Larry Page is taking over the command chair of the Starship Google. He replaces Eric Schmidt in the CEO role, who was brought in a decade ago to provide adult supervision, and who moves into an advisory position as executive chairman. Before he joined Google, Schmidt was already a legend in the computer industry. He […]
Look at all the wonderful new toys announced last week at the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Tablet computers and lots of things running Android. Internet-connected televisions that have browsers and apps, such as Samsung’s Smart TV. A new app-store model for OS X, that is, Apple’s Macintosh notebook and desktop computers. Lots […]
What a year that just past in 2010 – and what a year we can look forward to. Can you believe that the iPad only came out last year? That Oracle hasn’t always owned Sun and Java? That Microsoft used to be a powerhouse in consumer technologies? That Google used to be a search engine, […]
I’m having an identity crisis. Please feel free to join me. When I wake up my laptop, it asks for a username and password. The right answer provides access not only to the machine and its locally stored applications and data, but also my keychain of stored website passwords. The same is true with my […]
Some software developers manage without 1,3,7-trimethyl-1H-purine-2,6(3H,7H)-dione. I have no idea how they do it. Haven’t they read the requirements document, which clearly states that all IT professionals must consistently consume massive quantities of caffeine at all times? How can you be agile without coffee? My apologies, but tea, hot chocolate, Diet Coke and Mr Pibb […]
Microsoft has many, many enemies. Microsoft is threatened on the Internet front by Google, on smartphones by Apple, on developer tools by IBM Rational, on databases by Oracle, and on game platforms by Sony and Nintendo. Yet the earliest Undesirable No.1 was Novell. Since the early 1980s, NetWare platform defined small-business local area networks. The […]
What a day I’ve chosen to write this Take – it’s late afternoon on Thursday, Aug. 26, and today the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed below 10,000 again. Coincidentally, we’ve been sweltering here in the San Francisco Bay Area with a unusual heat wave (bring me lemonade, stat!), and I’ve been trying to help a […]
Like many of my friends and colleagues, I’ve got two smartphones. One of them is an Apple iPhone 4. Oooh. The other is an HTC EVO running Android. Aaah. Both of those smartphones are great to use (though it’s sometimes disconcerting when switching between them). Each is stuffed full of different native functionality and third-party […]
SD Times is changing to a monthly publishing schedule, and is being redesigned into a standard magazine size. When we launched SD Times in February 2000, it was as the first-ever newspaper of record for the software development industry. Being a newspaper meant that we needed to publish often; we determined that twice a month […]
I don’t know a single software developer who doesn’t process a commitment to quality – and who believes anything except that he or she designs, writes and publishes solid, secure applications filled with clean, efficient code.I don’t know a single development team manager who won’t insist that his/her team writes great software – and who […]
An alarming message came in today from a cousin’s email address — and freaked out some members of my extended family. However, it’s a total scam. Someone hacked in my cousin’s email address (either by guessing her password or by phishing for it) and sent out these messages. One worried family member actually went to […]
It’s amazing to believe the laser has only been around for about 50 years. So much depends on lasers, from the read/write heads in our optical drives (think CDs and DVDs) to laser printers to laser pointers to laser eye surgery to lasers driving optical fiber networks to laser mice for our laptops. Last week, […]
Apple makes really cool, really sexy notebook computers. Last week, the company unveiled two models of its ultra-lightweight MacBook Air – one weighing a featherweight 2.3 pounds, the other a mere 2.9 pounds. The emotional right side of my brain is demanding, “Buy one! Buy one now!” while the analytical left side is screaming, “Shut […]
We’re long past the simplify and naivety of Java’s “write once, run anywhere,” and of a vision for a universal programming language. Java was always about business. The Java Community Process wasn’t never forum for interested parties to develop the ideal programming language and an ideal runtime. It was a place for competitors and partners […]
One hundred million issues of SD Times! That’s one heck of a milestone. For many developers and IT professionals, it’s easy to forget the low-level underpinnings of today’s computers. A personal computer isn’t a computation device. It’s a communicator, office productivity tool, entertainment center and shopping aid. What we see—whether we’re browsing with Firefox, coding […]
Last week was incredible. We held our debut iPhone/iPad DevCon last week in beautiful La Jolla, a village in San Diego. So, please forgive me if I’m on a bit of a mobile high. (As I write this, it’s Friday, and I’m both working my way through several days’ accumulated email and trying to get […]
The first ZTrek post was on Sept. 22, 2006. The 500th was on May 9, 2008. In that post, entitled “Opus 500,” I calculated that post #1000 would be on Dec. 25, 2009. Whoops. The pace has slowed for several reasons. 1. I’m so busy! 2. Because I share many thoughts that would have been […]
OOW + OD + J1 = Big. Wow. This week was the Oracle triple play – Oracle OpenWorld, Oracle Develop and JavaOne. This is the first year, of course, that Java is owned by Oracle, and therefore, it’s the first year that JavaOne is an Oracle production instead of an event thrown by Sun Microsystems. […]
My head is full of mobility – and that’s a good thing. But sometimes juggling all the technology can be a bit overwhelming. In one pocket, you’ll often find a new Apple iPhone 4, newly upgraded to iOS 4.1. In another pocket, an HTC Evo 4G handset runs the Android 2.2 operating system. A Kindle […]
Yesterday afternoon, I walked through the neighborhood devastated by last week’s gas-main explosion in San Bruno. (It’s close to my house.) The governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, coincidentally was there doing a press conference. You can see my photos here: http://tinyurl.com/32gen3y
It’s scary watching water-tankers flying over your house… and dropping their loads only a couple of blocks away onto a towering ball of flame that we could see – and feel. My home is less than a mile from the gas-line explosion that happened in San Bruno, Calif., on Thursday afternoon, Sept. 10. San Bruno […]
It’s late afternoon on Thursday, Aug. 26, and today the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed below 10,000 again. Coincidentally, we’ve been sweltering here in the San Francisco Bay Area with a unusual heat wave (bring me lemonade, stat!), and I’ve been trying to help a young man find a software engineering job. The young man […]
It seems as if all the major IT companies are going bonkers. What’s going on? Is there something in the water? Think about all the odd behavior that we’ve seen lately. Is there a pattern? To mention just a few, in alphabetical order: Apple – The master of marketing screwed up. Yes, there is a […]
The Android platform is gaining market share and mindshare with amazing speed. While it’s clearly trailing iPhone’s large head start, in terms of installed base and number of independent applications, Android is sprinting to make up the gap. Why is Android moving so fast? From the consumer side, it’s about choice. If you buy an […]
We talk so much about agile processes, which are clearly well-suited to small and mid-sized projects. But what about scaling agile for big projects? This is a topic that’s often debated, but in my opinion at least, hasn’t been completely settled. By big projects, I don’t mean the workload of the deployed application (i.e., lots […]
I’m a mainframe guy. Cut my teeth writing COBOL, PL/I and FORTRAN on the IBM System/370. CICS is my friend. Was playing with virtual machines long, long before there was anything called “DOS” or Windows” or Linux.” My office closet is filled with punch cards and old nine-track tapes, all probably unreadable today. One of […]
What will software development be like in the year 2020? It would be easy to draw a straight line from ten years ago through today, and see where it goes a decade from now. Ten years ago: Hosted applications through ASPs (application service providers) were getting started, but had little impact. Today: Hosted applications through […]
When you think about a modern software monoculture, which company do you think of first? Chances are that it’s Apple. However, if I asked that question between, say, 1995 and 2007, you probably would have said Microsoft. In agriculture, a monoculture is when too much of a region plants exactly the same crops. If there’s […]
Is literally everything about the cloud? You’d think so, going by the chatter from the biggest industry players. It seems that every company that wants to talk to be is pushing something to do with cloud computing. New service offerings from hosting providers. New tools for optimizing the performance of applications, or for making it […]
IBM Rational has written a solid white paper on software security, focusing on improving code reviews. Although I rarely (very rarely) endorse a vendor white paper, this is one that’s worth reading. Written in December 2009 by Ryan Berg, a senior security architect at IBM, the paper focuses on best practices for examining code for […]