So what innovation and what services do you think we are going to see?

 Ask yourself, what are people going to with all their pictures in the future?
 What are they going to do? Is writing to CD-ROM really safe? Sorry -
 it's gone in a few years. Are people going to do a 3-stage offering, or
 make one of their copies in an alternative geographical location?
 Nobody does that.

 With digital you can do things better; for a really simple straight forward
 things.

 No one has designed architecture for the home. We've got Wi-Fi and broadband
 and Bluetooth but there's no way to put it all together.

 So who, then? We've seen that even with the best intentions Wintel can't do
 a good job. It has to come from the consumer electronics people;

 ...

 What would you do differently, if you had your time as CEO again?

 We wouldn't have spent time on user interfaces. We'd have left that
 much earlier. [In 2001, Symbian left the business of designing UIs to its
 licensees, with the exception of UIQ, which remains part of the company].
 Everyone was keen to share and we tried hard for two years, but it was never
 going to happen. Everything about those companies [phone OEMs] is based
 in their own UIs. So that was two years wasted.

 In hindsight we came to the right view; but we never learnt that lesson.
 There were other things people were keen for us to get into early, for
 example WAP. We could never have NOT done it, but I had a pretty good
 feeling it wasn't going to be worth it. But I wasn't the customers.®
 So it has to go back to being vertically integrated; you have to tackle
 the product offering yourself. You start doing something vertically
 because you can't work with everybody. So somebody has to break through,
 starting with a niche.

story

Skype is a good VoIP program, that also does conference calls amongst several people reasonably well. It helps me cut down my phone bill :-). skype

I saw this post, dated May 16, 2004 by terminus, a skype staff member, which made me very happy. I am sick of running windows on my laptop only to use for skye. Now I can stay in good old Penguin-land.

 Skype is now starting a closed Linux beta. We are looking for forum
 members who would be willing to actively test the Linux version and
 provide input and feedback to finalize the Linux version development.

link

bk clone bk://ftp.rubyx.org/rubyx
cd rubyx
bk co

 
mkdir /my/rubyx/dir  (or something like)
./rubyx --root /my/rubyx/dir --download base net disk (for the basics)
./rubyx --root /my/rubyx/dir --download all (for everything)

European Ruby Conference 2004. New date: October 8 and 9 in Munich

Register

Come for some Ruby-fun. Last year’s conference: www.approximity.com/cgi-bin/europeRuby/tiki.cgi/

 The Ruby Production Archive (RPA) will provide packages of Ruby
 libraries and programs in a form that allows production use, engineered
 through a stringent process resembling FreeBSD's or Debian's.

 rpa-base is a port/package manager designed to support RPA. Its scope and
 purposes are different to those of other systems like RubyGems.

 rpa-base 0.1.0 is now available on http://rpa-base.rubyforge.org .
 Please keep in mind that this is *not* a RPA release (that is, a release
 of the repository) but just a release of the rpa-base tool itself. We
 have provided several sample ports/packages for testing purposes, but
 they don't formally belong to RPA. Read below for information on the
 libs/apps packaged so far.

 rpa-base requires Ruby 1.8.1 (certainly 1.8 at least, it might work on
 1.8.0); it has been tested on several Linux distributions, FreeBSD and
 win32. We would appreciate feedback (both positive and negative) under
 those or any other architecture.

 It takes but a couple minutes to install and will allow you to do

 rpa install instiki ruvi

 ;-)
 (NOTE: ruvi, the cool pure-Ruby vim clone, won't work on win32)

 Features
 ========

 rpa-base is a port/package manager designed to support RPA's client-side
 package management. You can think of it as RPA's apt-get + dpkg. It
 features the following (working right now):

  * sane dependency management: rpa-base installs dependencies as needed,
    keeps track of reverse dependencies on uninstall, and will remove no
    longer needed dependencies
  * atomic (de)installs: operations on the local RPA installation are atomic
    transactions; the system has been designed to survive ruby crashes (OS
    crashes too on POSIX systems)
  * modular, extensible design: the 2-phase install is similar to FreeBSD and
    Debian's package creation; rpa-base packages need not be restricted
    to installing everything under a single directory ("1 package, 1 dir"
    paradigm)
  * rdoc integration: RDoc documentation for libraries is generated at install
    time (currently disabled on win32)
  * ri integration: ri data files are generated for all the libraries managed
    by RPA; you can access this information with ri-rpa (currently disabled on
    win32)
  * handling C extensions: if you have the required C toolchain, rpa-base can
    compile extensions as needed
  * unit testing: when a library is installed, its unit tests are run; the
    installation is canceled if they don't pass

(Source: whytheluckystiff) The (Poignant) Guide is a new approach to teaching Ruby, emphasizing the lingual traits of Ruby and illustrating its uniqueness with comics, visual imagery, and songs with accompanying hand gestures.

This date marks the release of the first three chapters. Feel free to tell your friends and family (a.k.a. Slashdot) about the news. With enough input and support, this book could see completion by next year. Hopefully this is a step towards explaining to the world why Ruby is such an enticing and voluptuous gem to behold.

Go and enjoy the book

Okay, I’ll keep this short. If you want to read more about my motivation, head over to the announcement on my site. motivation

LinuxTag program

You can get Rake from rubyforge. If you have rubygems installed, then all you need to do is

  gem -i rake

If you have a very recent version of rubygems (i.e. from CVS), then the gen-rdoc option finally produces a decent rendition of the Rake documentation locally.

QuickStartExample

Some very interesting ruby stuff:

• Artificial Neural Networks: Implemented a multilayer backpropagating artificial neural network using a momentum term and optionally a weight decay term.
• Borges mod_ruby Integration: I have managed to get Borges running using mod_ruby. I will produce a library ready version of that and check it in the Borges project.
• and much more
link

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