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Source: LinuxTracker.org

Category: Linux Live CDs Size: 82.69 MB Status: no seeders and no leecher Added: 2007-07-20 17:40:39

Source: LinuxTracker.org

Category: Freespire Size: 677.21 MB Status: no seeders and no leecher Added: 2007-07-20 15:21:07

Source: pcbsd

PC-BSD 1.4 Beta (release name: da Vinci) is now available: "After months of hard work, the PC-BSD team is pleased to make available the 1.4 BETA release. This version includes many exciting new features and software, such as: 3D desktop support via Beryl; KDE 3.5.7; FreeBSD 6.2; Xorg .

Source: puppy

Barry Kauler just announced the release of Puppy Linux 2.17: "Another wonderful new Puppy! The 'standard' release is puppy-2.17-seamonkey-fulldrivers.iso live-CD and is 82.6MB. There is one thing that stands out from reading the release notes, and that is the major advances with hardware support -- which astounds even .

Source: Linux Today

Ars Technica: "Last month, Novell decided to push the limits of developer empowerment and perform an elaborate experiment in innovation by liberating the company's entire Linux engineering team for one full week of free hacking "

Source: Linux Today

dot unplanned: "They seem to be there because some developers, instead of making a good interface, made an interface they thought would be good for users who were exactly like themselves, only total cretins "

Source: Linux Today

Editor's Note: 359 reasons why the "too many distros" argument is just plain wrong-headed.

Source: Linux Today

Boycott Novell: "Earlier this week, just less than a couple of months after their seemingly-friendly deal, Microsoft betrayed Linspire "

Source: Linux Today

ConsortiumInfo: "I'm a bit mystified by a reference to me in a post that Microsoft's Jason Matusow added to his blog yesterday "

Source: Linux Today

Mad Penguin: "For sometime there, I generally figured that once the next revision of the GPL came about, all of these deals that are being made with Microsoft will eventually be put to bed "

Source: Linux Today

Krishwords: "The problem with the tech media (conventional media and tech blogosphere) is that they are way too deep into proprietary software and hit based economic models "

Source: Linux Today

LinuxDevices: "A startup is readying an interesting new Linux-based device promising to deliver free domestic calls (in the U.S.) for life "

Source: Linux Today

The Inquirer: "There's plenty of consternation floating around the Steam forums this morning as open sauce geeks get het up over Valve's persistent refusal to port its popular Steam game-delivery client to something a little more penguin-based "

Source: Linux Today

LinuxDevices: "The 'MicroB' browser was released last night, by the Nokia-sponsored Maemo community that maintains open source software stacks for Nokia's tablets "

Source: Linux Today

Linux Journal: "Most people in the free software world know two things about Apache. The first is that its name derives from the fact that it was a 'a patchy server,' built out of patches to the earlier NCSA HTTPd Web server "

Source: Linux Today

eWeek: "When Microsoft's Windows XP went gold back in the fall of 2001, the platform was, practically speaking, the only desktop operating system game in town. But is this town now big enough for Windows and Linux ?"

Source: Linux Today

Linux.com: "Mozilla's Sunbird calendaring application lives perpetually in the shadow of its siblings Firefox and Thunderbird, garnering just a fraction of the developer effort and publicity lavished on the browser and email client "

Source: Linux Today

DesktopLinux: "It appears to be on schedule, and when it arrives in customers' hands in late August or early September it will be running a variation of Xandros Desktop Linux "

Source: Linux Today

LinuxLookup: "Red Hat today announced that SAP AG, the largest provider of business software solutions in the world, has certified the SAP NetWeaver platform on Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform "

Source: Linux Today

Phoronix: "When it comes to binary display drivers under Linux, NVIDIA is generally known as the company that's able to offer drivers that are on par with their Windows driver "

Source: Linux Today

SearchEnterpriseLinux: "In 2005, Michael Dortch, executive editor and director of IT infrastructure management strategies at the Robert Frances Group, penned a report comparing Linux application server total cost of ownership (TCO) with Microsoft's Windows and Sun Microsystems' Solaris "

Source: Linux Today

KernelTrap: "In a continued thread about how the recently merged Completely Fair Scheduler affects the nice command, Ingo Molnar offered a history of nice levels in the Linux kernel "

Source: Linux Today

developerWorks: "PHP Web applications are a cinch to start. The syntax of the PHP language is uncluttered and easy to master "

Source: Linux Today

PolishLinux: "The majority of Linux users have gotten used to keeping more than one operating system on their hard disks. Most frequently the second system is a version of Microsoft Windows "

Source: Linux Today

KernelTrap: "'I have a backlog of maybe 300 patches here which I am cheerfully ignoring while concentrating on preventing 2.6.23 from being less of a disaster than it has already been '"

Source: Linux Today

SearchEnterpriseLinux: "Everyone in the IT industry is concerned with security, especially Linux administrators. Many Linux distributions come with several services that you may not use or ever need, but they're running on your server anyways "

Source: eWEEK Linux

Microsoft's "Covenant to Customers" concerning its deal with Linux distributor Linspire raises questions. (Linux-Watch)

Source: eWEEK Linux

SAP AG has certified the SAP NetWeaver platform on RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) Advanced Platform 5.

Source: eWEEK Linux

Shortcomings Aside, Microsoft's OOXML Offers an Opportunity

Source: ONLamp.com

I’m pretty good at Perl, so I hear a lot of comments about programming language syntax. Many of them are fluff around the old argument that “I don’t like to read punctuation.” Many of them bring up the silly idea that an ideal programming language syntax should be so intuitive that people who’ve never used the language before should be able to understand programs written in the language.

That’s a ridiculous argument.

I’ve argued before that above a certain mimimal level of clarity, expressiveness, and consistency, the choice of identifiers within a system has a greater effect on maintainability than does the syntax of a language. Of course, that presumes that the people responsible for developing that system are proficient in that language. (If not, you have a bigger maintenance problem than your choice of language or coding standards.)

A large part of choosing good identifiers is having a good understanding of the problem domain. What does the system do? What should it do? I’m a decent programmer, but if you plop me in the middle of a large insurance system written in COBOL, I’m in trouble for two very good reasons. First, I don’t know COBOL. Second, I don’t know anything about insurance!

Even so, people still believe that language syntax matters, and so they bring out the tired old “intuitive to novices” argument. No matter how often people repeat it, it’s still bunk.

Why?

Syntax doesn’t matter as much as semantics.

A programming language, its libraries, and its platforms and tools are just tools for expressing a solution. That solution depends on the problem! Any correct solution must express at least some of the semantics of the problem domain. How likely is a novice to understand those, and if the novice doesn’t understand those semantics, what does his or her opinion on what the program does matter?

Even further, no language is purely syntax. Every programming language also has underlying semantics–and those are rarely obvious when reading only the language’s syntax. Filling in the gaps is a matter of extrapolation and pattern matching through a series of hopefully-educated guesses–that is, intuition.

The same thing happens in natural languages. We call some of those guesses false cognates, because certain words or constructs or parts of speech look superficially similar between languages, but they’re often very different.

Fortunately, human languages often have sufficient redundency and fuzziness that it’s still possible to communicate without too much difficulty in the face of false cognates and other errors (there’s that intuition again). Unfortunately, programming languages don’t.

Unless you know of a programming language that encodes all of its semantics completely in its syntax such that an interested but otherwise ignorant observer can explain the full behavior of a useful system within its problem domain, this is a lousy metric for judging the maintainability of a programming language.

Source: Linux DevCenter

Hi! I’m Kevin Farnham, a career software developer, and sometimes editor and writer. Most of my software development work has been on Unix/Linux platforms, but I also have significant experience on Windows (especially on the server side). My core experience is in the areas of complex scientific programing (mathematical modeling and simulation) and high volume data processing and data access. I’ve worked with multiprocessor systems, and developed multithreaded applications, for a very long time.

As you can see from the articles I’ve published on the O’Reilly Network (click the Articles tab on my O’Reilly Network profile page to see the articles list), I’ve worked with quite a few Linux distributions. My current favorite is Gentoo — because it lets me have exactly what I want to have in my system, and nothing more. I use XFCE as my desktop environment. Again, it gives me what I need, without extraneous clutter.


I’ve just started working on a new project involving Intel’s Threading Building Blocks, a C++ template library that simplifies development of multithreaded software for use on Linux, Windows, and Mac operating systems. With multicore processors quickly becoming the norm, software development is going to have to change — otherwise, applications will utilize only a small portion of the available processing power on modern PCs. I’ll be posting quite a lot about that specific topic area in my blog on the Intel Software Network Blogs site.


As for other interests: I often find myself “overly” fascinated by subjects that would appear to many to be obscure, such as how bootloaders work, the poetry of the Middle English author known as “the Pearl Poet”, the significance of quantum mechanics, algorithms, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s philosophy of Nature. Right now, in addition to my studies of Threading Building Blocks, I’m reading “Causality and Chance in Modern Physics” by David Bohm, and I’m rereading John Milton’s “Paradise Lost”. All quite good brain exercise, I think!


What’s up next for me is: OSCON! I’ll be attending next week for the first time. It will also be my first visit to Portland, Oregon. When I’m not attending tutorials or sessions, you’ll probably be able to find me hanging out at the Intel and O’Reilly booths, or somewhere nearby. Let me know if you’d like to connect.


And I’ll be sure to post here, from there.