Programming

Effective C++, Third Edition 296

Posted by timothy from the charming dept.
nellardo writes "If you've been programming C++ for any length of time, you probably have the book, Effective C++, by Scott Meyers on your shelves. Well, this book has just hit its third edition, and it's a major re-write and re-org. Do you need this book? If you program C++, yes, you probably do, even if you have a previous edition. Don't let the "Third Edition" faze you, because it has lots of new insights into the vagaries of the C++ language. And if you're new to C++, this is pretty much a must-own book." Read on for the rest of Nellardo's review.
Programming

Why Crunch Mode Doesn't Work 90

Posted by Zonk from the chomp-crunch-chomp dept.
so sue mee writes "There's a bottom-line reason most industries gave up crunch mode over 75 years ago: It's the single most expensive way there is to get the work done. When used long-term, Crunch Mode slows development and creates more bugs when compared with 40-hour weeks. Evan Robinson has an article at the International Game Developer's Association site talking about the harsh realities of crunch time, and why the gaming industry should stop using it." From the article: "It is intuitively obvious that a worker who produces one widget per hour during an eight-hour day can produce somewhere between eight and 16 widgets during a 16-hour day. As we've seen, that's the essential logic behind Crunch Mode's otherwise inexplicable popularity. But worker productivity is largely dependent upon recent history."
OS X

Does New Development For Mac OS X Make Sense? 394

Posted by Cliff from the despite-change-development-goes-on dept.
DLWormwood wonders: "As a long time Mac developer, originally as a hobbyist and then a professional, I'm feeling pessimistic about the future of the platform now that Apple is embracing Intel and abandoning the few remaining 'Mac' technologies (like the PowerPC and OpenTransport) left to the platform. With the high likelihood that these new Macs will offer a full speed version of Virtual PC and (what I think is) the almost assurance that some clever hacker will make 'X for x86' run on commodity hardware, I'm doubting the willingness of most IT and development houses to even give the Carbon and Cocoa APIs a first glance. (If it wasn't for the poor past performance of VPC, I would not have gotten my first Mac programming job.) Can anybody with a more optimistic view think of a scenario where a modern development house will do Mac development in an age where the help desk will just say either 'switch boot to Windows/Linux' or 'run Virtual PC?'"
Hardware Hacking

PSP Hackers Go Retro 69

Posted by Zonk from the hi-mom dept.
ByteWoopy writes "Hello World!' That's the traditional phrase that programmers display when they create their first piece of software for an unfamiliar operating system. Owners of Sony's handheld PSP game system were delighted to hear May 5 that a hacker had managed to write a small program that displayed those words on a PSP. They wondered what would be next. As it turned out, it only took hackers five days to go from 'Hello World' to Mario World. On May 10, sites like PSP Hacker reported that a Japanese hacker known only by the name Mr. Mirakichi had developed a program called RIN that let the PSP play software written for the original black-and-white Nintendo Game Boy system.'"
Data Storage

Sony Beefs up FAT for Consumer Devices 56

Posted by timothy from the but-it's-all-muscle dept.
An anonymous reader points to a report at LinuxDevices which says that "Sony has created an enhanced version of the vFAT filesystem that it says works better in Linux-based consumer electronic devices with removable USB mass storage devices. Unlike vFAT, the xvFAT filesystem will not induce a kernel panic if a USB storage device is removed during a write operation, Sony says," and writes "For now, xvFAT is a patch to the Linux 2.4.20 source tree maintained by CELF, an industry group of consumer electronics giants working to improve Linux for CE devices. Sony intends to submit the filesystem for inclusion in the mainstream 2.6 Linux tree as well."
Privacy

3.9 Million Citigroup Customers' Data Lost 602

Posted by timothy from the gee-maybe-they-should-collect-less dept.
Rick Zeman writes "CNN.com is reporting that United Parcel Service has lost backup tapes containing the identies of 3.9 million Citigroup customers. According to UPS, '... a "small package" containing data storage tapes was lost while being transferred to a credit reporting bureau.' According to Citigroup, they 'included Social Security numbers, names, account history and loan information about retail customers, and former customers, in the United States.'"
Programming

Rails Day 2005 a Success! 26

Posted by Hemos from the congrast-to-all dept.
zestyalbino writes "Rails Day 2005 has finished! In total, there were 55 entries that qualified. Descriptions and downloads are on the site. For those of you that don't know, Rails Day was a contest to see what websites entrants could come up with in just 24 hours using Ruby on Rails."
Java

ApacheDS Virtual Directory Add-Ons 12

Posted by Hemos from the good-additions-to-have dept.
yinyanger writes "Safehaus team is pleased to announce the 0.9.1 release of Penrose. Penrose is an open source java-based virtual directory server based on Apache Directory server. A Virtual Directory does not store any information itself, unlike other LDAP implementations. Requests received from LDAP client applications are processed by the Virtual Directory Server and passed on to the data source hosting the desired data. Frequently this data source will be a relational database, and more often than not it will be the authoritative source of the directory information. Many thanks to all those who've helped on this release, from end users, folks who've created test cases, submitted patches and developers. You can download a new release from here or view the change log"
Internet Explorer

Plugging Internet Explorer's Leaks 480

Posted by CowboyNeal from the finger-in-the-dike dept.
jgwebber writes "If you're developing DHTML web apps, you probably already know first-hand that Internet Explorer has horrendous memory leak issues. You can't not run on IE, so you've got to find a way to plug those leaks. So I've created a tool to help you find them. So until Microsoft decides to fix its browser architecture (ha!), at least we can keep it from blowing huge amounts of memory."
Sun Microsystems

Sun Buying StorageTek for $4.1B 215

Posted by Zonk from the that's-a-lot-of-storage dept.
MarkEst1973 writes "Sun Microsystems Inc. is buying Storage Technology Corp. in a $4.1 billion cash deal, the companies announced Thursday. The acquisition answers lingering questions about what Sun would do with about $3.1 billion of balance sheet cash. StorageTek is a profitable company with $191 million in profit in '04 on $2.2bn in sales while Sun posted a loss last year (albeit a much smaller one than the year before)."
Google

Google Launches Summer of Code 376

Posted by Zonk from the better-than-the-summer-of-love dept.
chrisd writes "We're very happy to launch the Summer of Code today, and I thought Slashdot readers would be interested and might even help us spread the word (We have a flyer, even). The program is designed to give computer science, and other, students a stipend ($4500) while they learn to release and create open source software. We're working with a variety of Open Source software foundations and organizations and we hope to sign up around 200 developers. We hope the end result will be more open source developers! I'll be pleased to answer questions in the comment stream about this program. Thanks!"
Operating Systems

Porting Open Source to Minor Platforms is Harmful 709

Posted by samzenpus from the do-one-thing-at-a-time dept.
Tamerlan writes "Ulrich Drepper posted a blog entry titled "Dictatorship of Minorities". He argues that open source projects' attempts to support non-mainstream (read "non-Linux") operating systems slow down development and testing. While Ulrich may be biased (he is a RedHat employee) he has the point: if you ever read mailing list of any large open source project, you know that significant piece of traffic is about platform-specific bugs or a new release broken on some exotic platform."
Announcements

PHRACK Final 122

Posted by Hemos from the call-for-papers-and-so-much-more dept.
lbolla writes ""...a glorious era comes to an end. #63 will be _our_ last PHRACK RELEASE -- ever... Phrackstaff is pleased to bring you _our_ last ever call for papers for the final release of phrack. We are preparing for a hardcover and ezine release at a major hacker convention near you! We ask everyone to submit a paper. Great care will be taken to ensure that only the best articles make it into PHRACK FINAL.""
Programming

8th Annual ICFP Contest 72

Posted by Zonk from the push-the-button,-frank dept.
mauricec writes "Think your favorite programming language is the best one out there? Put it to the test in this year's International Conference on Functional Programming's annual Programming Contest. The contest is coming up in a little under 4 weeks! This year's competition rewards programmers who can plan ahead. As before, we'll announce a problem and give you three days to solve it. Two weeks later, we'll announce a change to the problem specification and give you one day to adapt your program to the new spec. More info on the contest and prizes is on the contest's web page."
Mozilla

Mozilla Extending Javascript? 286

Posted by Zonk from the busy-little-devs dept.
Nomad128 writes "Mozilla's Deer Park 1 Alpha RC appears to have extended the Javascript spec for the first time in quite some time. New features include Array object methods "every" (logical AND), "some" (logical OR), "map" (function mapping), and "forEach" (iteration). They also appear to have added native XML support. Will this speed up the development of AJAX applications and give Moz a leg-up over IE7?"
Programming

O'Reilly on the Virtues of Rexx 330

Posted by CowboyNeal from the langauges-that-time-forgot dept.
gaijincory writes "O'Reilly's ONLamp has written an interesting article on the history and virtues of Rexx, the first widely used scripting language concocted 25 years ago. According to the review, 'Rexx employs decimal rather than binary arithmetic' and 'You don't need to declare or predefine your variables. Rexx automatically allocates them when you first refer to them.' I'd be interested to hear about any success (or failure) implementation stories."
Windows

Nothing of .Net in Longhorn? 479

Posted by Zonk from the missing-technology dept.
turnitover writes "We've been waiting for Longhorn before we really get on the .Net train, but should we bother at all? According to Mary Jo Foley at Microsoft Watch, Longhorn won't be based on .Net at all. Foley, who's usually right on target, calls this MS's 'dirty little secret'." From the article: "We're guessing that Microsoft will maintain that nothing has changed-that no one ever promised that the .Net Framework 2.0 would be the foundation for Longhorn. But developer types we've been chatting with seem to find this update a newsworthy revelation."
The Internet

Using the Semantic Web to Enhance Search 150

Posted by Zonk from the does-whatever-a-spider-can dept.
RobMcCool writes "At Stanford KSL, we really like the Semantic Web. So we've taken many of our favorite web sites, scraped them, and put together a huge pile of RDF, which we'll let you download. We've used that RDF to create a search application, in the spirit of Google Q & A or Microsofts recently announced MSN Search extensions. Our search can answer simple factual queries like the previously discussed population of Portugal but can also answer some more complex ones. We also have a smart autocomplete system, type "tom hanks birth" slowly to see it in action (best with Firefox). We're looking for people to be a part of this search system by running their own search sites, and by putting their data on the Semantic Web. Come check it out!"
Data Storage

McVoy Strikes Back 777

Posted by Zonk from the them's-fightin-words dept.
cranos writes "Fast on the heels of his previous article claiming the kernel is at risk of Bad Things over the BitKeeper fuss, Daniel Lyons has released a new article where Larry McVoy attacks the Open Source movement as non-innovative and dependent on the kindness of corporations. The following quote says it all: 'The open source guys can scrape together enough resources to reverse engineer stuff. That's easy. It's way cheaper to reverse engineer something than to create something new. But if the world goes to 100% open source, innovation goes to zero. The open source guys hate it when I say this, but it's true.'"
Programming

VS.Net Apps Can Now Run On Linux 245

Posted by Hemos from the where-does-this-live-us dept.
MxTxL writes "EWeek is reporting here about a plugin for Visual Studio.Net, called Grasshopper, that allows web applications that once only ran on IIS to be run on Tomcat or other J2EE platforms. The Mainsoft Developer Zone has more details on how it works but basically it converts the MS Intermediate Language into Java bytecode. The developer is also a supporter of the Mono Project."

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