The IBM Personal Computer was introduced on August 12, 1981. The IBM Selectric typewriter debuted July 31, 1961. What a world of difference between the two devices – but both made a tremendous mark on global business and on today’s society. My introduction to the IBM Selectric came in the 1970s. Through high school and […]
When you find what you’re good at, double-down. That’s the message from Perforce, a company that’s well-known for its source-code management system, also called Perforce. The company, reaching the milestone of its 15th birthday, faced a decision: What to do next? The company had been investing in and improving its SCM software for years, but […]
When my friends and family visit restaurants, one of our favorite games is, “spot the typos on the menu.” Now, I don’t claim to be the best proofreader in the world, but spelling and grammar errors jump out at me. And while I make tons of typos in my own writing and emails, it’s because […]
Mac OS X 10.7 “Lion” began shipping on Wednesday, July 20. I use the term “shipping” advisedly – for now, the only way to get Lion is to download it from Apple’s Mac App Store for $29.99. It was a 3.7GB file, which fortunately transferred in under an hour. I feel bad for those who […]
Let’s talk about the Samsung Series 5 3G Chromebook. Google generously promised to send a Samsung Chromebook to everyone who attended its Google I/O conference a few months ago, and mine arrived this week. (So, full disclosure: I didn’t pay for the $499 device.) What’s a Chromebook? It’s a notebook that boots into a browser […]
Like many of you, I’ve been riveted by the expanding drama with News Corp.’s flagship British newspaper, News of the World. What started as an apparently straight-forward phone-hacking scandal (where journalists guessed voicemail passwords and listened to a murdered girl’s phone messages) got worse. Rapidly. We learned that the reporters from News of the World […]
It’s a short book you can read at the beach. And like being on vacation at the seashore, Robert “Uncle Bob” Martin’s newest book is quite refreshing, if a bit pricey. Bob Martin, one of the key figures behind agile software development, thinks a lot about software craftsmanship. He has spoken many times about software […]
Amazon.com. What a bunch of jerks. Amazon is frantic to maintain their (to me unfair) competitive advantage that buyers don’t have to pay sales tax in California. Because of that, Amazon’s prices are automatically cheaper than those of brick-and-mortar resellers, or online sellers that have some sort of presence in the state. Normally you might […]
Look around. Think about how your organization gets things done. Is it the most efficient process possible? Doubtful. Is there room for improvement? Always. Are some parts of the process wasteful? Almost certainly. There are many ways to improve efficiency, and many agile processes tackle the problem head-on. However, there’s always waste – in this […]
Let us spend a moment pondering the barcode. Barcodes are everywhere. Everywhere. Every time you visit a grocery store, cashiers use barcodes to ring up your purchases. That is, unless you choose the self checkout, where you scan them yourself. Airlines send barcodes to phones for paperless checking. Barcodes track warehouse inventory and adorn corporate […]
“We don’t take credit cards, sir.” What? Get with the 21st century, my friend! Yesterday I was talking on the phone with a professional services company we use occasionally at BZ Media (which publishes SD Times and News on Monday). We worked out the requirements for a straightforward project which would cost a few hundred […]
IBM’s market capitalization has surpassed Microsoft’s market cap – for the first time in 15 years. While both companies trail behind Apple, IBM has re-emerged to become the largest enterprise computing company. What does this mean? Let’s start by looking backwards. If your computing career began in the 1970s, or perhaps back in the 1960s, […]
The Mono Project has been named to the 2011 SD Times 100 as an influencer. We recognize companies, organizations and projects in the SD Times 100 for their leadership and innovation in the previous calendar year, that is, 2010. What Novell and the Mono team did last year was incredible, and they thoroughly deserve the […]
Microsoft is stodgy, but not very stodgy. But the company formerly known as Novell is super-stodgy. Salesforce.com is straddling the line. And Google is the last stodgy of them all. That’s the result of a highly nonscientific survey, conducted over the past couple of months, by yours truly. As you may recall from my February […]
Last week, my friend Adam Kolawa, founder of Parasoft, passed away suddenly. Adam, whom I’ve known for over a decade, was a young man, only 53 years old. In a brief statement, Parasoft described Adam’s legacy as In 1983, Kolawa came to the United States from Poland to obtain a Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics from […]
Novell is now part of Attachmate. Should you care? Yes. The deal closed on Wednesday, Apr. 27. “Novell, Inc., the leader in intelligent workload management, today announced that it has completed its previously announced merger, whereby Attachmate Corporation acquired Novell for $6.10 per share in cash. Novell is now a wholly owned subsidiary of The […]
A few years ago, a multi-day power failure on Long Island left our offices in the dark – including the Microsoft Exchange Server in our server closet. After that experience, and a few others involving the local electrical grid, we moved our mail system into the cloud for improved reliability. This week, a failure of […]
I was surprised to read that MKS Inc. was being purchased by PTC (a firm I’d never heard of). Most people today know MKS as a seller of enterprise application lifecycle management tools. The Waterloo, Ont.-based company’s flagship is Integrity, an ALM suite that covers requirements, modeling, coding and testing. While I’ve never used Integrity, […]
I was recently at a party – okay, the speaker’s party at iPhone/iPad DevCon last week – where it was obvious that the speakers neatly bifurcated into two groups. There were those who recognized Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells playing on the stereo, and those who didn’t. (You could also identify the Tubular Bells cognoscenti by […]
The lawsuits flying around Silicon Valley are getting ridiculous. • Microsoft is suing Barnes & Noble because Microsoft says that Android infringes Microsoft patents, and B&N’s Nook e-reader is based on Android. Thus, B&N must be forced to license Microsoft patents. • Oracle is suing Google because Oracle says that Android’s Jalvik Java Virtual Machine […]
When you’re building a website or a Web application – how big is the user’s screen going to be? That used to be an easy question to answer, but now it’s getting a lot harder. And that means a lot of extra presentation-layer work for someone on your team. When I first started building static […]
The earthquake and tsunami in Japan were horrific in scope. The subsequent challenges with the Japanese nuclear power plants has magnified the disaster. Where will it end? How many lives were lost, how many families shattered? As I write this, the world has many questions, but sadly, not many answers. Like many of you, my […]
Archeologists criticize Smithsonian over Java Objects. That headline in the New York Times’s Arts Beat section gave me pause. What type of Java objects are the historians upset about? Are Lara Croft or Indiana Jones going after some valuable POJOs or something? The story made it clear that these Java objects aren’t instantiations of members […]
Earlier this week, Apple announced the iPad 1.1, the long-awaited successor to its magical tablet. The iPad 1.1 is very similar to the original iPad (which I’ll call the “iPad 1”), except that it’s available in white. It’s a bit thinner. It’s a bit lighter. It has a dual-core processor (Apple says 2x faster), a […]
It’s great to get out of the office and go to conferences, learn new stuff and blow the cobwebs away. And it’s even better to do it with a friend. About two or three times a year, I get the opportunity to attend a professional conference or convention. I’m not talking about those events that […]
I never spent any time with towering figure behind Digital Equipment Corp., but I remember seeing Ken Olsen speak on several occasions. Sadly, the details of those talks are vague. But certainly the story of Kenneth H. Olsen, who died on Sunday, Feb. 6, at age 84, is the story of the pre-PC computer industry. […]
It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s Super-Geek! Like many techies, my self esteem is pretty high. There’s no run-of-the-mill tech problem I can’t solve. Networking? Operating systems? Application crashes? Crazy error messages? Bring ‘em on, says Alan “MacGyver” Zeichick, a veritable St. George ready to slay every virtual I.T. dragon. There’s one category of […]
On January 27, Microsoft released its latest quarterly financial reports, showing that its net income was US$6.6 billion – more than 10% above analyst estimates. Total quarterly revenue was $19.95 billion, compared to analyst estimates of $19.2 billion. This represented significant growth from the same quarter a year earlier. When listening to the financial news […]
Proprietary multimedia formats annoy me. I don’t care if it’s DOCX or SWF or WMV or H.264 or CR2. I don’t like them, and wish they’d go away. Or at least, I wish they’d stay off the public Internet. Software developers should not have to pay to be able to read or write data in […]
Winter time, Long Island, New York. Storm after storm means office closures, lost productivity, missed ship dates. Visiting SD Times’ New York office this week, I enjoyed a few decent snowfalls. That reminded me of why I moved from New England to San Francisco back in 1990… our New York office is a nice place, […]