Programming

A Real World HTML 5 Benchmark 163

Posted by timothy from the global-variables dept.
KidCompy writes "The newest browsers boast huge performance improvements, but how much do you trust benchmarks trotted out to prove those claims? Do they reflect the real uses to which developers will put HTML 5 and JavaScript? We've extracted several benchmarks from our existing programs to measure actual versus theoretical performance."
Software

Progress In Algorithms Beats Moore's Law 166

Posted by timothy from the when-bottlenecks-swap dept.
Relic of the Future writes "Seen on the blog 'Algorithmic Game Theory,' a report to congress and the president about past and future advances in information technology notes that, while improvements in hardware accounted for an approximate 1,000 fold increase in calculation speed over a 15-year time-span, improvements in algorithms accounted for an over 43,000 fold increase."
Perl

23 Years of Culture Hacking With Perl 99

Posted by Soulskill from the in-its-prime dept.
Modern Perl writes "Larry Wall, the creator of Perl, reflects on Perl's history of hacking its culture, from subverting the reductionist culture of Unix to reinventing the ideas of programming language and culture in Perl 6 and the verbal aikido used to encourage honest detractors to become valuable contributors. Perl turned 23 years old last week, and Perl 6 is available."
GUI

10 Dos and Don'ts To Make Sysadmins' Lives Easier 246

Posted by timothy from the sorry-dave-can't-let-you-do-that dept.
CowboyRobot writes "Tom Limoncelli has a piece in 'Queue' summarizing the Computer-Human Interaction for Management of Information Technology's list of how to make software that is easy to install, maintain, and upgrade. FTA: '#2. DON'T make the administrative interface a GUI. System administrators need a command-line tool for constructing repeatable processes. Procedures are best documented by providing commands that we can copy and paste from the procedure document to the command line.'"
Education

Do High Schools Know What 'Computer Science' Is? 564

Posted by CmdrTaco from the answer-is-zero dept.
theodp writes "The first rule of teaching high school-level Computer Science should be knowing what CS is-and-isn't. Unfortunately, many high schools offering 'Computer Science' really aren't. Using her old California high school as an example, now-a-real-CS-student Carolyn points out that one 'Computer Science' class (C101) touted keyboarding 'speeds in excess of 30 words per minute at 95% accuracy' as a desired outcome, while another (C120) boasted that students will learn to use hyperlinks to link to other sites. While such classes fill a need, she acknowledges, they should not be called Computer Science. What's the harm? 'Encouraging more girls to take computer classes as they are now might have the opposite of the desired effect,' she explains. 'More girls might get the impression that computer science is only advanced application use, which might turn them off to computer science.'"
Perl

RubyGems' Module Count Soon To Surpass CPAN's 206

Posted by timothy from the we-finally-know-who's-counting dept.
mfarver writes "According to the data gathered by modulecounts.com, the total number of modules checked into RubyGems (18,894, and growing at about 27/day) will probably exceed CPAN (18,928, and growing about 8/day) this week."
Google

Google Donates Windowbuilder, Codepro To Eclipse 150

Posted by timothy from the spreading-it-around dept.
h00manist writes "Google is donating Windowbuilder Pro and Codepro Profiler to the Eclipse project. 'Google acquired the software when it bought Instantiations, relaunching the Java graphical user interface building tool Windowbuilder Pro shortly after. Now the outfit has decided to donate both Windowbuilder Pro and the code analysis tool Codepro to the open source Eclipse project. Although Google has announced its intention to donate the software, it needs go through a rigorous filtering process to ensure that no intellectual property rights will be breached. Once those formalities are dealt with, it is likely that both Windowbuilder Pro and Codepro will tip up in the Indigo release of Eclipse sometime in June 2011.'"
Microsoft

Microsoft, Apple, EMC, and Oracle Form Patent Bloc 113

Posted by Soulskill from the axis-of-prior-art dept.
An anonymous reader writes "When Novell finally sold itself, part of the deal included the sale of 882 patents to a consortium backed by Microsoft. Thanks to a tip from Florian Mueller, it turns out that Microsoft's partners are Apple, Oracle, and EMC, which raises questions about where these companies are heading and what it means for the rest of the industry."
Oracle

Oracle Releases MySQL 5.5 263

Posted by samzenpus from the new-and-improved dept.
darthcamaro writes "Two years after Sun released MySQL 5.1, Oracle has picked up the ball with the official release of MySQL 5.5. New features include semi-synchronous replication, InnoDB by default and new SIGNAL/RESIGNAL support for exception handling. Above all, Oracle stressed that they are committed to further MySQL open source development and that they see it as a complementary technology to their proprietary Oracle database."
Facebook

TIME Names Mark Zuckerberg Person of Year 317

Posted by CmdrTaco from the remember-when-it-was-you dept.
theodp writes "Sorry, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates — there's a new geek kid in town. TIME magazine has selected Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg as its Person of the Year. Why? 'For connecting more than half a billion people and mapping the social relations among them; for creating a new system of exchanging information; and for changing how we all live our lives,' reasoned TIME At age 26, Zuckerberg is TIME's second-youngest selection, bested only by Charles Lindbergh. So what does Zuckerberg do for an encore — Academy Award, maybe?"
Biotech

Scientists Create Programmable Bacteria 117

Posted by samzenpus from the anti-coding-soap dept.
wilmavanwyk writes "In research that further bridges the biological and digital world, scientists at the University of California, San Francisco have created bacteria that can be programmed like a computer. Researchers built 'logic gates' – the building blocks of a circuit – out of genes and put them into E. coli bacteria strains. The logic gates mimic digital processing and form the basis of computational communication between cells, according to synthetic biologist Christopher A. Voigt."
Math

Next Generation of Algorithms Inspired by Ants 106

Posted by samzenpus from the bugs-for-bugs dept.
letsurock writes "Ants' capability to find the shortest route through a maze in an hour, and to find the second shortest route when the first path was obstructed, has inspired researchers creating algorithms for the future. From the article: 'Finding the most efficient path through a busy network is a common challenge faced by delivery drivers, telephone routers and engineers. To solve these optimization problems using software, computer scientists have often sought inspiration from ant colonies in nature — creating algorithms that simulate the behavior of ants who find the most efficient routes from their nests to food sources by following each other's volatile pheromone trails. The most widely used of these ant-inspired algorithms is known as Ant Colony Optimization (ACO).'"
Businesses

Feds To Adopt 'Cloud First' IT Policy 142

Posted by Soulskill from the what-happens-when-the-cloud-wants-to-move-to-the-cloud dept.
theodp writes "The White House Thursday announced plans to restructure IT by consolidating federal government data centers and applications, and adopting a so-called 'cloud first' policy. Unveiled by federal CIO Vivek Kundra, the 25-Point Plan (PDF) calls for cutting 800+ data centers by 2015, as well as shifting work to cloud computing systems. The new 'Cloud First' policy cites the ability of Animoto.com to scale vs. the government's short-lived Cars.gov (Cash for Clunkers), although Google Trends suggests this may be somewhat of an apple-to-oranges comparison for justifying a national IT strategy. As long as we're talking clouds, a tag cloud of the 25-Point Plan underscores that the Feds are counting more on IT Program and Contract Management rather than Computer Science wizardry to deliver 'the productivity improvements that private industry has realized from IT.' Not to be a buzzkill, but those of you celebrating CS Education Week might be advised to consider an MBA if you want a Federal IT career."
Java

Oracle Asks Apache To Rethink Java Committee Exit 266

Posted by kdawson from the with-sugar-on-top dept.
CWmike writes "Oracle has asked the Apache Software Foundation to reconsider its decision to quit the Java SE/EE Executive Committee, and is also acknowledging the ASF's importance to Java's future. In a message released late Thursday, an Oracle executive made conciliatory gestures to Apache. At least for now, the ASF doesn't seem eager to rejoin the committee. 'Give us a reason why the ASF should reconsider other than "please,"' ASF president Jim Jagielski said in a Twitter post on Thursday. The Java Community Process is 'dead,' Jagielski said in a blog post, also on Thursday. 'All that remains is a zombie, walking the streets of the Java ecosystem, looking for brains.'"
Oracle

RIP, SunSolve 100

Posted by timothy from the to-the-moon-instead dept.
Kymermosst writes "Today marks the last day that SunSolve will be available. Oracle sent the final pre-deployment details today for the retirement of SunSolve and the transition to its replacement, My Oracle Support Release 5.2, which begins tomorrow. People who work with Sun's hardware and software have long used SunSolve as a central location for specifications, patches, and documentation."
Java

Apache Resigns From the JCP Executive Committee 136

Posted by timothy from the I'll-resign-my-commission dept.
iammichael writes "The Apache Software Foundation has resigned its seat on the Java SE/EE Executive Committee due to a long dispute over the licensing restrictions placed on the TCK (test kit validating third-party Java implementations are compatible with the specification)."
Oracle

Ex-Sun CEO Warns Oracle of Death By Open Source 408

Posted by timothy from the everyone's-got-a-narrative dept.
gearystwatcher writes "Former Sun CEO Scott McNealy talks to The Reg on where things went wrong, and acquisition by Oracle: 'We probably got a little too aggressive near the end and probably open sourced too much and tried too hard to appease the community and tried too hard to share,' McNealy said. 'You gotta take care of your shareholders or you end up very vulnerable like we got. We were a wonderful acquisition — we got stolen for a song at the bottom of the Dow.'"
Oracle

Oracle To Halve Core Count In Next Sparc Processor 200

Posted by timothy from the reverse-course-full-steam dept.
angry tapir writes "Oracle will halve the number of cores in its next Sparc processor and instead improve its single-thread performance, a weak area for the chip but one that's important for running large databases and back-end applications. The next Sparc chip on Oracle's roadmap, the T4, will have eight cores on each chip, down from 16 in the current Sparc T3."
Programming

Programming Mistakes To Avoid 394

Posted by Soulskill from the livin'-on-the-edge-cases dept.
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Peter Wayner outlines some of the most common programming mistakes and how to avoid them. 'Certain programming practices send the majority of developers reaching for their hair upon opening a file that has been exhibiting too much "character." Spend some time in a bar near any tech company, and you'll hear the howls: Why did the programmer use that antiquated structure? Where was the mechanism for defending against attacks from the Web? Wasn't any thought given to what a noob would do with the program?' Wayner writes. From playing it fast and loose, to delegating too much to frameworks, to relying too heavily on magic boxes, to overdetermining the user experience — each programming pitfall is accompanied by its opposing pair, lending further proof that 'programming may in fact be transforming into an art, one that requires a skilled hand and a creative mind to achieve a happy medium between problematic extremes.'" What common mistakes do you frequently have to deal with?

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