Stories about: Creative

Computerworld is undertaking a series of investigations into the most widely-used programming languages. Previously we have spoken to Alfred v. Aho of AWK fame, S. Tucker Taft on the Ada 1995 and 2005 revisions, Microsoft about its server-side script engine ASP, Chet Ramey about his experience maintaining Bash, Bjarne Stroustrup of C++ fame, and to Charles H. Moore about the design and development of Forth. In this interview, Computerworld ventures down a less series path and chats to Don Woods about the development and uses of INTERCAL

If calculating the maximum height at which an egg won't break when dropped while sacrificing the least number of eggs sounds like a worthy challenge to a programmer, then this year's Google Code Jam may be of interest. "

It took a 19th-century English poet to convince Robin Hunicke that her future lay in computer science.

Judging from initial accounts, the next version of the Mac OS X, named Snow Leopard, will be aimed squarely at business and enterprise users, signaling a formal push by Apple to take Windows head on outside the consumer and education markets. "Apple is taking the Mac OS one step closer to the enterprise," says Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at Jupiter Research.

An update to Apple's operating system released late Monday fixed a data corruption problem that Photoshop users had reported after the company's last Mac OS X upgrade.

A French court has fined eBay US$61 million for allowing the sale of Louis Vuitton Malletier and Christian Dior Couture counterfeit goods on its Web site, the luxury goods company LVMH said Monday.

In many ways, managing a developer is just like managing any other employee. Developers want managers who'll help them solve business and technical problems, who'll protect them from unnecessary office politics and who will help them meet their personal career goals. But programmers are...different. Like musicians, these creative folks can alternate between big-picture thinking and persnickety detail in a heartbeat. They can be sidetracked by silly toys, and convinced to work overtime by the promise of pizza and a T-shirt. Trying to understand and motivate these people can drive managers-particularly nontechnical managers-to distraction.

As expected ICANN, the nonprofit group that manages the Internet domain name system, unanimously voted to begin the process of relaxing the rules for generic top-level domain names (gTLDs).

Look around at people talking on their mobile phones and, almost without exception, they are chatting on familiar-looking small rectangular boxes with glowing screens. However, this cookie-cutter approach to mobile phones will change dramatically in the next few years as phone designers get more daring and more personal.

While it's too early to tell if Bill Gates will impact philanthropy as he has the technology industry, his support of creative capitalism has the potential to change how people engage in philanthropic efforts.

As the dynamic duo steering Microsoft together for the past 28 years, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer have been a near-unstoppable team, combining Gates's technical vision and will to power with Ballmer's salesmanship and rousing, if polarizing, personality.