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Public Council Teleconference: Application Rationalization — Hidden Costs and Smart Decisions
November 17 at 11:00 am US/Eastern (GMT-5)
Join Honorio Padrón, of The Hackett Group, who will share the drivers for companies to tackle application rationalization and the results of research that define the hidden cost of complexity. Additionally, we will discuss key decision milestones—to start or not, holding the course steady and fulfilling expectations.
Virtual Desktop Cost-Benefit Analysis — Michael Jacobs, Catlin Group
The analysis contained in this presentation measures the cost of everything from the machines and licenses to the infrastructure for virtual vs. traditional desktop environments.
Honor your best senior team members - Apply for the CIO Ones to Watch Award
Get well-earned public recognition for your top up-and-coming team members, your IT organization and your enterprise. Award winners will be announced, publicized and feted in May 2010, great timing to help attract new IT recruits to your company.
Learn more about the CIO Executive Council »November 25, 2007 — InfoWorld —
Developers of the Python programming language are working concurrently on two upgrades to the core platform, both to arrive in 2008, representatives of Python said Wednesday.
The first due out, Python 2.6, will serve as a transitional release ahead of Python 3.0, which features basic changes but does have some incompatibilities with the 2.x line, said David Goodger, a director of the Python Software Foundation, which manages IP rights to the language and promotes it. Version 3.0 also is known by the codename Python 3000.
Popular for Web development but not limited to it, the language has benefits like taking care of tasks like memory management and declaration of variables so developers do not have to, Goodger said. "It fits programmers' brains a lot better than other languages," he said.
With version 2.6, users will be able to determine if there are any incompatibilities between Python 3.0 and their programs. A tool will be offered to ease the conversion to the 3.0 platform.
Version 3.0 will feature internationalization via Unicode support and will make such alterations as changing its print statement into a function so that developers can use the word "print" in their programs. Also, it will feature a new I/O library to make for better compatibility across different operating systems.
"Over the years since Python was originally released in 1991, it's come to many people's realizations that there are some problems with the original design," Goodger said. "We're taking this opportunity to fix those problems and round off the edges."
A beta release of version 2.6 is due around February with the general release set for March or April. Currently in an alpha stage, PHP 3.0 goes to beta during the timeframe of the PyCon conference for Python developers in March with the final release set for next August.
"Some minor changes might have to be made to 2.x code to make it compatible with the tool that converts it to version 3, so this tool we're providing will allow people to upgrade their code base without a lot of manual work," Goodger said.
Those in charge of the base Python platform also may continue developing the 2.x line of the language, but these would not include some of the optimizations featured in Python 3.0, said Goodger.
Goodger noted that while the core distribution of Python is maintained by the foundation, there are multiple versions of Python with organizations able to take it and add their own third-party packages. IronPython serves as an implementation of the Python language for Microsoft's .Net language, for example. Jython is a version for Java.