Introduction

Perhaps more than any other engineering discipline (see Steve McConnell’s After The Gold Rush), software engineers work on projects that have no real chance of success. There are as many reasons why as there are projects, but if you want to be in with a chance of surviving such a ‘death march’ this could be the book for you.

Content

Edward Yourdon is a well known and well respected computer scientist, so what useful information can he give you in these circumstances? Surely you’re lumbered with the simple choice between putting up with it or resigning?

# Introduction

Everyone will be very pleased to hear that Oracle’s third attempt at producing a usable database product on Linux has largely been successful. The first two usually worked but only after much aggravation. Forget all the extras that 8.1.6 provides, you can get the thing installed with much less grief!

Of course, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that it was simple and straight-forward all the time. It is Oracle that we’re talking about here.

Introduction

Many developers would hate to have their master-work described as a mess, but not Larry Wall, creator of Perl and celebrity hacker. The way he sees it, the language is a mess because the problem domain — real life — is also a mess. He has a point.

I first came across Perl a few years ago when I was writing a program that required a certain amount of ‘screen-scraping’ from a telnet session, the ability to retrieve files using FTP, some complex processing and interaction with an Oracle database. This is a fairly messy problem, and one that Perl looked eminently able to solve.

It is now two days after Microsoft’s official release of ‘the next generation’ of their premier operating system, Windows 2000 (n?e, NT5). We’re now at a safe distance to be able to assess the impact it has had on people and the press.

The first interesting thing to note is that on Slashdot, the Internet’s favorite site for hacker-oriented hi-tech news, did not make any announcement. One argument is that Slashdot is Linux, or at least Unix, biased making Windows news irrelevant. I don’t buy that. What Microsoft is doing is important if Linux is to achieve world domination.