for free from http://www.activestate.com/Products/activeperl/ since it is not effected by this bug. Seriously, this is far from the first time that Red Hat has botched the dynamic language environments it ships.
recent report that said smartphones with pocket PC capabilities, sale numbers rose an average of 120% while smartphones have only gained about 6% growth.... Death to pocket PC's, long live the smartphone!
Do you see the basic fallacy in these remarks? The part that makes the phone smart is the PDA capabilities, and whatever report you cited specifically mentioned PocketPCs, so there is no death for PocketPC as a platform.
Also, how much longer before the thumbprint reader is included on smartphones to enable access to them (although I'm sure it's already been done...)? Also, I have a Skype client on my non-phone PocketPC device, which has built-in wifi. Where do you place that?
This works well enough for production apps now, but it will also become part of the Tk core in the near future. They interoperate with all existing Tk widgets, and the extension works with Perl's Tcl::Tk binding and with Tkinter.
Even without that, it is not more than a dozen lines of code to polish up the look of most Tk apps, it is just that many don't put that last spit and polish step into their code.
My guess is that you haven't really examined an Apple desktop machine closely. The attention to detail - for extending as well as just pure observation, it excellent. My main systems are Win/Lin, but I've had the opportunity to have an Apple around on occasion, and it's just a marvelous machine.
Sure, others may do it, but nobody does it with quite the detail or panache that Apple does, on the scale that Apple does it.
I'm only partly facetious. I don't know if its a natural cycle, years of service, or whatnot, but management (even people formally coders and those who actually *did* work) is more often filled with family types who manage the work/life balance well.
Management isn't always the pointer-haired boss, but can just mean Tech Lead or Supervisor, where you aren't necessarily the frontline coder. Being the latter can be fun when single or childless, but can lead to unhappiness when you have to balance work and family.
In the end, remember one thing: your child is here for life, your job (usually) isn't. Prioritize from there.
Although it seems like more music companies are getting directly involved in the online music biz, I haven't seen any reports on what orgs like the RIAA really think about these commercial online music offerings.
I do know they still want to sure more people. Just today the papers in Canada were running articles that the Canadian version of the RIAA plans to start suing file swappers. This comes just days after they added more taxes to MP3 players to fill the coffers of the same organization...
I don't know the exact history, but the patent in question was derived from work at Berkeley around the same time - so it may have come from the same development work. Thus it is not prior art - it is *the* art. Remember that Eolas' patent is really an exclusive license of a Berkeley patent (Eolas' founder is an ex-Berkeley professor).
One thing that arguably sparsely resourced open source groups need is more fracturing. Now, in addition to doing the porting work, the cygwin/xfree86 porters will need to deal with source and site maintenance. That's just time wasted essentially.
As an ActiveState employee, I can say that this is all good, even for the tools and open source languages side of our business. While Sophos' anti-virus products merge well with ActiveState's successful PureMessage anti-spam software, Sophos is fully aware of the value ActiveState has received from the tools and languages side as well.
All ActiveState employees will be sticking around, doing what they were doing before. We will continue to make the Active(Perl|Python|Tcl) language distributions and continue development on Komodo, TDK, PDK, etc.
Since you mention CDN, I assume you are in Canada, like myself. My question when I see this is will it stand up to the weather? He's using laminated bamboo. I have an old cromag/alu bike (over 10 years old now). Aside from the occasional greasing of the chain and other moving parts, the bike requires no thought to maintain, and it's had a lot of mud caked on it.
Will I have to care for a laminated bamboo bike by oiling it or reweatherproofing it in some way? Will I have to carefully clean and dry it after riding on rainy days?
Noone seems to have answered the subject question... so I will. Yes, the fifth book is good. I am a fan of Harry Potter since before the media hype, having received the first book second hand by chance. I don't really like the HP movies, because they don't really capture the feel of the book. The books get more complex and interesting from one to the next.
To be honest, I got a little jaded by the excessive media hype for HP5 and didn't even bother to prepurchase the book. I still ended up buying it a couple days after launch. Reading into the first few pages already gave me a warm and fuzzy feeling that this was a good purchase. While I wouldn't consider HP high art, Rowling is a good writer.
I would rephrase that to say that Linux won't pass Apple on the desktop until "configuration files" is something the average Linux desktop user won't need to see / understand / fiddle with.
There are some good utilities that provide a UI over some conf stuff, but it has a ways to go.
While there are way too many loonies shaving, applying makeup, or handling a cell phone while driving, I can also see some bright sides to more electronics in a car.
How about keeping the kids in back quiet because they are watching their favorite film instead of fighting? I've used this trick before with my 4-year old and laptop and it does work on long trips.
How about keeping peoples eyes on the road more with more integrated electronics that allow voice-control over equipment? "CD, disc 3". "CD, next track". "Phone, dial home". Or instrument clusters that use HUDs (some cars have elements of these already).
Of course, defining the Right Thing will in the end be up to your managers, but influencing their opinion is important.
First off, do they realize what value they are already getting from open source, or was that snuck in the door? The former would make life easier (for everyone, since more PHBs will realize the value of OSS).
One thing you don't want to do is to sneak behind your boss' backs and contribute what is unarguably company IP back to OSS without their permission. This can cause headaches down the road that could have been avoided.
Setting criteria for contributing back to OSS that you are enhancing is much easier than releasing OSS in the first place (IMO), and, yes, I have worked for enlightened companies that blended both well. It all depends on what your company does (industry focus) and where it values its IP. Generally though, if you have just enhanced OSS, returning those enhancements should be a no-brainer (and required by some OSS licenses). Again, that is really a no-brainer only if management knew you were using OSS in the first place.
For major enhancements, try to value it from your company perspective. If you were (eg) a video codec software company and had just made changes to a BSD video codec that gets 10x compression improvement with no quality loss, is it really worth your while to release that back immediately? I know some will argue that all software must be free, but how many of them are gainfully employed based solely on the free software that they develop (read: I don't think the model for just selling support sustains itself). IOW this isn't intended to start religious wars, just to make you think about what IP really has value to your company, and what you should be more readily willing to share.
Completely new software that you might want to release under and OSS license is similar to the above. First off, if you company isn't OSS aware, make them. Then discuss what things you don't want to release for core IP reasons, and what is good to release.
Remember that just releasing code doesn't raise the jollies of most corporate types. It usually has to have a purpose, and company brand awareness is a large part of that. Making or enhancing OSS software can be very good guerilla marketing for a company. It's perhaps not the same as dot.bomb hype levels, but it still has value for brand awareness, recruiting, etc.
Excepting anything that might be considered secret and confidential (like missile guidance software... which probably never gets released anyway), why isn't all NASA software public domain?
I'm going on the assumption that we are talking solely about all the US taxpayer funded engineers making software there. Why isn't this stuff by definition public?
The amount of legacy code you could rip out of XFree86 is staggering. All the clip mask code.
I'm not at all enamoured of the need to be distracted by what lies behind other windows, and I can't see this really being practical for most users. I can understand some special uses, but re: the comment above, perhaps I am misunderstanding your intent in "all the clip mask code". I use these for clipping of text or images when I'm drawing on the screen (like for writing a spreadsheet widget). While you might get rid of things like Expose events, you probably have to introduce new events to indicate view level (what if a user wants to show/highlight different things depending on their transparency layer). I don't think this is going to "ease" anything.
Buttons not doing anything, but working when you do a soft reboot - software.
Sorry... should have been more specific. I meant the hardware buttons on the front of the device (not the UI drawn buttons on screen). This is a hardware problem. So yes, I did mention hardware and software issues.
I have and develop on a Windows CE device. I have found it to be fairly stable as an OS, but the programs aren't all well-behaved. Windows MediaPlayer can lose its mind sometimes when I boot if I didn't completely stop the app previously before turning the device off. Sometimes action buttons can be unresponsive (a soft reset fixes this).
There are similar "hardware" related issues particular to each device, which just shows that it mostly is hardware related and the designers are still working out the kinks. Much like laptops 10+ years ago, but I think this will reach a much better polished state earlier.
Developing for it has been sometimes frustrating, but overall a better impression than I expected. I use Keuchel's celib as a porting layer, which provides lots of POSIX stuff and traditional APIs that the CE OS lacks, making it easy to port apps (this is what CE emacs, tcl/tk, perl/tk, python, etc. all rely on). While "ramping up", I crashed my stuff all the time on the CE device and it just pops up with this "Just In Time Debugging" window that asks if I wanted to debug. Sort of like mini-Dr. Watson. I now use the embedded visual tools from MS (BTW, all CE development tools are currently free from MS), which is a modified VC++ that lets me select an executable that I built (cross-compiled) on my Win2K box, select the target device I want to run on (connected via ActiveSync), and it copies the executable over and runs it in the debugger. This is a Very Nice setup.
All in all, to get to your question, I have found the OS itself to be quite stable, even in the face of badly behaved apps. The software itself has some fine-tuning (I'm not up to the latest software patchlevel, which I know fixes some problems I've seen).
You can get one of the phone versions of the WinCE devices (my brother has the Siemens one - nice device). I have a Toshiba (WinCE without phone). The OS is unicode based (lots of ascii functions are actually missing in the APIs). There are ports of lots of good "traditionally unix" tools at http://www.rainer-keuchel.de/software.html. You can see some of the I18N stuff done with Tcl/Tk on CE and general Tcl/Tk on CE info. Perl/Tk also exists, along with lots of other goodies, at Rainer's site.
The reason that I purchased a WinCE device over Palm was because of all the more fun hack potential.
Tcl is designed to be simple, and "passing things by value" is a very simple concept. At the same time, Tcl does have a very modern core. Things haven't been actually passed by value for years. What actually happens is a pointer to the value is passed on the stack the the next procedure. It is very efficient.
I think "uplevel" is a terrible idea
Then don't use it. It is a power-user feature, and allows things that aren't possible in many other languages (like creation of new control structures), but most users will not require it.
The reason Tcl is the embedded language is that AOLserver was developed in the early nineties, when Tcl was the hot new language. If the system were to be developed today, I'm sure that the developers would have chosen Python, Perl or some other more buzzword compliant language that has a strong following.
Those who don't understand might presume this, but they are incorrect. Tcl would still be chosen again, as it has advantages other Perl and Python that make it ideally suited for that development. Tcl is the easiest to embed and extend, which is a core port of AOLServer's architecture. More importantly, Tcl is the easiest to learn and use, which is very important because the people creating these web pages are not computer scientists - they are web designers, page authors and the like.
Slashdot Mirror
for free from http://www.activestate.com/Products/activeperl/ since it is not effected by this bug. Seriously, this is far from the first time that Red Hat has botched the dynamic language environments it ships.
That's almost as fast as the movie industry is generating crappy movies to download!
Do you see the basic fallacy in these remarks? The part that makes the phone smart is the PDA capabilities, and whatever report you cited specifically mentioned PocketPCs, so there is no death for PocketPC as a platform.
Also, how much longer before the thumbprint reader is included on smartphones to enable access to them (although I'm sure it's already been done ...)? Also, I have a Skype client on my non-phone PocketPC device, which has built-in wifi. Where do you place that?
As noted in a previous response, Tk actually has a themed widget extension call tile:
http://tktable.sourceforge.net/tile/
This works well enough for production apps now, but it will also become part of the Tk core in the near future. They interoperate with all existing Tk widgets, and the extension works with Perl's Tcl::Tk binding and with Tkinter.
Even without that, it is not more than a dozen lines of code to polish up the look of most Tk apps, it is just that many don't put that last spit and polish step into their code.
My guess is that you haven't really examined an Apple desktop machine closely. The attention to detail - for extending as well as just pure observation, it excellent. My main systems are Win/Lin, but I've had the opportunity to have an Apple around on occasion, and it's just a marvelous machine.
Sure, others may do it, but nobody does it with quite the detail or panache that Apple does, on the scale that Apple does it.
I'm only partly facetious. I don't know if its a natural cycle, years of service, or whatnot, but management (even people formally coders and those who actually *did* work) is more often filled with family types who manage the work/life balance well.
Management isn't always the pointer-haired boss, but can just mean Tech Lead or Supervisor, where you aren't necessarily the frontline coder. Being the latter can be fun when single or childless, but can lead to unhappiness when you have to balance work and family.
In the end, remember one thing: your child is here for life, your job (usually) isn't. Prioritize from there.
Out of curiosity, I tied these scores to CPU prices as listed at http://www.pricewatch.com/:
CPU SCORE US$
Athlon64 3200 64: 523.70 $255
Athlon XP2700: 467.15 $ 80
Athlon64 3200 32: 449.07 $255
Athlon XP2600: 448.42 $ 71
Pentium4 3.0GHz: 387.57 $203
Athlon 1400: 305.26 $ 97
AMD Athlon 950: 209.51 $ 69
Sparc 500MHz: 52.21 ???
Sparc 440MHz: 51.89 ???
Although it seems like more music companies are getting directly involved in the online music biz, I haven't seen any reports on what orgs like the RIAA really think about these commercial online music offerings.
...
I do know they still want to sure more people. Just today the papers in Canada were running articles that the Canadian version of the RIAA plans to start suing file swappers. This comes just days after they added more taxes to MP3 players to fill the coffers of the same organization
With that kind of purchase, it would be first class travel for years!
I don't know the exact history, but the patent in question was derived from work at Berkeley around the same time - so it may have come from the same development work. Thus it is not prior art - it is *the* art. Remember that Eolas' patent is really an exclusive license of a Berkeley patent (Eolas' founder is an ex-Berkeley professor).
One thing that arguably sparsely resourced open source groups need is more fracturing. Now, in addition to doing the porting work, the cygwin/xfree86 porters will need to deal with source and site maintenance. That's just time wasted essentially.
As an ActiveState employee, I can say that this is all good, even for the tools and open source languages side of our business. While Sophos' anti-virus products merge well with ActiveState's successful PureMessage anti-spam software, Sophos is fully aware of the value ActiveState has received from the tools and languages side as well.
All ActiveState employees will be sticking around, doing what they were doing before. We will continue to make the Active(Perl|Python|Tcl) language distributions and continue development on Komodo, TDK, PDK, etc.
There is more in the open letter here:
http://www.activestate.com/corporate/letter/
Since you mention CDN, I assume you are in Canada, like myself. My question when I see this is will it stand up to the weather? He's using laminated bamboo. I have an old cromag/alu bike (over 10 years old now). Aside from the occasional greasing of the chain and other moving parts, the bike requires no thought to maintain, and it's had a lot of mud caked on it.
Will I have to care for a laminated bamboo bike by oiling it or reweatherproofing it in some way? Will I have to carefully clean and dry it after riding on rainy days?
... you are in management?
Noone seems to have answered the subject question ... so I will. Yes, the fifth book is good. I am a fan of Harry Potter since before the media hype, having received the first book second hand by chance. I don't really like the HP movies, because they don't really capture the feel of the book. The books get more complex and interesting from one to the next.
To be honest, I got a little jaded by the excessive media hype for HP5 and didn't even bother to prepurchase the book. I still ended up buying it a couple days after launch. Reading into the first few pages already gave me a warm and fuzzy feeling that this was a good purchase. While I wouldn't consider HP high art, Rowling is a good writer.
I would rephrase that to say that Linux won't pass Apple on the desktop until "configuration files" is something the average Linux desktop user won't need to see / understand / fiddle with.
There are some good utilities that provide a UI over some conf stuff, but it has a ways to go.
While there are way too many loonies shaving, applying makeup, or handling a cell phone while driving, I can also see some bright sides to more electronics in a car.
...
How about keeping the kids in back quiet because they are watching their favorite film instead of fighting? I've used this trick before with my 4-year old and laptop and it does work on long trips.
How about keeping peoples eyes on the road more with more integrated electronics that allow voice-control over equipment? "CD, disc 3". "CD, next track". "Phone, dial home". Or instrument clusters that use HUDs (some cars have elements of these already).
Just looking at the possible upside
Of course, defining the Right Thing will in the end be up to your managers, but influencing their opinion is important.
First off, do they realize what value they are already getting from open source, or was that snuck in the door? The former would make life easier (for everyone, since more PHBs will realize the value of OSS).
One thing you don't want to do is to sneak behind your boss' backs and contribute what is unarguably company IP back to OSS without their permission. This can cause headaches down the road that could have been avoided.
Setting criteria for contributing back to OSS that you are enhancing is much easier than releasing OSS in the first place (IMO), and, yes, I have worked for enlightened companies that blended both well. It all depends on what your company does (industry focus) and where it values its IP. Generally though, if you have just enhanced OSS, returning those enhancements should be a no-brainer (and required by some OSS licenses). Again, that is really a no-brainer only if management knew you were using OSS in the first place.
For major enhancements, try to value it from your company perspective. If you were (eg) a video codec software company and had just made changes to a BSD video codec that gets 10x compression improvement with no quality loss, is it really worth your while to release that back immediately? I know some will argue that all software must be free, but how many of them are gainfully employed based solely on the free software that they develop (read: I don't think the model for just selling support sustains itself). IOW this isn't intended to start religious wars, just to make you think about what IP really has value to your company, and what you should be more readily willing to share.
Completely new software that you might want to release under and OSS license is similar to the above. First off, if you company isn't OSS aware, make them. Then discuss what things you don't want to release for core IP reasons, and what is good to release.
Remember that just releasing code doesn't raise the jollies of most corporate types. It usually has to have a purpose, and company brand awareness is a large part of that. Making or enhancing OSS software can be very good guerilla marketing for a company. It's perhaps not the same as dot.bomb hype levels, but it still has value for brand awareness, recruiting, etc.
Excepting anything that might be considered secret and confidential (like missile guidance software ... which probably never gets released anyway), why isn't all NASA software public domain?
I'm going on the assumption that we are talking solely about all the US taxpayer funded engineers making software there. Why isn't this stuff by definition public?
I'm not at all enamoured of the need to be distracted by what lies behind other windows, and I can't see this really being practical for most users. I can understand some special uses, but re: the comment above, perhaps I am misunderstanding your intent in "all the clip mask code". I use these for clipping of text or images when I'm drawing on the screen (like for writing a spreadsheet widget). While you might get rid of things like Expose events, you probably have to introduce new events to indicate view level (what if a user wants to show/highlight different things depending on their transparency layer). I don't think this is going to "ease" anything.
Sorry ... should have been more specific. I meant the hardware buttons on the front of the device (not the UI drawn buttons on screen). This is a hardware problem. So yes, I did mention hardware and software issues.
I have and develop on a Windows CE device. I have found it to be fairly stable as an OS, but the programs aren't all well-behaved. Windows MediaPlayer can lose its mind sometimes when I boot if I didn't completely stop the app previously before turning the device off. Sometimes action buttons can be unresponsive (a soft reset fixes this).
There are similar "hardware" related issues particular to each device, which just shows that it mostly is hardware related and the designers are still working out the kinks. Much like laptops 10+ years ago, but I think this will reach a much better polished state earlier.
Developing for it has been sometimes frustrating, but overall a better impression than I expected. I use Keuchel's celib as a porting layer, which provides lots of POSIX stuff and traditional APIs that the CE OS lacks, making it easy to port apps (this is what CE emacs, tcl/tk, perl/tk, python, etc. all rely on). While "ramping up", I crashed my stuff all the time on the CE device and it just pops up with this "Just In Time Debugging" window that asks if I wanted to debug. Sort of like mini-Dr. Watson. I now use the embedded visual tools from MS (BTW, all CE development tools are currently free from MS), which is a modified VC++ that lets me select an executable that I built (cross-compiled) on my Win2K box, select the target device I want to run on (connected via ActiveSync), and it copies the executable over and runs it in the debugger. This is a Very Nice setup.
All in all, to get to your question, I have found the OS itself to be quite stable, even in the face of badly behaved apps. The software itself has some fine-tuning (I'm not up to the latest software patchlevel, which I know fixes some problems I've seen).
You can get one of the phone versions of the WinCE devices (my brother has the Siemens one - nice device). I have a Toshiba (WinCE without phone). The OS is unicode based (lots of ascii functions are actually missing in the APIs). There are ports of lots of good "traditionally unix" tools at http://www.rainer-keuchel.de/software.html. You can see some of the I18N stuff done with Tcl/Tk on CE and general Tcl/Tk on CE info. Perl/Tk also exists, along with lots of other goodies, at Rainer's site.
The reason that I purchased a WinCE device over Palm was because of all the more fun hack potential.