Browser is gaining in popularity, but not necessarily at the office.

Browser is gaining in popularity, but not necessarily at the office.

Developing a large and complex program means combining many ideas, often hundreds or thousands of them. In a country that allows software patents, chances are that some substantial fraction of the ideas in your program will be patented already by various companies.

Perhaps hundreds of patents will cover parts of your program. A study in 2004 found almost 300 U.S. patents that covered various parts of a

single important program. It is so much work to do such a study that only one has been done.

Shell scripts are a popular choice for writing small

programs that do file manipulation. They are generally portable across platforms, but there are a number of things that can make a shell script work fine on one machine and fail on another. This article reviews some of the issues shell programmers may run into when trying to write widely portable scripts.

Sun Microsystems Inc is open to relinquishing

stewardship of Java to a neutral third party, but is

apparently against releasing the language to open

source under GPL.

Sun Microsystems Inc is open to relinquishing

stewardship of Java to a neutral third party, but is

apparently against releasing the language to open

source under GPL.

Given all the excitement around open-source databases, now is a good time to take a look at which of the two most popular options—MySQL and PostgreSQL—is a "better" choice. Of course, there's no quicker way to get third-degree burns from a flame war than to imply that one database is "best." Each has their own set of devotees, and both groups are vocal and devoted, and both can give ample reasons why their choice is the right choice.

Given all the excitement around open-source databases, now is a good time to take a look at which of the two most popular options—MySQL and PostgreSQL—is a "better" choice. Of course, there's no quicker way to get third-degree burns from a flame war than to imply that one database is "best." Each has their own set of devotees, and both groups are vocal and devoted, and both can give ample reasons why their choice is the right choice.

Despite the popularity of open-source software, chances are you don't know how widely this software has penetrated your company—and you likely aren't aware of the substantial risks involved.

I started work a few weeks ago at a Anglican Church's community centre, in one of Christchurch's poorer suburbs. I am to be the tutor for a class of adult learners and techie for the community centre.

They have five computers, three running Windows 95 and two running Windows 98. It's all kosher, since they got them from a computer recycler I know, which has a charity license setup with Microsoft.