With a show of hands, French lawmakers approved a new copyright law on Friday, in a move that could have profound consequences for online music stores, open-source programmers, desktop Linux users and peer-to-peer file sharers.
The Programmers Guild is filing a stack of complaints with the U.S. Department of Justice against some 300 IT employers it says are discriminating against U.S. citizens and permanent residents by placing advertisements that specifically seek "H-1B only" visa holders or workers who have student or L-1 visas.
PayPal will open an applications store this year where developers can offer their wares, the latest step in the company's multi-pronged strategy to deepen its relationship with external programmers.
When I started college at Bowling Green State University in the fall of 1978, I was among a large group of women majoring in computer science. Although today there are far fewer women nationwide who choose that field, at the time, about 40% to 50% of the students in my class were female. The women's movement was alive and well, and the demand for computer programmers was so high that employers didn't care what gender you were. The year I graduated, computer science programs nationwide reported record numbe
Over the last few years, Microsoft has aggressively sought to change the image that its products have poor security. The company says Windows Vista, which has been released to manufacturing, will be its most secure operating system, representing a top-down change in how its programmers develop code with security in mind.
As high-performance computing (HPC) becomes more important in helping financial services companies deal with a rising tsunami of data, there's growing angst on Wall Street about a dearth of skilled programmers who can write for multicore chip architectures and parallel computing systems.
The General Public License, or GPL, is a novel thing. It was created by open source pioneer Richard Stallman, who also developed GNU, the open-source tools and apps that turn a Linux kernel into a Linux operating system. The GPL is intended to ensure that independent programmers and companies uphold the spirit of free software. "Free as in speech, not beer," is Stallman's oft-quoted motto regarding free software.
Microsoft Corp.'s long hold on power in the software industry has depended on its solid grip on developers. Programmers have written uncountable desktop and client/server applications over the decades that have inextricably linked independent software developers and corporate IT shops to Microsoft. Now the company aims to do the same for cloud-based software by luring loyal programmers to its Windows Azure environment.
Open source icon Stormy Peters recently joined us for a live Network World chat. Peters is co-founder of the non-profit GNOME Foundation and director of community and partner programs for OpenLogic. Peters discussed why enterprises don't know how much open source software they use, how newbies and non-programmers can become involved in the movement and why she thinks open source software is more secure than proprietary code.
A deep dive into crowdsourced salary data from more than half a million employees shows that the gender pay gap is very real, and that male computer programmers make far more than their female counterparts.
Microsoft just spent $150 million to trumpet its new Office System 2003. But before you spend as much as $500 to buy it, consider that few of the suite’s improvements are geared to small businesses. XML support benefits only firms with experienced programmers integrating server back-end processes to client applications. Improvements to the Outlook e-mail client are numerous, but only raise it to the level of Eudora and Netscape clients. The most interesting new product, a free-form text processor called
Despite its complexity, the software development process has gotten better over the years. "Mature" programmers remember how many things required manual intervention and hand-tuning back in the day. Today's software development tools automatically perform complex functions that programmers once had to write explicitly. And most developers are glad of it!
Coding is no longer just for programmers and geeks -- it's a great skill for almost anyone at work. Here are five great places online to learn coding for free, or to upgrade your skills if you already code.
AbstractThe singleton is a recurring pattern used by programmers. The singleton pattern is easy to understand but has subtle implementation problems in C++. This article discusses those problems. The
Amazon Web Services has long offered an SDK to make it easier to access its web services from Java. Now it has another lure for Java programmers: James Gosling, the father of Java.
You would think a seriously complex discipline like programming would also require formal training, but a new survey from Stack Overflow, which surveyed 50,000 programmers, found that very few have a lot of formal training.
Sound advice against the use of bad passwords has been around for decades. Yet I still find people electing to use passwords like pa55w0rd and login123 as if they'd never heard about password cracking programs. Even technical professionals -- programmers, help desk techs and systems administrators -- sometimes assign really weak passwords to their own and other important accounts. It's become painfully obvious to me that telling people to use good passwords isn't enough. We need to clearly define what a go
An amusing analysis of employee dissatisfaction as it applies to mainframe programmers and what can be done about it. The next Jurassic Park movie and George Clooney are included as entertaining analogies.