Computing
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Introduction
Most of us involved
in this web site are involved in the computer industry. Fed up
with hearing from too many opinionated people who are often wrong,
we'll try our hand at being opinionated :)
Open Source
We're fans of
the open source approach to software. A common misconception is
that you can't make any money, or even that it takes away our ability
to make money. Not so!
Some of us use
open source tools in every day of our professional existance.
Myself, I use Linux at work and at home. Numerous open
source tools are God-sends, such as the wonderful GCC compiler, the Red Hat distribution, and the
amusing Emacs :)
That's not to
say that open source stuff is for everyone. There are some commercial
applications which are still the best in their fields, examples include
Excel (yes, a Microsoft product!), X-Plane (flight simulator),
and Photoshop (no, Gimp isn't that good yet).
OpenOffice is certainly
improving in leaps and bounds, but still has some way to go.
Numerous big players in the computing industry are realising the worth
of Open Source. Apple is basing their new OSX platform on BSD,
and although the whole system isn't open source, they have open sourced
numerous components, and they are both using and contributing to open
source tools. IBM are putting serious money into open source,
right across their product range. And SCO are realising the value
of Open Source, although they're going about it quite a different way :)
Software
Engineering
Cross-platform
development is an interesting area. Usually for various Unix
flavours, Windows, and OSX. As such this page is slanted towards
that mindset. Cross-platform development and hence portability
helps improve the quality of the software in question. Each
different platform, compiler, and runtime library has its own quirks.
When done right, the difference between these items helps make
your software more robust. However when done poorly, your
software ends up as an unscalable mess of conditional compilation.
(More stuff to
come in this section)
Languages
(To come soon;
discussion of application development languages (C++, Java, Ruby, et
al), scripting languages (Perl, Python, Ruby, et al)
Operating Systems
(To come soon;
discussion about aspects of the Windows variants, Unix variants, OSX,
and CP/M)
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