shame they didn't use something that was already available, cheap, and proven."

XUL is the future, because it brings GUI's closer to the masses. Such a claim can't be made about QT or GTK. Someone had to step into the future.

BTW there's more to the QPL,GPL issue than money.

I'm not sure you understand here. The .NET Framework is a collection of objects (similar to the Win32 API's) that all .NET managed code has access to.

Managed .NET code must be written with certain constraints, however.

C++ is not designed with these constraints in mind.

But, C# and VB.NET aren't the only languages out there. ActiveState has Python.NET and Perl.NET, there's COBOL.NET, Fortran.NET, Forth.NET, and even Pascal.NET (and many others).

But, managed code is a new addition to .NET that requires some adoptions in the programming languages.

I'm not sure you understand here. The .NET Framework is a collection of objects (similar to the Win32 API's) that all .NET managed code has access to.

Managed .NET code must be written with certain constraints, however.

C++ is not designed with these constraints in mind.

But, C# and VB.NET aren't the only languages out there. ActiveState has Python.NET and Perl.NET, there's COBOL.NET, Fortran.NET, Forth.NET, and even Pascal.NET (and many others).

But, managed code is a new addition to .NET that requires some adoptions in the programming languages.

Sure! To use XML with an RDBMS you have to do one of two things. First, map the XML to a relational schema. It is well understood that doing this has two main problems. The first problem is the resulting schema. To create a schema to support heirarchical data results in a complex and ugly schema. The second problem is a spatial one. To retrive a given XML document, the database must pull data from a variety of pages. This results in poor performance as the database has no context to store the different bits of an XML document together on the disk. FYI, this one of the main reasons for the creation of OO databases.

The second way of handling XML in an RDBMS is to store the document as a CLOB. Storing it as a CLOB has the advantage of solving the two above issues, but introduces one of its own; You can't query the data that is represented by the CLOB because it is all stored in a single column. This means you have to extract the document from the CLOB and parse it before being able to use any of the data. Some databases now have built in XML parsers so you can do this from stored procedures and combine the XML document with tabular data, but the performance sucks.

I do cover why you would want to use an XML database and how to use Xindice in an article I wrote for DevX that can be found here.