Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Linux Business

Submission + - RAD Tool for developing C/S on Linux

Submitted by SpikeyMike
SpikeyMike writes: Hi /. I'm a long-time developer for the Win32 platform. For the past 8+ years, my development tool of choice for client/server applications has been Power Builder. For those who don't already know, Sybase bought this tool a few years back. Part of my job entails developing a long-term strategy for the business. I've started with our server room and have migrated everything off of Windows servers and replaced them with Linux. Our network has never run faster or more trouble-free, by the way. My next step is to replace the desktops with Linux, but we have a few line of business applications (done in PB) that are holding things up. I proposed using Wine or Crossover office, but management prefers a native solution, even if that means re-writing our LOB applications. So my question to the community is this: What cross-platform development tool is recommended for Rapid Application Development for client/server applications? So far, I've looked very closely at Eiffel Studio (http://www.eiffelstudio.com), and it appears to fit the bill. I was hoping to tap the vast knowledge of the community before I made any decisions. I should add that I'm not a .NET fan, and would not consider MONO a solution. Thanks for your input! -Mike
Government

Submission + - Ready for global taxes? (infowars.com)

Submitted by ArcherB
ArcherB writes: According to InfoWars and several other sites, the true goal of Global Warming Alarmism has come to light: Global redistribution of wealth.

Following a discussion entitled "A Global CO2 Tax," a UN panel yesterday urged the adoption of "a global burden sharing system, fair, with solidarity, and legally binding to all nations," to impose a tax on plant food (CO2).
Othmar Schwank, one of the participants, said that the U.S. and other wealthy nations need to "contribute significantly more to this global fund." He also added, "It is very essential to tax coal."
The bounty from this $40 billion dollars a year windfall will go straight into the coffers of a UN controlled "Multilateral Adaptation Fund".
Of course, if passed, it will be without the need for those pesky elections.
Windows

Submission + - HFS+ For Windows (bizzeh.com) 2

Submitted by
Bizzeh
Bizzeh writes: "their are one or to ways that i know of to access HFS+ (Mac OS) partitions in windows (e.g. MacDrive, HFSExplorer), but in general, they are terrible. are their any GOOD file system drivers for HFS+ for windows (2k/xp/vista), prefairably free ones?"
Space

Submission + - Chinese Moon Photo Doctored, Craters Moved (msn.com) 1

Submitted by
mytrip
mytrip writes: "A controversy over last week's photo of the lunar surface, allegedly from China's lunar spacecraft Chang'e, appears to be resolved. It's real but it isn't. An expert says the photo's resolution shows that it is of recent origin. However, for some inexplicable reason, someone on Earth edited the photo and moved a crater to a different location.

Some dogged sleuthing by a fellow space blogger has tracked down the truth behind the controversial first photo from China's moon orbiter.

In the week since the picture was released amid much fanfare in Beijing, there have been widespread rumors that the photo was a fake, copied from an old picture collected by a U.S. space probe.

The photo from China's Chang'e 1 orbiter is clearly a higher-resolution view, with sunlight streaming from the northwest rather than the north.

The mission's chief scientist, Ouyang Ziyuan, told the Beijing News that a new crater had been spotted on the Chang'e imagery — a crater that didn't appear on the U.S. imagery. Lakdawalla determined that crater in question it wasn't exactly new — instead, it appeared to be a crater that had been moved from one spot on the picture to another spot slightly south."
Linux Business

Submission + - Microsoft Claims Patent On Embedded Linux? 1

Submitted by Preedit
Preedit writes: This InformationWeek story points out a recent deal between Microsoft and Japanese printer maker Kyocera Mita, under which Kyocera obtained from Microsoft a license to patents used in "certain Linux-based embedded technologies." The question everyone's asking is why Kyocera needs a patent license from Microsoft to develop its embedded Linux products.
Power

Submission + - Linux vs Windows Power Consumption (phoronix.com)

Submitted by matelmaster
matelmaster writes: As a follow-up to their recent Linux Power Consumption review Phoronix published a short article comparing The power consumptions of Windows XP Sp2, Windows Vista, Fedora 8 Test 3 and Ubuntu 7.10. The test concludes that Ubuntu uses the most power while both idling and under normal usage, whereas Fedora and Windows XP seem to consume less.
Microsoft

Submission + - Mom blasts Ballmer over kid's crappy Vista OS (computerworld.com) 6

Submitted by
Lucas123
Lucas123 writes: "While on stage at a Gartner's ITxpo conference today, Ballmer got an ear-full from the mother of a 13-year-old girl who said after installing Vista on her daughter's computer she decided only two days later to switch back to XP because Vista was so difficult. Ballmer defended Vista saying: "Your daughter saw a lot of value"; to which the mother replied: "She's 13." Ballmer said that Vista is bigger than XP, and "for some people that's an issue, and it's not going to get smaller in any significant way in SP1. But machines are constantly getting bigger, and [it's] probably important to remember that as well." Says the mother: "Good, I'll let you come in and install it for me.""
Privacy

Submission + - Windows Live Healthcare

Submitted by NullProg
NullProg writes: The latest blog from Mary Jo Foley over at ZDnet states that Microsoft will be entering the medical records storage business. http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=785 From the article, Peter Neupert, vice president of the Microsoft Health Solutions Group, described HealthVault as "an extension of our (health) search product." "It's a platform — a shred data repository for users to collect, store and access their health information." Neupert and others at Microsoft know that connectivity is only one hurdle players in this market face. Privacy concerns are even more of an issue, especially for Microsoft, which isn't a company many users have come to equate with "trust." Microsft will use Windows Live ID as the secure-authentication mechanism. I personally would rather store my health care information myself. Will others entrust Miscrosoft with thier medical records?
Software

Submission + - PCWorld refuse hardware repair due to Linux. 10

Submitted by
Tikka
Tikka writes: "Today I visit PC World (London, UK) because my 5 months old laptop has developed a manufacturing fault, the hinge to the display has started to crack the plastic casing.
Anyone in the know, will know that this is due to the joint inside and this means that ultimately the screen will separate from the keyboard in time.

Repair was refused, because I have Gentoo Linux on my laptop — Replacing the Windows Vista that was pre-installed.

PC World have said that this has void my warranty and there is nothing they will do for me, I spoke to a manager who said that he has been told to refuse any repairs if the operating system has been changed.

I feel this has really gone against my statutory rights and will do everything I can to fight it, I will review comments for your advice."
Wii

Submission + - The little Wii that could

Submitted by DesertBlade
DesertBlade writes: According to a study conducted by VG Chartz the Wii is the fastest selling console ever. Since it's rlease it has been out selling Xbox360 2 to 1. It is now the next gen console champ with worldwide sales of 10.6 million, compared to 10.5 million xbox 360s. Sony has a pitiful 4.3 million sold. While the Xbox and PS3 try to be a media center being able to play DVDs and Bluerays the Wii focuses on being a gaming platform for the masses.
Programming

Submission + - Programming Erlang Book

Submitted by
gnalre
gnalre writes: "Every day it seems there is a new publication of a book on perl/python/ruby. Some languages however do not seem to get that sort of attention. One of those under-represented languages is Erlang, however for the first time in 10 years a new Erlang book has been published!

As someone who had a brief flirtation with Erlang long ago, I was interested to see how the language had evolved in the intervening decade. I was also curious to re-evaluate Erlang to see what solutions it offered to the present day issues of writing reliable distributed applications.

Programming Erlang — Software For A Concurrent World (ISBN 10193435600X) is part of the pragmatic programmer series. As with all the books in this series, it is available in paperback or for a reduced cost you can directly download it in PDF format (which is always useful if you spend a lot of time on the move and you do not like carrying around a dead tree with you). The books format and layout as with all the books of this series are clear and logical.

The book is written by Joe Armstrong, who co-authored the first Erlang book a decade ago. He was also one of the originators of the Erlang language and has been directly connected to its development ever since. We can therefore be assured about the author's knowledge and insight into the language, if not his impartiality.

The book itself can be roughly split into three main sections.
  1. Getting started and Sequential programming
  2. Concurrent Programming
  3. Erlang libraries and advanced Erlang techniques.


In Chapter 1 the author sets out his stall of why Erlang is worthy of your attention. It's clear from this chapter that the author feels Erlang's strength lies in applications requiring an element concurrency and fault tolerance. Another emphasis is made of running Erlang on modern multi-core processors, something that was only a glint in a hardware designer's eye 10 years ago, but is rapidly becoming an issue in all areas of programming. From this chapter you also get a feel on how the author approaches his programming in that he states that he wants the reader to have fun with the language, which is a refreshing change to some language text books whose main purpose appears to be as a cure for insomnia.

Chapter 2 goes through installing Erlang and the Erlang shell (a command line environment similar to ones with languages such as perl). The chapter also starts us into the strange world of functional programming, where variables can only be given a value once (e.g you cannot do i=i+1), recursion replace loops and pattern matching replaces assignments. Fortunately the Erlang language is remarkably concise. For example there are only 4 data types. However to those coming from a purely procedural programming background the learning curve could be a steep one. Saying that the Author does a good job of leading you through the languages intricacies with examples being compared to code from languages such as Java to help keep your feet on solid programming ground.

The next 3 chapters move on to writing simple Erlang programs. As a quick aside, for anyone new to Erlang it is well worth examining the quicksort implementation described in chapter 3. Its conciseness and simplicity was one of the reasons the language won me over when I first met the language.

These chapters also cover error detection and handling. It's worth noting that Erlang has a philosophy of ensuring programs fail hard, so that bugs can be weeded out at an early stage. This idea very much defines how Erlang error handling is defined.

One criticism of the first section is Chapter 6 which describes compiling and running an Erlang program. I would have preferred that this information be covered earlier in the book or be placed in an appendix because it is probably an area you will want to reference repeatedly.

Chapter 7 is where things really get interesting and the true power of Erlang starts to come to the fore. This is where Erlang's concurrency credentials are explained. This chapter begins by providing some useful metaphors of the Erlang concurrent model, but chapter 8 is where the fun begins by describing the Erlang concurrency primitives that allow the creation of processes and the process communication methods. The author here highlights one of the language features, the Erlang light weight process. These are true processes (not threads) but take up very little in the way of resources. Indeed it is not unusual to have 1000's of such processes running in an application.

The next few chapters expand on the available concurrency primitives and how to move from concurrency on your local processor to concurrency utilising the resources of multiple machines either on a local network or across the web. It finishes the section off by showing the example of a simple IRC application.

Chapter 12 starts the next section by looking at how to interact with the world outside the Erlang environment. First it examines how to interface an Erlang program to applications written in other languages such as C. It then goes onto to look at file and socket handling in Erlang. Chapter 15 looks at two important Erlang storage primitives ETS and DETS before we get to the OTP Erlang libraries in Chapter 16.

The OTP libraries are the standard Erlang libraries and tools. In fact the OTP libraries are worthy of a book in itself. The author highlights the section on the generic Server module as the most important section in the whole book and one to be reread until its importance has sunk in. This is because here are encapsulated many of the lessons learned in writing industrial fault-tolerant applications, such the updating of a running applications code without causing that application to miss a beat. The section is finished off by describing the Erlang distributed database (humorously named Mnesia) and then finishing it off with the example of a simple server application.

The book finishes off by looking at Erlang on multicore systems including its support for SMP. As the author states this is the leading edge of present day Erlang and is still under development.

Conclusion

Firstly I would like to thank the pragmatic programmers for publishing this book. Erlang's profile has been in need of highlighting for many years and hopefully this book will help. The book definitely provides a great starting point for anyone who wants to get to grips with the language and takes them to the point where they can start writing useful applications. This book is a worthy successor to the last book published and does a good job of both updating the material and explaining some of the later developments such as SMP. Anyone who has a need for writing fault tolerant applications should at least look at this book. If nothing else you will never be afraid of dealing with recursion ever again.

In many ways the book cuts off just when things are getting interesting. There are hints in the book about real world Erlang's applications and it would have been good if some of these experiences could have been expanded. Hopefully however this book is the start of increased exposure for Erlang. If so then someone may get around to writing another Erlang book describing some of the advanced issues about generating robust applications. I just hope it won't take another 10 years this time.

Tony Pedley is a senior engineer specialising in real-time embedded systems. In his spare time he likes to tease windows programmers and confuse managers by telling them it would be a lot easier if we wrote it in Erlang."
Communications

Submission + - Skype Outage Caused by Microsoft Update (timesonline.co.uk)

Submitted by
ZenWarrior
ZenWarrior writes: ""Skype, the internet telephony provider, said today that a massive, simultaneous restart of its users' computers was to blame for the two-day outage its service suffered last week. Millions of users collectively downloading a routine security update from Microsoft and then rebooting their machines had caused what the company called a "critical disruption", prompting its peer-to-peer network to collapse." Is Skype actually serious about that explanation?!"
Software

Submission + - Software "Upgrade" Disallows Remote Deskto 2

Submitted by
langelgjm
langelgjm writes: "I work for a small business, and I have been using Remote Desktop to work from home and school quite happily for the past 3 years. We recently purchased an upgrade to one of our manufacturing software packages (this is high-priced CAD/CAM stuff, complete with hardware security dongles), and I just discovered that the "upgrade" no longer allows the application to be run over Remote Desktop. This wasn't disclosed anywhere. I called the distributor, and was told that my options are to buy a network key and another license for the software, which will cost several thousand dollars, or to use a service like GoToMyPC or VNC. Frankly, I'm at a loss; I don't understand: 1) why they deny Remote Desktop but then suggest you use another program to accomplish the same thing; 2) why I should need a network key and two licenses when only one person can use Remote Desktop at a time; 3) why I should have to pay nearly $200 a year indefinitely and rely on a third party (GoToMyPC) to accomplish what I've been doing for free in the past. I specifically chose not to use VNC because Remote Desktop is significantly faster and better looking over slow network connections; also, Remote Desktop has lightweight and secure clients for OS X, Pocket PC, and Linux, all of which I use.

Have any Slashdotters been in a similar situation? Is there a workaround that will allow me to keep using Remote Desktop? Why do companies feel the need to remove completely valid, legal, and extremely useful features from new versions?"

Slashdot Top Deals

It's later than you think, the joint Russian-American space mission has already begun.

Close