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Accounting systems: a rant and a quest

Posted May 8, 2012 20:59 UTC (Tue) by djc (subscriber, #56880)
Parent article: Accounting systems: a rant and a quest

The SFLC seems to use something called ledger. Perhaps it's interesting? Here's something I dug out of Google...

http://www.softwarefreedom.org/blog/2011/sep/07/accountin...

Apache OpenOffice 3.4 released

Posted May 8, 2012 20:56 UTC (Tue) by lkundrak (subscriber, #43452)
In reply to: Apache OpenOffice 3.4 released by pbournho
Parent article: Apache OpenOffice 3.4 released

What makes you believe they have enough manpower to keep things going?

I'm not very confident. They did not even bother branding the product package properly (README refers to "OpenOffice.org", so does the window title and even a button in the help menu that pops up an "Apache OpenOffice" about box) and their web site now looks hacked together by someone not particularly literate in the area and ridiculously inconsistent:

http://www.openoffice.org/why/
http://www.openoffice.org/product/index.html

Also, I thought OS/2 was done by a well known and organized consortia too...

Coroutines

Posted May 8, 2012 20:54 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
In reply to: Coroutines by fuhchee
Parent article: nPth - The new GNU portable threads library

Not a lot of applications require massively parallel computations.

In niche areas Erlang (built on message passing) is quite popular.

Accounting systems: a rant and a quest

Posted May 8, 2012 20:47 UTC (Tue) by cantsin_ (guest, #74889)
Parent article: Accounting systems: a rant and a quest

I run a small business also. We pretty much settled on Quickbooks as the only viable accounting software, and it's such a pain, since it requires me to maintain a virtual Windows environment just to do our bookkeeping. (Windows isn't installed on any other box we have.)

I really, *really* would like to learn about open source small-business accounting tools out there too. Like the article alludes to, there's a lot of activity on the personal finance software side but seemingly little on the small-business front. I do have to say, though, I'm somewhat relieved that I'm not the only one with this problem...

And at the same time, I'm not really surprised with the dearth of good open source accounting solutions. Quickbooks is the 800lb gorilla -- I don't think any of our small-to-medium sized clients use anything else. It's "good enough" for virtually all cases, so Intuit has a huge moat around that particular business.

Accounting systems: a rant and a quest

Posted May 8, 2012 20:37 UTC (Tue) by bernat (subscriber, #51658)
Parent article: Accounting systems: a rant and a quest

GNUcash has official Python bindings. Shouldn't be a good way to interface with the web site ?

Nichols, Jacobson: Controlling Queue Delay

Posted May 8, 2012 20:35 UTC (Tue) by zlynx (guest, #2285)
Parent article: Nichols, Jacobson: Controlling Queue Delay

I keep meaning to install CertWrt on my wifi router, but never quite get around to it. Perhaps the desire to try this will do it.

Coroutines

Posted May 8, 2012 20:31 UTC (Tue) by wahern (subscriber, #37304)
In reply to: Coroutines by valyala
Parent article: nPth - The new GNU portable threads library

The problem with using getcontext/setcontext is that those APIs are no longer maintained, and mixing them with pthreads causes trouble. For example, on some systems thread-local-storage breaks when code trying to access a TLS object is run on a stack created with makecontext. I ran into this issue just the other day when I linked in libffi, which pulled in pthreads. (Odd, I know; but even libffi is using pthreads these days; to make its closure framework thread-safe, I believe.)

I've been writing event-oriented and thread-oriented C apps for over 13 years. Using makecontext was useful then, but not so much today.

Coroutines

Posted May 8, 2012 20:18 UTC (Tue) by wahern (subscriber, #37304)
In reply to: Coroutines by juliank
Parent article: nPth - The new GNU portable threads library

The design behind Plan 9 predates both Alef and the threading library. Lots of fruitful things were developed on Plan 9, and some folded back into the low-level systems. libtask was developed for Alef and only made available to run-of-the-mill C application later. According to Wikipedia, Plan 9 began in the mid '80s, and libtask was folded into the mix in 2000, two years before the project officially ended.

Limbo succeeded Alef, and Go seems to have succeeded Limbo. But I'll admit this is all just largely opinion.

But more to the point, Plan 9 never touted intraprocess message passing. If you read any of the papers, when they talked about parallelism they spoke about their rfork() system call (which may have inspired Linux' clone syscall; OpenBSD's rfork is clearly derivative of Plan 9). Alef, and later Limbo, was where all the experimentation into messaging passing went, and I think my comparison to Awk v. Unix is apt. To see where I'm coming from, just read their own description and emphasis: http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/9.html

Coroutines

Posted May 8, 2012 20:11 UTC (Tue) by valyala (guest, #41196)
In reply to: Coroutines by geertj
Parent article: nPth - The new GNU portable threads library

Greenlet API looks too complex comparing to my own 'cross-platform' user-space threads' library - http://code.google.com/p/fiber-framework/ . It tries hiding cooperative multitasking complexities under easy-to-use API.

Coroutines

Posted May 8, 2012 19:37 UTC (Tue) by juliank (guest, #45896)
In reply to: Coroutines by wahern
Parent article: nPth - The new GNU portable threads library

I'd say that Go is actually closer to Alef then Limbo. And it really is Plan 9 derived in some way. Not only the languages such as Alef, and later Limbo, but there's also a C library called libtask that implements the channel/thread mechanism (using user threads, Plan 9 doesn't seem to do kernel threads).

Google guilty of infringement in Oracle trial; future legal headaches loom(ars technica)

Posted May 8, 2012 19:35 UTC (Tue) by smoogen (subscriber, #97)
In reply to: Google guilty of infringement in Oracle trial; future legal headaches loom(ars technica) by mikov
Parent article: Google guilty of infringement in Oracle trial; future legal headaches loom (ars technica)

In some cases it is. To form an informed opinion on this, one needs to know if Federal law, the 9th Circuit or the specific district rules asks for or requires a judge to put forth such questions. Without knowing that your original question is not informed opinion but what we would want the world to be like.

Apache OpenOffice 3.4 released

Posted May 8, 2012 19:26 UTC (Tue) by pbournho (guest, #1822)
Parent article: Apache OpenOffice 3.4 released

Congratulations!
As a faithful Openoffice user, I tried briefly libreoffice, but I will switch back to Apache OpenOffice right now, as I have a long term confidence in software based on well known and organized consortia.

Coroutines

Posted May 8, 2012 19:19 UTC (Tue) by robert_s (subscriber, #42402)
In reply to: Coroutines by geertj
Parent article: nPth - The new GNU portable threads library

You clearly didn't get enough of cooperative multitasking the first time around.

Fragmentation on the Linux Desktop (Is it Normal?) (Datamation)

Posted May 8, 2012 19:18 UTC (Tue) by hummassa (subscriber, #307)
Parent article: Fragmentation on the Linux Desktop (Is it Normal?) (Datamation)

It is my opinion, based on 25+ years experience on the programming field, that fragmentation is both inevitable and Good. Without fragmentation, we would be stuck with the implications of monoculture, wrt security and hindering of inovation.

Programmers push for monoculture, but thankfully each one wants their own culture to prevail. :-D

Coroutines

Posted May 8, 2012 19:07 UTC (Tue) by wahern (subscriber, #37304)
In reply to: Coroutines by juliank
Parent article: nPth - The new GNU portable threads library

Go is based on Limbo, not Plan 9. It's like the difference between Awk and Unix. I mention it because Plan 9 was influential is so many other ways. The recent C11 standard has many features which originated (I believe) with Plan 9's C extensions. UTF-8 was first used in Plan 9. Modern /proc, I believe, is descended from Plan 9. And nothing about Plan 9 dictates or even strongly suggests a message-based multi-threaded language design.

Coroutines

Posted May 8, 2012 19:03 UTC (Tue) by endecotp (guest, #36428)
In reply to: Coroutines by juliank
Parent article: nPth - The new GNU portable threads library

> Threads don't need locking if you only use message
> passing between threads

How do you implement your message passing? Most likely it needs some form of locking internally.

I would express it this way: don't try to implement your multi-threaded application using ad-hoc locking / synchronisation. Instead put all of the locking into some concurrency building blocks and restrict your inter-thread communication to only those building blocks. Message passing is one possible set of building blocks, but there are others.

Google guilty of infringement in Oracle trial; future legal headaches loom(ars technica)

Posted May 8, 2012 18:54 UTC (Tue) by wahern (subscriber, #37304)
In reply to: Google guilty of infringement in Oracle trial; future legal headaches loom(ars technica) by wahern
Parent article: Google guilty of infringement in Oracle trial; future legal headaches loom (ars technica)

I meant the _right_ to a jury trial is required. The right is waivable at the discretion of the defendant.

Google guilty of infringement in Oracle trial; future legal headaches loom(ars technica)

Posted May 8, 2012 18:53 UTC (Tue) by wahern (subscriber, #37304)
In reply to: Google guilty of infringement in Oracle trial; future legal headaches loom(ars technica) by SEMW
Parent article: Google guilty of infringement in Oracle trial; future legal headaches loom (ars technica)

A jury is required in this case because of the 7th Amendment to the United States Constitution:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seventh_Amendment_to_the_Uni...

This makes the United States the last country, I believe, to keep juries for civil cases, and extremely difficult to change. Most of the individual states still have juries for civil cases, too, even though this is usually not required by the state's constitution.

Coroutines

Posted May 8, 2012 18:50 UTC (Tue) by juliank (guest, #45896)
In reply to: Coroutines by fuhchee
Parent article: nPth - The new GNU portable threads library

Not yet, but work is happening, for example in Go (Go actually uses a hybrid co-routine/thread architecture, but this does not matter); and other stuff continuing those Plan 9 concepts.

Google guilty of infringement in Oracle trial; future legal headaches loom(ars technica)

Posted May 8, 2012 18:47 UTC (Tue) by wahern (subscriber, #37304)
In reply to: Google guilty of infringement in Oracle trial; future legal headaches loom(ars technica) by tseaver
Parent article: Google guilty of infringement in Oracle trial; future legal headaches loom (ars technica)

The jury doesn't decide what constitutes Fair Use. The judge describes the legal elements of Fair Use, and how they apply in the case. It's the jury's task to decide whether the facts fit the elements, including whether they believe the facts as presented by Google.

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