Programming

Video Games Need A Woman's Touch 177

Posted by Zonk from the not-that-kind-of-touch-you-perv dept.
hattan wrote to mention an AP article going around detailing one woman's frustration with the roles for women in games. From the article: "Tara Teich enjoys nothing more than slipping into the role of a female video game character. But the 26-year-old software programmer gets annoyed by the appearance of such digital alter egos as the busty tomb raider Lara Croft or the belly-baring Wu the Lotus Blossom of 'Jade Empire.' Don't even get her started on the thong-bikini babes that the male gunmen win as prizes in 'Grand Theft Auto,' which was sent to stores with hidden sex scenes left embedded on the discs by programmers. "
IBM

IBM Collaborating With Open Source Java Project 149

Posted by Zonk from the big-corp-and-little-guy-working-together dept.
lord_rob the only on writes "According to news.com, IBM has begun participating in the open-source Java project Harmony and intends to contribute code to the initiative, according to a Big Blue executive. At this point, IBM's participation is limited to thoughts on design, but the company has plans to contribute code to the project in the future." From the article: "We really like to see the community get started, and they're still working out the rough edges of what they want to deliver. And we didn't want to disrupt that,"
HP

HP Fires Father of OOP 697

Posted by CowboyNeal from the hard-times dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Wow. Hewlett-Packard has disbanded its Advanced Software Research team and sent its leader, reknowned programmer Alan Kay, packing. From today's Good Morning Silicon Valley: 'HP is bidding adieu to legendary Silicon Valley technologist Alan Kay. A founder of Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, Kay -- who once said, "The best way to predict the future is to invent it" -- was instrumental in the development of the windowing GUI and modern object-oriented programming. He envisioned a laptop computer long before the first ones rolled out and his Smalltalk programming language was a predecessor to Sun Microsystems' Java. Hard to believe HP's cutting him loose.' Maybe Apple will hire him."
Programming

Matrix-Style Bullet Time for Realtime Online Games 59

Posted by Zonk from the leave-it-to-the-finns dept.
gcnaddict writes "Creating a slowdown in time on one end of an online game while maintaining normal speed on another was once one of those impossibilities which should never have happened. However, Finnish researchers have successfully invented a way to replicate a bullet-time-esque scene on one end of a real time multiplayer game without affecting the play speed on the other end(s). Of course, there are some slight issues which may never be resolved, such as when a player may occasionally think they have shot an opponent in a game and is surprised when his target refuses to die..."
Programming

What's the Best Way to Handle Scripting Under XP? 167

Posted by Cliff from the automated-task-execution dept.
ChrisZermatt asks: "I've got to build a custom workflow for a customer that has a photography business. His photographers take hundreds of thousands of photos a year, and since he's recently moved entirely to digital, he wants to automate a lot of his current processes. Ideally I'd be able to plonk a recent Mac running Tiger into his shop, and use a combination of AppleScript, iView Pro, Photoshop and an FTP program to handle all his needs. Sadly, he insists on using *cheap* PC's running Windows, so a Mac isn't an option for this project. So, what should I use on the Windows side of things to build a custom workflow?"
Mozilla

New Mozilla Developer Site Goes Live 27

Posted by timothy from the developers-section-topic-mozilla dept.
bdaehlie writes "After a lot of hard work, Mozilla's new developer site has gone live. It has been available at a test URL for a while but the transition is now complete. This should be a great resource for Mozilla contributors, web developers, and anyone interested in finding out more about Mozilla technologies."
GUI

Fold 'n' Drop Window Interaction 566

Posted by timothy from the what-about-window-smashing dept.
Mints writes "Following up on recent "Desktop Innovation" stories that have left some disappointed, I thought Pierre Dragicevic's exploration of Fold 'n' Drop warranted mention. Described as "a new interaction technique for seamlessly dragging and dropping between overlapping windows", Fold 'n' Drop allows the user to interact with layered or overlapping windows in a very intuitive manner. Refreshingly, Mr. Dragicevic provides both a sample implementation, in Java, and video demos. Mr. Dragicevic is a researcher in Human-Computer Interaction at Intuilab, Toulouse."
Education

The Changing Face of Computer Science 493

Posted by Zonk from the go-to-school dept.
For another facet of CS education, HangingChad writes "MSNBC is carrying an interesting article on the changing demographics of IT workers and education. The upshot of the article is that older, working adults are taking IT related courses for advancement while comp sci continues to slide as a career choice in college, which the researchers in the article attribute to perception issues." From the article: "In fact, as the technology-dependent United States struggles to stay ahead of the Bangalores of the world, the Higher Education Institute at the University of California-Los Angeles found significantly fewer students at the college level -- 60 percent fewer -- wanted to study computer science in 2004 as opposed to the year 2000. "
Microsoft

Gates On Future of CS Education 563

Posted by Zonk from the we-need-more-women-too dept.
lilrowdy18 writes "In an interesting article from Eweek, Microsoft chairman and chief software architect Bill Gates talks about how the lack of spending in research and development is 'kind of a crime'. He also talks about future problems that are facing the computer industry including outsourcing and the speed of upcoming processors." From the article: "Microsoft taps both native-born talent and foreign talent, but Gates said he is frustrated that more U.S. students are not going into computer science. 'The fastest growing major is physical education,' he said. 'The Chinese are going to wake up and say we missed this opportunity,' he joked."
Programming

Freelance Programming Sites? 50

Posted by Cliff from the when-you-are-too-busy-to-DIY dept.
CarrotLord asks: "I have some small, fairly well-defined programming projects that I need done, but I don't have time to do them myself. So, I've been looking into sites like Get a Freelancer and ScriptLance. Does anybody have any experience of these types of sites? Specifically, I'd like to hear your recommendations and advice, as well as your experiences. My concerns include: getting very poor quality work; communication and language barriers and also losing control over the work that I've paid for -- if I'm paying for some work, I want it licensed on my own terms."
Java

Ruby on Rails and J2EE: Room for Both? 47

Posted by timothy from the floor-topping-and-dessert-wax dept.
Wayne writes "Ruby on Rails is a relatively new Web application framework built on the Ruby language. It is billed as an alternative to existing enterprise frameworks, and its goal, in a nutshell, is to make your life -- or at least the Web development aspects of it -- easier. This article will contrast the Rails framework against a typical J2EE implementation using common open source tools that are regularly found in enterprise applications."
Software

Managing for Creativity 130

Posted by Zonk from the make-life-better dept.
theodp writes "After seeing some of the ideas management comes up with as a result of reading the Harvard Business Review, you may be tempted to hide their copies. But make sure they see this month's Managing for Creativity by Dr. Jim Goodnight, the still code-cranking CEO of SAS, the world's largest privately held software company." From the article: "Many academics and businesses have made inroads into this field. Management guru Peter Drucker identified the role of knowledge workers and, long before the dot-com era, warned of the perils of trying to "bribe" them with stock options and other crude financial incentives. This view is supported by the research of Harvard Business School's Teresa Amabile and Yale University's Robert Sternberg, which shows that creative people are motivated from within and respond much better to intrinsic rewards than to extrinsic ones."
Internet Explorer

MS Urging Developers To Prep For IE 7 406

Posted by Zonk from the the-end-times-are-coming dept.
Mike Savior writes "Eweek has a story stating that Microsoft is telling web site developers to prepare their sites for IE 7. From the article: 'One area that Microsoft has clearly articulated as being one in which developers can start work now to prepare for IE 7 involves the UA (user agent) string. First discussed in the company's Weblog in April, the code change prompted a reminder on Wednesday to developers, telling them that Microsoft continues to run across Web sites that are not expecting Version 7 of the browser, and urging them to test their UA strings. '"
Databases

Distributed Versus Centralized DB? 47

Posted by Cliff from the updates-without-terrible-bottlenecks dept.
OSXCPA asks: "I am developing a framework for processing accounting information. What kinds of advice would you have for setting up an environment where several (eventually, many) remote data aggregation and processing centers would update a central server 'after hours' to avoid processing delays. For those with ERP experience, I am trying to process transactions locally, instead of generating a batch in the central server, then update and validate the result to the central server, so my remote users can process at full speed all day, and central DB can get caught up later. Remote locations are all self-contained, in that no one will be posting transactions to another remote location. No big iron - this is all networked PC/Mac hardware and a central server (eventually to be a server farm, as needed). Feedback or constructive criticism would be appreciated. Technical advice is great, but I'm also looking for stuff like 'Gee, if I had only known XXX when I set this up, I would have done YYY...'"
PHP

Community, OSL and Sun Jump to Drupal's Rescue 175

Posted by Zonk from the feel-the-love dept.
Robert Douglass writes "Drupal asked for help and received a major dose of it. Sun Microsystems has stepped up and donated a Sun Fire V20z server which will be the backbone of Drupal's new server architecture at the Open Source Lab. Furthermore, over $10,000 in donations were collected in a matter of a couple days (thanks to all the people who responded to the previous /. post!), plus thousands more in pledges from groups like Apress and CivicSpaceLabs... looks like the community loves Drupal!"
Programming

Expert Delivery Using NAnt and CruiseControl.NET 109

Posted by timothy from the we-deliver-overnight dept.
Jim Holmes writes "Marc Holmes's Expert .NET Delivery Using NAnt and CruseControl.NET is an outstanding book for development teams wanting to build a reliable, automated delivery system. The book clearly lays out the case for having a standard delivery process, then dives into specific details of implementing such a process via NAnt and CruiseControl.NET. The book also covers several other tools, both open source/freeware and commercial, including NDoc, FxCop, NUnit, Red Gate's SQL Bundle, and Eric Smith's CodeSmith code generation tool. This book, like Steve Loughran's Java Development with Ant has crucial concepts and patterns which are useful to folks even outside its target .NET audience. This is because the author is so emphatic about the criticality of process and standards, something applicable to anyone developing and delivering software." Read on for the rest of Holmes' review.
Television

NerdTV Coming in September 212

Posted by timothy from the in-time-for-school dept.
Random BedHead Ed writes "After years of development, Robert X. Cringely's NerdTV is finally on its way, and will be released September 6th. The program will feature interviews with prominent nerds, such as Bill Joy and Macintosh programmer Andy Hertzfeld. But far from being a normal television show, it will be downloadable. As Cringely explained last week in his column, BitTorrent and the expansion of broadband made this the right time for such a move. The show will be available at pbs.org/nerdtv/, where there is currently an information page. Larry Lessig points out that the show will be distributed under a Creative Commons license - the specific license is not specified, but Cringely and PBS say that noncommercial use and redistribution will be allowed."
Programming

Check Boxes and Radio Buttons Conquered by DHTML 522

Posted by CmdrTaco from the making-things-prettier dept.
Philip Howard writes "Pretty much every form element has been conquered by CSS so far, letting us create stylish, integrated forms to tie in closely with our site designs for that UI polish graphics artists love to have. Radio Buttons and Check Boxes, however, have resisted most attempts to style them consistently, accessibly and elegantly- perhaps because nobody cares enough to come up with the solution. However, these elusive form elements have finally been conquered with a simple combination of CSS and Javascript and a little HTML wrapper. The solution is easy and quick to implement, is accessible (working with tab and space) and elegantly degrades where CSS and/or XHTML is not available."
Java

Apple Freezes Java Support for Cocoa 154

Posted by timothy from the like-a-moolatte dept.
Nice2Cats writes "A little message on Apple's Developer Connection tells us that Cocoa for Java will get no new features after 10.4. The full text is: 'Features added to Cocoa in Mac OS X versions later than 10.4 will not be added to the Cocoa-Java programming interface. Therefore, you should develop Cocoa applications using Objective-C to take advantage of existing and upcoming Cocoa features.' Is this bad for Java, or bad for Apple, or bad for both, or doesn't anybody give a damn anyway?"

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