Slashdot: Developers
Microsoft Rinses SOAP Out of SQL Server 2008 Julie188 writes "A Microsoft SQL Server 2005 fan toppled over in surprise when he got this error message from SQL Server 2008 (he was running the SQL Server 2008 Upgrade Advisor tool): 'In SQL Server 2008, SQL Server native SOAP has been deprecated and will be removed in a future SQL Server release ... Avoid use of SQL server native SOAP in new development work, and plan to modify applications that currently use it.' No more SOAP-based Web services for your SQL Server database? Native XML was only added in v.2005 and was much ballyhooed at that time." Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotDevelopers/~3/376506753/article.pl
MapReduce Goes Commercial, Integrated With SQL CurtMonash writes "MapReduce sits at the heart of Google's data processing — and Yahoo's, Facebook's and LinkedIn's as well. But it's been highly controversial, due to an apparent conflict with standard data warehousing common sense. Now two data warehouse DBMS vendors, Greenplum and Aster Data, have announced the integration of MapReduce into their SQL database managers. I think MapReduce could give a major boost to high-end analytics, specifically to applications in three areas: 1) Text tokenization, indexing, and search; 2) Creation of other kinds of data structures (e.g., graphs); and 3) Data mining and machine learning. (Data transformation may belong on that list as well.) All these areas could yield better results if there were better performance, and MapReduce offers the possibility of major processing speed-ups." Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotDevelopers/~3/375553224/article.pl
Examining Portal's Teleportation Code Gamasutra is running a story deconstructing the mechanics of Portal's teleportation programming. They present a snippet of Portal's code and a downloadable demo. They ran another article in this series earlier this year with an analysis Mario Galaxy's unique take on physics. We've discussed the development of Portal in the past. "Teleport mechanics in video games are nothing new. Puzzles from the original Gauntlet were memorable -- and more than likely, that wasn't the first game to use teleportation as a gameplay mechanic. The difference between Portal and all those that came before it is that Portal's teleportation acts as a frictionless tube between point A and point B. Physics are still hard at work inside the frictionless tube. Instead of simply repositioning an object from point A to point B, the player enters point A with full velocity and exits point B with the same speed, but moving in a new direction." Update: 8/26 at 19:37 by SS: Dan notes that the code was not directly from Portal; it was written to approximate Portal's physics. Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotDevelopers/~3/375467091/article.pl
Terror Watchlist "Crippled By Technical Flaws" I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "The database used by the government to generate lists like the No-Fly List is 'crippled by technical flaws,' according to the chairman of a House technology oversight subcommittee. And the upgrade may be worse than the original. Rep. Brad Miller (D-NC) says that 'if actually deployed, [the upgrade] will leave our country more vulnerable than the existing yet flawed system in operation today.' It seems that the current database doesn't have any easy way to do plain-text matching, forcing users to enter SQL queries. That might not sound so bad until you learn that the database contains 463 poorly indexed tables. How long until there's a terrorist named Robert'); DROP DATABASE; —?" Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotDevelopers/~3/375175258/article.pl
Software Quality In a Non-Software Company? Nicros writes "I work for a publicly traded biotech company that happens to write software that is, in fact, kind of critical for the business — without it no data would ever be read from our instruments, and no analyses would be performed on that data. The problem is that as a 'biotech' company, we are not taking software quality seriously. We have no senior management with any history of commercial software development — our C level has really no clue whatsoever what software really is, much less what is going on in software development. All of our quality processes are related to manufacturing our system (not software), so we are constantly forced into ad-hoc development since there is no real process for our development. Repeated requests to hire someone with some real commercial software development experience have gone unanswered. I have been to the CEO directly one-on-one and although he agreed this was an issue, thanked me, and said he would look into it, that was the end of it. He has bigger things to worry about. So the question: Is this just a fact of life and I need to deal the best I can? What else can I do to get some attention on software quality in the company?" Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotDevelopers/~3/375071979/article.pl
The 1-Petabyte Barrier Is Crumbling CurtMonash writes "I had been a database industry analyst for a decade before I found 1-gigabyte databases to write about. Now it is 15 years later, and the 1-petabyte barrier is crumbling. Specifically, we are about to see data warehouses — running on commercial database management systems — that contain over 1 petabyte of actual user data. For example, Greenplum is slated to have two of them within 60 days. Given how close it was a year ago, Teradata may have crossed the 1-petabyte mark by now too. And by the way, Yahoo already has a petabyte+ database running on a home-grown system. Meanwhile, the 100-terabyte mark is almost old hat. Besides the vendors already mentioned above, others with 100+ terabyte databases deployed include Netezza, DATAllegro, Dataupia, and even SAS." Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotDevelopers/~3/374240754/article.pl
Legal Group Releases Guide To GPL Compliance An anonymous reader brings news that the Software Freedom Law Center has published a guide for compliance with the GNU General Public License. The purpose of the guide is to prevent "common mistakes" the SFLC has encountered during its various GPL violation investigations. Their suggestions include close scrutiny of software acquisitions, more precise tracking of changes and updates, and avoiding "build gurus." They also provide tips for dealing with a violation. The full guide is available at the SFLC's website. Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotDevelopers/~3/372736754/article.pl
Firefox Gets Massive JavaScript Performance Boost monkeymonkey writes "Mozilla has integrated tracing optimization into SpiderMonkey, the JavaScript interpreter in Firefox. This improvement has boosted JavaScript performance by a factor of 20 to 40 in certain contexts. Ars Technica interviewed Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich (the original creator of JavaScript) and Mozilla's vice president of engineering, Mike Shaver. They say that tracing optimization will 'take JavaScript performance into the next tier' and 'get people thinking about JavaScript as a more general-purpose language.' The eventual goal is to make JavaScript run as fast as C code. Ars reports: 'Mozilla is leveraging an impressive new optimization technique to bring a big performance boost to the Firefox JavaScript engine. ...They aim to improve execution speed so that it is comparable to that of native code. This will redefine the boundaries of client-side performance and enable the development of a whole new generation of more computationally-intensive web applications.' Mozilla has also published a video that demonstrates the performance difference." An anonymous reader contributes links the blogs of Eich and Shaver, where they have some further benchmarks. Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotDevelopers/~3/372366774/article.pl
Interview Update With Bjarne Stroustrup On C++0x An anonymous reader writes "DevX interviewed Bjarne Stroustrup about C++0x, the new C++ standard that is due in 2009. Bjarne Stroustrup has classified the new features into three categories: Concurrency, Libraries and Language. The changes introduced in Concurrency makes C++ more standardized and easy to use on multi-core processors. It is good to see that some of the commonly used libraries are becoming standard (eg: unordered_maps and regex)." Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotDevelopers/~3/371052970/article.pl
Was Standardizing On JavaScript a Mistake? snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister questions the wisdom of standardizing on a single language in the wake of the ECMA Committee's decision to abandon ECMAScript 4 in favor of the much less ambitious ECMAScript 3.1, stunting the future of JavaScript. Had the work continued, McAllister argues, it could have ushered in an era of large-scale application development that would ensure the browser's ability to meet our evolving needs in the years ahead. 'The more I hear about the ongoing efforts to revise the leading Web standards, the less convinced I am that we're approaching Web-based applications the right way,' McAllister writes. 'If anything, the more we talk about building large-scale Web applications, the more we should recognize that a single style of programming will never suit every job.' McAllister's simple truth: JavaScript will never be good for everything — especially as the Web continues to evolve beyond its original vision. His solution? 'Rather than shoehorning more and more functionality into the browser itself, maybe it's time we separated the UI from the underlying client-side logic. Let the browser handle the View. Let the Controller exist somewhere else, independent of the presentation layer.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotDevelopers/~3/371018807/article.pl
Bridging the Gap Between Art and Code In Games Gamasutra posted an article written by Jason Hayes, a developer for Volition Inc., which is known for its production of the Saint's Row, FreeSpace, and Red Faction series. Hayes discusses the division between graphical artists and coders, who often clash because their aims are so disparate and their areas of expertise do not necessarily overlap. It has caused some companies, such as Volition, to develop an intermediary "technical artist" to find a balance between the two. "Integrating technical artists into a studio frees up the programmers from being solely responsible for the development and maintenance of the game's tools and pipelines. While programmers still have a hand in the design (and sometimes implementation) of those tools and pipelines, the technical artist is the driving force behind them and is looking out for the best interests of both parties." Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotDevelopers/~3/370266385/article.pl
My Job Went To India Josh Skillings writes "The author, Chad Fowler, draws upon his experiences as a software engineer, a team leader over a group of Indian developers, and as a jazz musician, to describe 52 ways or tips that will help you to become a more valuable employee. These tips are described in two or three pages each, and are usually illustrated by a practical example or story. The tips are well thought-out, well-explained and make sense. Chad draws upon the open source movement as well, highlighting ways that contributing to and learning from open source can improve your career. These tips gave me greater respect and appreciation for the open source movement in general." Read on for the rest of Josh's review. Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotDevelopers/~3/370102764/article.pl
Why Corporates Hate Perl Anti-Globalism recommends a posting up at O'Reilly's ONLamp on reasons that some companies are turning away from Perl. "[In one company] [m]anagement have started to refer to Perl-based systems as 'legacy' and to generally disparage it. This attitude has seeped through to non-technical business users who have started to worry if developers mention a system that is written in Perl. Business users, of course, don't want nasty old, broken Perl code. They want the shiny new technologies. I don't deny at all that this company (like many others) has a large amount of badly written and hard-to-maintain Perl code. But I maintain that this isn't directly due to the code being written in Perl. Its because the Perl code has developed piecemeal over the last ten or so years in an environment where there was no design authority.. Many of these systems date back to this company's first steps onto the Internet and were made by separate departments who had no interaction with each other. Its not really a surprise that the systems don't interact well and a lot of the code is hard to maintain." Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotDevelopers/~3/369786101/article.pl
An Intro To OpenSim, the Apache of Virtual Worlds ajohnj1 writes with an excerpt from Ostatic: "You've probably read a bit about OpenSim, the BSD-licensed virtual world server, and recent news that IBM and Linden Lab are working to make Second Life and Open Sim interoperable. Besides that project, what's Open Sim about, who's working on it, what are they doing with it, and how do you get involved as a developer and participant? Here's a starter's guide." Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotDevelopers/~3/369030778/article.pl
OLPC Physics Game Jam For an XO Brian Jordan writes "For 48 hours during the weekend of August 29-31 at the OLPC Physics Game Jam Boston, game developers will compete in teams of 2-4 to design and implement a physics-based game for the One Laptop per Child XO laptop. There are prize categories for indie, professional, and remote developers (Ludum Dare style). In addition to OLPC/Jam-related swag for all participants, one team will win an XO laptop. Participants should have some game development experience, but we'll be going over the development process during the event — read below for details. If you'll be in the Boston area this weekend, or want to participate remotely, sign up before August 22. If you're a graphic artist, sound designer, musician in the Boston area, or want to be a volunteer, get in touch." Click the magic link for details of the crash course in game programming being offered. Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotDevelopers/~3/368680558/article.pl

 

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