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Comment: Re:My god, it's full of troll. (Score 2, Insightful) 244

by C3c6e6 (#34257584) Attached to: An Illustrated Version Control Timeline

I couldn't agree more. In my previous job, I had a colleague who wanted to convert me from SVN to Bazaar (http://bazaar-vcs.org/).

He told me "it was very simple to use, you only have to..." and then started drawing a very complicated diagram on my whiteboard.

Personally, I thought it was complete overkill for the two-man project we were working on.

Comment: Re:Hahahahahaha (Score 5, Interesting) 350

by C3c6e6 (#33526568) Attached to: Broadcom Releases Source Code For Drivers

No one is saying that device drives will magically start working flawlessly because their source code is open, although it will make it easier to track down bugs (see Linus Torvalds' quote about the number of eyeballs).

The main point, however, is that now Linux distributions can ship these drives out of the box, so wireless devices will work straight away. Until now the biggest (and dare I say only?) problem I've had with installing Linux on a laptop is finding and installing the right drivers for wireless network cards.

American admissions to U.S. grad schools falls->

Submitted by
quantumstream
quantumstream writes "Admissions to U.S. grad schools are increasingly going to international students according to the latest data published by the Council of Graduate Schools [warning: PDF file]. Despite a 9% increase from both American and international applicants, admissions for international applicants increased by 3% compared to a 1% decline for U.S. applicants. Major increases were noted from China (16%) and Turkey (10%), while admissions for South Korean and Indian applicants fell. Interesting, these increases were not exclusive to the natural sciences and engineering, but included the humanities (1%) and business schools (8%). As these trends continue, one wonders what effects these changes will have on the next generation of U.S. knowledge workers and the immigration debate in Congress."
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IBM

The Mainframe: Dead Or Alive?->

Submitted by FlorianMueller
FlorianMueller writes "When the EU Commission launched its antitrust investigation against IBM last week, some were wondering whether there would still be mainframes around when the case is settled. But not so fast: eWEEK Europe just conducted a poll on mainframe spendings, and 30% of the respondents even plan to increase their mainframe capacities. At a recent presentation of the new mainframe generation, an IBM executive boldly said: "Western civilization runs on this system." So does IBM, owing 25% of its revenues and more than 40% of its total profits to the mainframe business. Mainframe software is a $24.5 billion market, twice as big as the Linux market. 200-300 billion lines of legacy code (much of it in COBOL) are still in use. So it's not just Microsoft and patent activists who take an interest in this."
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Microsoft

Microsoft's new F# programming language-> 3

Submitted by Gary W. Longsine
Gary W. Longsine writes "The Register has a fascinating (or nearly incomprehensible, depending on your tolerance for multiple simultaneous sweeping generalizations and caffeine level) article about F#, Microsoft's new programming language, apparently inspired by Objective Caml. Is there room for F# in the crowded field of programming languages?"
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Debate: Is traditional Operations obsolete now?->

Submitted by Lord Straxus
Lord Straxus writes "There's a debate going on over at InfoQ right now which revolves around the role of Operations in modern software development teams, whether traditional Operations teams have been obsoleted by the cloud and developers doing ops tasks, or whether there's still a place for all those DBAs and sysadmins. Choice quotes include:

- "to put it bluntly, when my app is deployed in a cloud, who needs Ops?"
- "it seems as if folks expect systems in the cloud to manage themselves, which is a mistake"
- "Extrapolating that logic, I would contend the development team should be doing the company accounting because software developers are good with numbers"
- "Most ops people are not developers, cannot read code and would not be able to track down a problem whose root cause was buried within the application layer"
- "Why is Ops penalized for missing an SLA target if the failure was not related to faulty infrastructure or processes, but failing code?"
- "change is bad for operations, while software development *is* change"
- "I have been in operations for over 30 years and you will never hear me advocate the elimination of operations. However, I think as industry operations needs to clean up and man up"
- "'Ops > Dev' is the common case in enterprises where operations puts a hold on everything developers do out of fear & risk control. 'Dev > Ops' is a pipe dream where developers are the new operators"
- "In short, and this may be painful for some to hear, many aspects of operations are being automated through programming and are less necessary. That's not to say there is no need for dedicated operations positions, but that they are changing their nature to higher level tasks"

Seems like a pretty good discussion is going on!"
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Comment: No all databases are for business (Score 1) 444

by C3c6e6 (#31647814) Attached to: Why Some Devs Can't Wait For NoSQL To Die

I think the author of TFA is missing something: not all databases / datastores are developed for businesses to keep track of their inventories. These days, many scientific disciplines, such as bioinformatics, rely heavily on databases as well.

The latest experimental techniques produce so much data such that "old-fashioned" RDBMSs just don't cut it anymore. So, for certain application domains, NoSQL seems to be at the moment the way forward. I'm afraid the author can wish all the he wants but NoSQL is gonna be around for a while. Until something better comes up, that is.

GNU is Not Unix

Can Free Software Save us from Social Networks?-> 1

Submitted by Glyn Moody
Glyn Moody writes "Here's a problem for free software: most social networks are built using it, yet through their constant monitoring of users they do little to promote freedom. Eben Moglen, General Counsel of the Free Software Foundation for 13 years, and the legal brains behind several versions of the GNU GPL, thinks that the free software world needs to fix this with a major new hardware+software project. "The most attractive hardware is the ultra-small, ARM-based, plug it into the wall, wall-wart server. An object can be sold to people at a very low one-time price, and brought home and plugged into an electrical outlet and plugged into a wall jack for the Ethernet, and you're done. It comes up, it gets configured through your Web browser on whatever machine you want to have in the apartment with it, and it goes and fetches all your social networking data from all the social networking applications, closing all your accounts. It backs itself up in an encrypted way to your friends' plugs, so that everybody is secure in the way that would be best for them, by having their friends holding the secure version of their data." Could such a plan work, or is it simply too late to get people to give up their Facebook accounts, even for something that gives them more freedom?"
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Programming

Can "Page's Law" be Broken? 1

Submitted by
theodp
theodp writes "Speaking at the Google I/O Developer Conference, Sergey Brin described Google's efforts to defeat "Page's Law," the tendency of software to get twice as slow every 18 months. 'Fortunately, the hardware folks offset that,' Brin joked. 'We would like to break Page's Law and have our software become increasingly fast on the same hardware.' Page, of course, refers to Google co-founder Larry Page, last seen delivering a nice from-the-heart commencement address at Michigan that's worth a watch (or read)."

"How to make a million dollars: First, get a million dollars." -- Steve Martin