Issue #163 / Jun 2014

As I have mentioned in the past, I continue to find it amazing that the high-tech world can go through the ritual of condemning privacy violations and NSA-style government spying, and at the same time celebrate life in the consumer-cloud paradise, where all data resides on a server controlled by a corporation and privacy is mined continuously as part of the basic business model.

Light Distro Sampler This month we give you a multilingual, multidistro DVD with six light Live Linux distributions. Try one, or try them all.

Updates on Technologies, Trends, and Tools

In July of last year, Jonas Bonér and some other colleagues published the Reactive Manifesto. Soon, the term was on everyone's lips, but this seemingly new programming concept is actually much older.

In mid-March, Oracle released the eighth version of Java. In addition to small tweaks, the long-awaited release extends the core language, adding elements of functional programming – the first significant development since Java 5.

Clojure looks like Lisp and runs wherever Java is installed. Practical tools and sophisticated libraries provide the underpinnings for rapid development of modern web applications.

Static typing, type checking, and low memory usage make this easy-to-learn language a strong candidate for application development.

For the past three years, 20 developers have been working on a revamped version of the KDE libraries. The alpha release appeared in February 2014 with many new features.

Even without elaborate infrastructure, you can still push your data across the network with netrw.

The innovative NixOS makes it easy to test and deploy new configurations – on the hardware and in the cloud