Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments
typodupeerror delete not in
  • Preferences

Slashdot stories can be listened to in audio form via an RSS feed, as read by our own robotic overlord.

Comments: 28 +-   Helping Perl Packagers Package Perl on Thursday December 24, @01:06AM

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday December 24, @01:06AM
from the dress-it-up dept.
perl
jamie writes "chromatic has a great post today on the conflict between OS distributions' and CPAN's installations of perl modules, along with some suggestions for how to start resolving this maddening problem: '[Though Debian has] made plenty of CPAN distributions available as .debs, I have to configure my CPAN client myself, and it does not work with the system package manager. There's no reason it couldn't. Imagine that the system Perl 5 included in the default package... had a CPAN client configured appropriately. It has selected an appropriate mirror (or uses the redirector). It knows about installation paths. It understands how to use LWP...' The idea of providing guidelines to distros for how to safely package modules is a great one. Could modules request (a modified?) test suite be run after distro-installation? Could Module::Build help module authors and distro maintainers establish the rules somehow?"
Read More... 28 comments story

Comments: 472 +-   Why Coder Pay Isn't Proportional To Productivity on Wednesday December 23, @02:27PM

Posted by timothy on Wednesday December 23, @02:27PM
from the productivity-is-a-blunt-edged-word dept.
business
theodp writes "John D. Cook takes a stab at explaining why programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity. The basic problem, Cook explains, is that extreme programmer productivity may not be obvious. A salesman who sells 10x as much as his peers will be noticed, and compensated accordingly. And if a bricklayer were 10x more productive than his peers, this would be obvious too (it doesn't happen). But the best programmers do not write 10x as many lines of code; nor do they work 10x as many hours. Programmers are most effective when they avoid writing code. An über-programmer, Cook explains, is likely to be someone who stares quietly into space and then says 'Hmm. I think I've seen something like this before.'"
Read More... 472 comments story

Comments: 61 +-   An Open Source Compiler From CUDA To X86-Multicore on Wednesday December 23, @02:06PM

Posted by timothy on Wednesday December 23, @02:06PM
from the abstraction-gains-a-layer dept.
programming
Gregory Diamos writes "An open source project, Ocelot, has recently released a just-in-time compiler for CUDA, allowing the same programs to be run on NVIDIA GPUs or x86 CPUs and providing an alternative to OpenCL. A description of the compiler was recently posted on the NVIDIA forums. The compiler works by translating GPU instructions to LLVM and then generating native code for any LLVM target. It has been validated against over 100 CUDA applications. All of the code is available under the New BSD license."
Read More... 61 comments story

Comments: 423 +-   When Developers Work Late, Should the Manager Stay? on Sunday December 20, @01:43PM

Posted by Soulskill on Sunday December 20, @01:43PM
from the stop-watching-me-think dept.
programming
jammag writes "A veteran developer looks back — in irritation — at those times he had to work late and his unskilled manager stayed too, just to look over his shoulder and add worry and fret to the process. Now, that same developer is a manager himself — and recently stayed late to ride herd over late-working developers. 'And guess what? Yep, I hadn't coded in years and never in the language he had to work with.' Yet now he understood: his own butt was on the line, so he was staying put. Still, does it really help developers to have management hovering on a late evening, even if the boss handles pizza delivery?"
Read More... 423 comments story

Comments: 52 +-   Palm Pre Development In the Browser on Sunday December 20, @12:17PM

Posted by Soulskill on Sunday December 20, @12:17PM
from the pre-existing-condition dept.
cellphones
introspekt.i writes "Palm is building upon the Mozilla Bespin project to deliver an IDE for the Palm Pre entirely in the web browser. Apps can be developed on the server and then downloaded and deployed locally. It is an interesting tool, especially given that WebOS is so web-centric. This tool comes as a supplement to the existing development tools for Eclipse and the command line released by Palm earlier this year. The project is open to anyone who registers as a Palm developer, which is free to do."
Read More... 52 comments story

Comments: 742 +-   The Environmental Impact of PHP Compared To C++ On Facebook on Sunday December 20, @10:52AM

Posted by Soulskill on Sunday December 20, @10:52AM
from the efficiency-is-overrated dept.
earth
Kensai7 writes "Recently, Facebook provided us with some information on their server park. They use about 30,000 servers, and not surprisingly, most of them are running PHP code to generate pages full of social info for their users. As they only say that 'the bulk' is running PHP, let's assume this to be 25,000 of the 30,000. If C++ would have been used instead of PHP, then 22,500 servers could be powered down (assuming a conservative ratio of 10 for the efficiency of C++ versus PHP code), or a reduction of 49,000 tons of CO2 per year. Of course, it is a bit unfair to isolate Facebook here. Their servers are only a tiny fraction of computers deployed world-wide that are interpreting PHP code."
Read More... 742 comments story

Comments: 95 +-   First MySQL 5.5 Beta Released on Friday December 18, @12:29PM

Posted by kdawson on Friday December 18, @12:29PM
from the taking-care-of-business dept.
database
joabj writes "While MySQL is the subject of much high-profile wrangling between the EU and Oracle (and the MySQL creator himself), the MySQL developers have been quietly moving the widely-used database software forward. The new beta version of MySQL, the first publicly available, features such improvements as near-asynchronous replication and more options for partitioning. A new release model has been enacted as well, bequeathing this version the title of 'MySQL Server 5.5.0-m2.' Downloads here."
Read More... 95 comments story

Comments: 553 +-   Has a Decade of .NET Delivered On Microsoft's Promises? on Friday December 18, @08:10AM

Posted by timothy on Friday December 18, @08:10AM
from the full-of-holes dept.
microsoft
cyclocommuter writes with this snippet from The Register's assessment of whether Microsoft's .NET framework has been a success: "If the goal of .NET was to see off Java, it was at least partially successful. Java did not die, but enterprise Java became mired in complexity, making .NET an easy sell as a more productive alternative. C# has steadily grown in popularity, and is now the first choice for most Windows development. ASP.NET has been a popular business web framework. The common language runtime has proved robust and flexible. ... Job trend figures here show steadily increasing demand for C#, which is now mentioned in around 32 per cent of UK IT programming vacancies, ahead of Java at 26 per cent."
Read More... 553 comments story

Comments: 427 +-   What Does Everyone Use For Task/Project Tracking? on Wednesday December 16, @04:31PM

Posted by timothy on Wednesday December 16, @04:31PM
from the tribal-tattoos-mostly dept.
programming
JerBear0 writes "I work as the sole IT employee at a company of about 50 people. I handle programming, support, pretty much anything that is IT related, or even that plugs in. As seems to be true with many small companies, the priorities seem to shift quite frequently. As a result, I've always got multiple programming (both new systems and improvements/changes to existing systems), integration, research, maintenance tasks/projects on my To Do list, in varying stages of completion. At any given time, I need to be able to jump back to one of these items and pick up where I left off. I am currently using Outlook Tasks, and then end up referencing my notebook and email for those dates to figure out exactly where I left off. It works, but not well. If it's been a while, I'll end up losing an hour or two just tracking everything down. I looked at using MS Project / OpenProj, but they want an individual file for each project, and I want at least the project/task list all on one screen. Essentially what I'd want would be a Task List on steroids, allowing for hierarchical subtasks, attachments, and prioritization. Ideally it would be a desktop app, but a locally-hostable web app would be okay. In some of these projects I may want to include proprietary information, which I really don't want floating out in the cloud outside of my control. I know I'm not alone in this problem, so what do you guys (gals) use to address this?"
Read More... 427 comments story

Comments: 156 +-   Oracle Responds To MySQL Purchase Concerns on Monday December 14, @02:23PM

Posted by Soulskill on Monday December 14, @02:23PM
from the we-cool-man-we-cool dept.
business
Luke has no name writes "Yesterday we discussed MySQL founder Monty Widenius's objections to the acquisition of MySQL by Oracle. Today, Oracle released a statement to address some of these issues. Among their commitments, Oracle says they intend to continue releasing MySQL under the GPL, allow vendors to produce 'any-license' third-party engines, maintain the Reference Manual, invest millions into the product, and create a 'customer advisory board.' The pledges are still not enough for some, however."
Read More... 156 comments story
Recent reviews from Slashdot readers:

Submitting a review for consideration is easy; please first read Slashdot's book review guidelines. Updated: 2008114 by samzenpus

Slashdot Login

Log In

Create Account  |  Retrieve Password

Search
Live fast, die young, and leave a good looking corpse. -- James Dean

All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 1997-2009 Geeknet, Inc.