This situation provides much of the motivation for our architecture, ERP5, which offers several advantages for business. All ERP5 tools are open source, so are free and have openly available source code that a business can change to suit its processes. ERP5 incorporates, from scratch, advanced concepts such as object-oriented databases, a content management system, synchronization, variations, workflows, and a method to model and implement business processes. ERP5 is also a Web site where researchers can share innovation on management techniques and their implementation through software.

In 2001, two companies initiated the ERP5 project: Nexedi, a Zope service provider in France (Zope is a well-known open-source application server), and Coramy, a European apparel manufacturer. They aimed to develop a set of ERP software components for small and medium-sized companies. In addition to source code, the project also produced educational material and a clearly defined theoretical model. To fit the needs of smaller companies, they also designed ERP5 for distribution across distant sites with slow and unreliable Internet connections.

link

 GM> Are there any accepted or already practiced ways for
 GM> companies to prevent Ruby source code from being read by potential
 GM> competitors? I can vaguely imagine redefining Ruby's
 GM> "require"-type methods so they can include zipped and passworded
 GM> ".rbz" files, say. Or using exerb (except for UNIX and without the
 GM> potential license issues).

 GM> I want to use Ruby at work but this is one of those "steps to
 GM> convincing your boss to use Ruby" I need to go through.

Just look at the "eval.c" file, i think the require is defined there and then write your hook. Or write a dll/so and add embedd your rb files as large c strings there (using maybe the "wrap" tool from the Fox Toolkit) and then do rb_eval_string("my c file"). After this protect the dll with something like "armadillo" (use google to find the URL). This works perfectly for me.

Of course, the devil’s in the details: there’s inventory to manage, backorders to fulfill, outstanding invoices to collect, orders to process, bills to pay, and customers to service. The goal of business may be simple enough — but the business of running a business is anything but.

Fortunately, computers are a natural for the back office, and software to manage a business — called customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource management (ERP) software — has become a big business in itself. SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft, and Microsoft charge plenty of beans for bean counting software. For example, Microsoft’s Great Plains Software division charges $50,000 for a license, $100,000 for implementation, and $20,000 a year for maintenance.

But just as Linux has provided a free alternative to proprietary operating systems like Windows and Solaris, Compiere, this month’s "Project of the Month," provides an open source alternative to commercial CRM and ERP solutions. link

Original by Ronald Jeffries, translation by Aleksi Niemela and Dave Thomas. www.rubycentral.com/articles/pink/index.html

German English

So hats off to Nucleus Research for firing a salvo at SAP for causing customers to shell out millions on software with little more than added worker productivity in return. link

From the README:

Major features:

• Cholesky decomposition
• LU decomposition
• QR decomposition
• Schur decomposition
• Singular value decomposition
• Eigenvalues and eigenvectors of a general matrix
• Minimization by least squares
• Linear equation solving
• Stand-alone LAPACK bindings: call any LAPACK routine from directly from ruby.

Source: _why, yaml.freepan.org) YAML is extremely simple to learn. The basics are extraordinarily simple. You may even find that you have unintentionally used YAML syntax when building lists or simple file formats.

It also helps if you have experience with any agile language (such as Ruby, Python, Perl or PHP). YAML was designed to suit these languages well and borrows a few basic ideas from them.

And look at the clock before you start. Jot the time down and we'll see how fast you are. [http://yaml.freepan.org/index.cgi?YamlInFiveMinutes]

The latest version of midilib (0.8.0) can be found on the midilib Web site (midilib.rubyforge.org/). The midilib RubyForge project page is rubyforge.org/projects/midilib/.

midilib is also available as a Gem. The Gem has been uploaded to RubyForge, and should appear in remote gem listings soon.

Changes: Several bugfixes were made for the JIT compiler. A working Java-to-Smalltalk bytecode translator (which does not support networking and reflection yet) was added.

homepage download

The last 20 years of the PC have been boring. PC vendors aim at businesses, who aren’t creative in their tool-use. They’re adults: they learn a system and stick to it. We should think about children. The printing revoltuion didn’t happen in Gutenberg’s day, it happened 150 years later, long after Gutenberg was dead, when all the pople alive had grown up with the press.

A small minority of Gutenberg’s contemporaries got the printing press, but it wasn’t until they were dead that the children who grew up with the press were able to put the ideas into practice.

James Licklieder: in a couple of years, human brains and computers will be coupled. It hasn’t happened yet. Except in science, where scientists and computers are indeed thinking as no human brain has ever thought before. .. craphound.com/kayetcon2003

(Source: Avi Bryant) I came across Avi Bryant's blog. Tons of interesting stuff, especially about Seaside. http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/userblogs/avi/blogView

Mauricio Fernandez posted this to ruby-talk: AFAIK he introduced the concept of "brain power consumption" (now renamed as "stress" in his last talk) for the first time.

That was the first time (I’m aware of) somebody stated that the main goal of a programming language isn’t expressive power (possibly by being close to natural languages, as Perl) nor ease of learning or usage, but making the programmer happier (which is a weighted mix of all other criteria).

www.rubyist.net/~matz/slides/oscon2003/index.html

Video of the ll2 talk: ll2.ai.mit.edu/

Significant functionality was added:

• Credit Management & Dunning
• Improved Discount Management
• Payment-Invoice Allocation improvements (incl. Auto Match)
• Ship/Receive in multiple UOMs
• Service Level Agreements
• GL Distribution
• Prepayment Order Improvements
• Financial Report writer improvements

Technical Improvements:

• Support of Oracle 10g
• Improved Database Connection management
• Performance improvements

Significant reduction of open bugs.

matz called his talk: "How Ruby sucks".

Welcome to my little book. In it, my goal is to teach you a way to think about computation, to show you how far you can take a simple idea: that all computation consists of sending messages to objects. Object-oriented programming is no longer unusual, but taking it to the extreme - making everything an object - is still supported by only a few programming languages.

Can I justify this book in practical terms? Will reading it make you a better programmer, even if you never use "call with current continuation" or indulge in "metaclass hackery"? I think it might, but perhaps only if you’re the sort of person who would read this sort of book even if it had no practical value.

The real reason for reading this book is that the ideas in it are neat. There’s an intellectual heritage here, a history of people building idea upon idea. It’s an academic heritage, but not in the fussy sense. It’s more a joyous heritage of tinkerers, of people buttonholing their friends and saying, "You know, if I take that and think about it like this, look what I can do!"

link

The PSP chipset comprises a number of components: the CPU, a media processor, a 3D graphics engine, a security processor and a power manager. The PSP’s MIPS R4000-based CPU will run at up to 333MHz, Sony chip designer Masanobu Okabe revealed at the Hot Chips conference in Stanford University, California. Its frontside bus runs at up to 166MHz, with both frequencies controlled by processor load. It contains a vector processing engine. link

I’m still waiting for some more, so check back periodically to see updates.

 Ich habe mal ein erstes deutsches 3.7g zusammengestellt:

 http://www.iam.unibe.ch/~denker/Squeak3.7gDeutsch.zip

 Das ist einfach das letzte 3.7g Full Image + deutsche uebersetzungen.
 Die englischen Fenster habe ich geloescht, die engl. Demo-Projekte sind
 aber noch drin.

 Was wir brauchen ist

 -> Eine deutscher Willkommen-text
 -> ein paar deutsche Demo Projekte
 -> am besten ein deutsches tutorial...

 Bi den Einfuehrungs-texten sollten wir uns nicht an den englischen orientieren,
 die sind naemlich eher sinnlos, denke ich.