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In my capacity as a web developer, here are the software packages that I feel you should have a firm understanding of:

1. XHTML - not just 'HTML', XHTML has a few changes that you should get used to (such as closing all tags, even <img src="..."/> and <br/> tags, and all tags being lowercase). For the upcoming specifications, such as XHTML 2.0, which will be very different (you can apply an href="..." property to ANY object, instead of having to wrap it in an <a href=..."> tag), it never hurts to be prepared.
2. CSS3 - May as well read up now, it's going to be relevant in not too long.
3. Photoshop - Use The GIMP if you must, but I find Photoshop generally does what I need it to with less hassle.
4. PHP, ASP, Coldfusion, and J2EE - You don't have to learn how to program in each one, but learn about these solutions, if for no other reason than to make compelling arguments against them if the bosses ever ask you about them (or worse, fail to ask you about them)
5. Apache and IIS - for the same reasons as listed above; also, a lot of things in Apache (mod_rewrite, for example) can help you solve problems down the road. Good things to know.
6. A good editor. I use ViM myself, but what you use is up to you. What you'll want is syntax highlighting, auto-indenting, and a powerful (preferably regex) search/replace. Learn to use your editor and you will save hours of work with seconds of typing.

And now for some soft skills. First, you'll need to learn to give effective presentations. You could use Powerpoint for this, or Keynote or Impress or just print them on transparencies and put them on an overhead projector. How you do it is up to you. Will you ever need to give presentations? Not really, but effective presentations require a lot of soft skills - eye contact, graphic design, pacing, speech tones, body language - that to be skilled in presentations in general means to be skilled in a lot of other areas.

You should also familiarize yourself with colour. Learn about Pantone, just so that you know about it. Learn how colours play off each other, which colors look good on which backgrounds. Learn about bordering, whitespace, balance, and form. Consider the Pantone Guide to Communicating with Color - out of 61 reader reviews, it got 4.5/5 stars, and is a good place to start.

Learn about logos. How companies make logos, and why. What goes into making a logo, subconscious suggestions from logos (there's a reason Playboy picked a bunny for their logo, and it's not obvious). This will help in your graphic design and page layout.

Learn about accessibility and colour-blindness.

I'm probably missing a ton of important stuff, but if you do it right and are willing to learn (and posting on slashdot seems to imply that), you'll probably learn what you need to know as you go. If not, just come back and post another Ask Slashdot.

Personally, I picked up an ex-corporate Sun Hurricane for about 100GBP which I run through a Linksys 4 port KVM. Bargain.

For TV, I'm not sure I agree. I don't really watch enough TV for eyestrain to be a problem, but the ex-Rental set I bought (branded 'Finlandia' and made in... Finland, surprise, surprise!) is fine.

I wasn't really advocating anyone actually buying one of those 28" sets from LIDL, but there's no denying that CRT-based TVs have come down massively in price, particularly if you're after a 4:3 rather than 16:9 widescreen set. It might even be worth doing a little pythagoras to see whether you can get a bigger physical picture - even with 16:9 material - on an equivalently-priced 4:3 set.

(Disclaimer: I am working on some free software that is competitive with BitTorrent)

It's too bad people must be willing to use unfree software before they can use your free software.

The Bloggies (2005 voting ends soon) rank blogs on a yearly basis.

I read a bunch of Sun blogs, including Jonathan Schwartz' misinformation blog. Same with Microsoft's MSDN blogs.

Primary reason I read those blogs is for the cool tidbits. A secondary reason I read their blogs is so that I can remain aware of all the FUD coming from them!

Open source can't survive in this market because nobody of consequence really wants it to.

Not really. N1 Grid Containers will allow the admin to basically chop up a machine into "virtual machines" or "environments." For example, a 12 CPU machine can be changed from a single server into 4 three CPU machines making it possible to have a development server and 3 test servers. N1 Grid Containers are much more than this but it just an example.

DTrace comes with Solaris 10 and it allows you to watch basically ever aspect of a program's execution. It can tell you how many times it pounds a particular library, which area of that library is being called, or even show you the top ten, twenty, etc libraries being called. Libraries were just an example. DTrace will help you make your programs more efficient. It is said that Sun debugged their own kernel using DTrace in Solaris 10.

I think the first thing he should do is install Solaris 10 with DTrace and debug with a passion. DTrace will reveal all those nasty problem areas making it easier to fix.

You should read about XP (extreme programming)...

I have. And way back into last century even. :-)

You're right that the initial idea is always different after seeing prototypes. But for this exact reason you shouldn't document your code. Code should be disposable, so don't waste time writing other than what the computer needs.

And this is where I'll have to strongly disagree with you. Even "Extreme Programming Installed" (a book I personally belive wonders off a bit from Beck's best XP) says to use UML.

Additionally, some of what I've seen in the best projects is the use of good Javadoc, DOC++, Doxygen or some such comments. The best time to write those is while the design is fresh in people's minds, such as in writing up initial tests or first writing each class. Additionally, it's much easier to keep up to date, and helps greatly as people need to go in and refactor code. Oh, and Eclipse has good Javadoc support, and having Javadoc comments helps it work even better.

Of course, I've gone Extreme myself on different projects by writing Docs in XML. Just poke a single XML with different XSLT stylesheets and get end-user API documentation, internal implementor guide documentation, and full test case source code all from that single sparse XML source. (But especially with all the workflow benefits one gets in Eclipse from having proper Javadoc comments around, those are well more that "disposable").

As a matter of fact, Microsoft is already leading this market with Windows terminal services. Basically the client systems are diskless, they look like a cable modem with a vid card. I have seen them used in hospitals etc. Sun has a similar system with the Sun Ray, but they seem to be losing popularity.

Gridengine just added Windows support:

- Windows XP and 2000 (December 2004 availability)

http://www.sun.com/software/gridware/

Gridengine's source can be downloaded from:

http://gridengine.sunsource.net/

Sweet another gaming console that has absolutely no games to back it.

We'll see what Sun can pull out of it's ass

http://www.sun.com/smi/Press/sunflash/2004-10/sunf lash.20041028.1.html

Transparent aluminum?

Sunsolve comes to mind

At first this flag was disabled by default because it was not comply with SPARCv8 ABI so some (mainly bad coded) applications that relied on the execution of code inside the stack could not run as expected. Sun collaborated with its huge community of developers to addresssome collateral effects and once resolved Sun published the new SPARCv9 ABI reference guide in which the stack is no longer mapped as executable.
Currently 64-bit Solaris applications running on SPARC don't need to worry about exploits that rely on malicious code execution due to stack overflows.

In theory you can use Doxygen with any OO language, provided you can get a parser for that language. But I haven't heard a lot about Doxygen outside the C++ community. I imagine Java people mostly stick with JavaDoc, since that comes with the JDK. But I consider Doxygen to be far superior.

Hibernate is a great product, but it's single-vendor and a proprietary API.

What do you mean by that?

Don't use Struts (or just Struts), use JSF(Java Server Faces). This transition is recommended by the creator of Struts.

Source? JSF 1.0 was just released in March. No where in Craig's blog does he say "use JSF not Struts" but rather to investigate both.

• http://java.sun.com/j2ee/javaserverfaces/
• http://www.onjava.com/lpt/a/4042
• http://www.onjava.com/lpt/a/4130
• http://www.onjava.com/lpt/a/4747
• http://www.onjava.com/lpt/a/5066
• http://www.onjava.com/lpt/a/5067

1. Console access. These include Speakup ftp://ftp.braille.uwo.ca/pub/speakup/, Screader http://www.euronet.nl/~acj/eng-screader.html, YASR http://yasr.sourceforge.net/, and many folks' favorite BrlTTY http://dave.mielke.cc/brltty/

2. Specialized environment. The most obvious option here is emacspeak http://emacspeak.sourceforge.net/ but there are others.

3. GUI Access. The only real option today is the Gnopernicus screen reader/magnifier http://www.baum.ro/gnopernicus.html that is part of the GNOME desktop http://www.gnome.org/start via the GNOME Accessibility Project http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gap/ (though other options are being explored). Note: my day job is as Sun's Accessibility Architect, working on the GNOME Accessibility Project and helping with the development of things like Gnopernicus, and another amazing product for people with physical impairments - GOK http://www.gok.ca/.

A pretty complete list of F/OSS accessibility projects can be found at the Linux Accessibility Resource Site (LARS) http://lars.atrc.utoronto.ca/current.html. I maintain a blog on this stuff as well, which has lots more information: http://blogs.sun.com/korn.

I never get over people saying things like this. It's always seemed like splitting hairs to me. Yes it looks like KDE, just like KDE looks like Windows, Windows looks like GNOME, GNOME looks like Aqua, etc, etc..

All of these popular interfaces use the same metaphors and ideas. For example, they all have some sort of "bar" in one part of the screen that organizes open programs and/or launches programs and/or tells you what time it is and a bunch of other stuff. Call it a "taskbar", a "panel", a "dock", or a "kicker", it's all the same thing.

Interfaces haven't really progressed from these basic ideas since their inception. If you want something that's fundamentally different, look at interfaces like Looking Glass, or Metisse.

SunOS has been a hobby OS from 1.0 to 4.9

SunOS? Don't you mean SkyOS? SunOS has been a solid, usable commercial OS for a long time, and only rather recently opened to hobbyists - but, you knew that, right?

and one of these :(

Yes. It is in Solaris 10. Here's an interview that addresses your question that I pulled up from Google in a few seconds of effort on my part.

You do realize that one can write drivers for a closed-source OS, don't you? See http://developers.sun.com/solaris/articles/writing dev.html for some intro Solaris driver writing docs.

Drivers are no more likely to "appear" for an open source OS as they are for a closed source OS.

noah

http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/jimgris/20041221# torvalds_solaris_is_a_joke

The Register coverage: Who Sank Itanic?

Everyone has been saying that Itanic will sink for quite a while now; it's about time that HP and Intel realized they were pouring money down a drain and pulled the plug on the project.

According to Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz they have 8 way chips already.

Both sound like lego bricks shoved into slots in a backplane (;-))

--dave

You mean this abomination?! Please, anything but OpenWindows!

And people think CDE is bad...

Don't forget Electric, an open source VLSI tool written in java. Sun recently interviewed the author about the challenge of rewriting it in java. Here's the article (with download).

High school students are enamored with their cell phones. I am especially surprised at the number of high school girls running around with cell phones as accessories to their outfit. Find ways to show kids how to do cool things with their cell phones, things like controlling a Mac via bluetooth or writing Java games for their phone. I think you will spark some interest if you can show them how to do stuff that will increase their social status by having the coolest phone or the game nobody else has. Of course I was the quintessential geek in high school so what do I know!

• 100 were security holes,

When referring to packaging, FBGA is usually Fine Ball Grid Array. I really doubt it's a typo. From the programmers point of view, the package virtually never significant.

Overall, this sounds remarkably similar to picoJava, which, last I checked, was going nowhere, and for good reason.

Designing bytecode formats for VMs is not really the same as designing opcodes for microprocessors -- shoehorning hardware that way is painful and generally results in less elegant, more expensive designs.

OTOH, the bytecodes in question aren't really significantly worse than, say, x86, and look where that is today...

This has been available for a long time with open access to the design from Sun as the picoJava CPU core. It was not an economically viable CPU and I think this's one of the reasons why Sun released it.

While I find this is typically true, I don't think it is inherently true. A monitor is a 2D device and the whole OS GUI is generally based off a desktop metaphor (and often called a desktop). So I can see that 2D is the most applicable in such cases.

However, there can be added value from 3D. Even desktop GUIs have improved from the early flat 2D look to a pseudo-3D look (window shadowing, beveled edges, etc.). While some may say this is just "window dressing", I find it takes advantage of natural human perception for ordering things. A real physical desktop may be 2D-ish, but things on top of other things do make use of 3D such as shadowing.

This is where I think 3D on a desktop can add value. If it uses natural perception abilities to improve one's ability to organize things it may be of use. For example, taking non-active windows and shrinking them into the background as if they are further away tends to draw our attention towards the active windows while keeping the background data easily accessible. (The taskbar is nice but is a "middle-man" in this respect and may not be the most efficient approach.) For example, I find some of the features of Project Looking Glass potentially very useful if done well.

What I find ironic is that this discussion reminds me a lot of the old "command line" versus GUI arguments from 10-15 years ago. I can still remember a few individuals who refused to accept that there was any benefit of a GUI over the DOS prompt. Certainly command lines have their benefits as well, as I'm sure many /.-ers would argue. But I doubt many would advocate universal rejection of the whole GUI approach. Perhaps in 10-15 years we may look back and have similar memories of when people couldn't see that there might be some use for 3D on the desktop. It's really in its infancy now, but I figure there's enough research into human perception and human/machine interfaces that something useful will eventually come out of it. But for now, I'd agree. Nothing has jumped out at me as highly useful, just the "coolness" look to it.

The link above is for downloading the code

well, i guess it would be nice, to just reach through my monitor
grab the oog file i want to play, and squeeze it til it plays.

but in reality, thats far from it.. but i guess there are some
great 3d likeness applications for the *nix platform:
http://desk3d.sourceforge.net/ & http://wwws.sun.com/software/looking_glass/demo.ht ml
...hopefully this will spark some interest!
--kingpunk

Strange because I can't stand PDFs and would imagine the consensus would be the same. In fact there is a group (will search later) that advocates the non-use of PDFs for websites. Sure have a download PDF link - but not just stick a PDF file no matter what.

The comparison between RAMs will have to be benchmarked. I imagine a PDF-reader plugin being fired is way heavier on resources than parsing an HTML page. It takes at least 5 seconds for Acrobat Reader to open. Also there are browsers that are anything but ram-consuming. Dillo has a very low memory print. Incredibly fast - as it rejects the DOM tree, CSS and Javascript (no wonder).

PDFs are not accessible - HTML is at least in principle accessible (depending on the web-designer). So Braille / Text readers or browser for the visually impared can enjoy the article.

The text layout rendering again is subjective. I abhor PDF, it is static, inflexible, sure I can zoom in, but i can't just augment the fonts without having to deal with scrollbars eventually.

The sudden jump between pages is another very annoying feature -for me. Where am I now page 3 or 4 ?? huh?

Again I am surprised I thought the anti-PDF feeling was pretty widespread - but I guess not. So that I find particularly interesting (after all noone thinks the same).

For me PDF great - to download and print and read it at your own leisure in the toilet.
For me HTML great - to read online - but usually an ugly mess if you care to print it out.

Websites should always keep it short, sweet, simple.

One of the original designers of Scheme?
Primary author of Common Lisp the Language?
Co-author of C: A Reference Manual, which was the bible on writing portable C?
Co-author of The Java Language Specification?

If contributing to the design of four major programming languages doesn't get you into the top twenty, how about designing the original EMACS command set? There may be people who are better known for contributions to one language or one toolset, but it's hard to beat him for sheer breadth.

This statement alone is enough to qualify your post.
I mean qualify as bullsh*t, of course. :)

About the "illusory hope for innovation coming from there":
Spotlight on Solaris Zones Feature
"The Solaris Zones feature is based on the same basic concepts as FreeBSD Jails."

About the "useless for research":
30 Sep 2004 - NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record
"NetBSD was used once more due to the scalability of its TCP code"

Because even though their boss is radical pro patents on anything, the ruling that required Sun to pay US$ 1 billion to Kodak scared the shit out of him.

I highly doubt the entire print ad is being 'rendered' out of a 3d app. I think you are using the term rendered way too liberally. ... And yes, I am a professionally-employed graphic artist so I know what I'm talking about.

But you don't even know what rendering means? Hint, "3D Rendering" is specific to 3D.

I could have really used that kind of money... http://store.sun.com/CMTemplate/CEServlet?process= SunStore&cmdStartWebConfig_CP&familyCode=AMAZON25& baseSelected=2

Here you go

'Operating system' has long been used in the broad sense of an entire system, like UNIX (kernel and userland) or Microsoft Windows, so Sun presumably decided to stop swimming against the tide over a pedantic issue that most people don't care about.

The stategy for killing off linux is to marginalize it to a single company, and then kill off that company. Some of the details are here. "Microsoft and Sun know they can attack Red Hat's limited resources and create doubts around its product and the company's support."

Schwartz also seems to think "linux" is the generic technology name and "Linux" is Red Hat's name for it. Look through any of his older posts and notice "Solaris", "HP-UX", "Windows", "Java", but always "linux" unless he's talking about Red Hat. (In one egregious case, note "JDS/linux" alongside "JDS/Solaris" and "JDS/Windows".) He abuses the trademark whenever he feels like it. Wonder if he believes in IP belonging to Linux as well.

Schwartz also seems to think "linux" is the generic technology name and "Linux" is Red Hat's name for it. Look through any of his older posts and notice "Solaris", "HP-UX", "Windows", "Java", but always "linux" unless he's talking about Red Hat. (In one egregious case, note "JDS/linux" alongside "JDS/Solaris" and "JDS/Windows".) He abuses the trademark whenever he feels like it. Wonder if he believes in IP belonging to Linux as well.

Schwartz also seems to think "linux" is the generic technology name and "Linux" is Red Hat's name for it. Look through any of his older posts and notice "Solaris", "HP-UX", "Windows", "Java", but always "linux" unless he's talking about Red Hat. (In one egregious case, note "JDS/linux" alongside "JDS/Solaris" and "JDS/Windows".) He abuses the trademark whenever he feels like it. Wonder if he believes in IP belonging to Linux as well.

Schwartz also seems to think "linux" is the generic technology name and "Linux" is Red Hat's name for it. Look through any of his older posts and notice "Solaris", "HP-UX", "Windows", "Java", but always "linux" unless he's talking about Red Hat. (In one egregious case, note "JDS/linux" alongside "JDS/Solaris" and "JDS/Windows".) He abuses the trademark whenever he feels like it. Wonder if he believes in IP belonging to Linux as well.

"Red Hat's" Linux simply distinguished it from "Suse's Linux", Mandrake's", etc, etc. The only implication is that Schwartz sees RH as the most important brand/distro or whatever, according to his commercial criteria, which may be debateable, but hardly insulting to "the community".

Why didn't the submitter link to the actual blog, instead of someone else selectively quoting from it? Schwartz's blog is here:

Confidence, commitment and execution are the three things every Sun constituent should expect from us. We'll deliver the systems, the innovation, the partner models, the services and ultimately the results that represent the best source of opportunity for everyone involved. We have never had a stronger product line to solve the problems faced by the developers, deployers and operators of network services. And with another UNIX falling by the wayside, it's increasingly evident the OS wars are down to three - Microsoft Windows, Sun's Solaris, and Red Hat's Linux. Not surprinsgly, I agree with the aforementioned HP customer. Enough is enough. We're happy to help all HP's constituents move on in life - better you walk away from the football, than have it walk away from you.

ps - I guess I did a miserably poor job of communicating with George Colony. And he didn't take me up on reading my blog. Red Hat does not equal linux, and linux is not evil. But, linux in the enterprise datacenter (that is, not your basement or startup or dorm room or gamebox) does equal Red Hat - and competing against a company is what we do for a living. Competing against a social movement we helped to found is a waste of energy, George. My fault for not more effectively communicating. (2004-09-30 22:48:07.0)

How about the fucking submitter, or editor, RTFA before wasting everyone's time with a beatup like this?