Many people have asked for it, and now it’s ready: the SD Times RSS news feed. It’s the first of several planned feeds that our Web dev team, led by Craig Reino, is building. This inaugural feed contains timely news from SD Times, including the latest from our twice-weekly “News on Monday” newsletter. And there’s […]
“We get it, media buyers. You want leads. And who doesn’t? But have you forgotten the value of building a brand?” That’s the question that David Karp, advertising sales manager for BZ Media’s Software Test & Performance business unit, asks in his thoughtful guest column in the November, 2006, edition of Folio Magazine. Effective marketing […]
Speaking of Borland: The company announced today that it’s spinning off its Developer Tools Group — you know, JBuilder, Delphi, C++Builder and the other integrated development environments — into a wholly owned subsidiary. CodeGear will be led by Ben Smith as CEO. He’s been with Borland for a year, and I never heard of him […]
For the second time, Borland has postponed an “all editors” briefing with SD Times, geared at helping us understand their technology, product and business strategy. The two-hour call was initially set for Oct. 24, and was to have included Tod Neilsen (pictured), their new CEO; Rick Jackson, the SVP for strategy; and Marc Brown, the […]
Big milestones were announced today from the Eclipse Device Software Development Platform (DSDP, in Eclipse-speak), as two core projects hit their “1.0” releases and one came close: Target Management (TM), release version 1.0 Mission: The goal of Target Management is to create data models and frameworks to configure and manage embedded systems, their connections and […]
Dorothy has Toto, and Java has Duke. It seems that Sun is open-sourcing the mascot too. Z Trek Copyright (c) Alan Zeichick
As Alex Handy reported on sdtimes.com, Sun is releasing Java SE and Java ME under the GPL 2 license. Sun’s Jonathan Schwartz maintains that this move is not a reaction to all the moves in Linux-land, with Oracle hoovering Red Hat and Microsoft playing footsie with Novell. While it’s impossible to know exactly what Sun’s […]
My first impression of Benjamin Netanyahu, former prime minister of Israel, is “Wow, this guy’s really smart.” That impression stayed with me through his nearly two-hour presentation in Palo Alto yesterday (Nov. 12). His appearance was sponsored by Silicom Ventures, a venture capital investment group. Netanyahu spoke eloquently on a number of topics, focusing on […]
On Sept. 25, 2006, Jonathan Schwartz, the CEO of Sun, wrote to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Schwartz wants to be able to use the Internet — including his official blog, hosted on Sun’s servers — to disseminate company news, including financial data and product releases. Currently, publicly traded corporations must use traditional methods […]
Reports from the Software Test & Performance Conference, going on right now in Cambridge, Mass., are that the three-day event is packed. Not just with technical classes, but also with attendees. STPCon sold out of its full event passes a couple of week ago and then all the remaining tutorials-only seats went too. (The exhibition […]
On October 17, 2006, the U.S. Department of State announced a new Federal rule proposing the use of RFID chips in card-sized passports. There have been similar proposals for standard passports for a couple of years now. As a person who travels overseas occasionally (generally once or twice per year), this is worrisome. I don’t […]
Qualcomm announced that it’s discontinuing development of Eudora, and will release the code as open source software in the first half of 2007. While I like Eudora (it’s my favorite Windows e-mail client, and I’ve been a paid-up customer for many years), the synergies between Eudora and the rest of Qualcomm’s product line is zero. […]
I’m delighted to report that registration is now open for the 4th Software Security Summit. For the first time, we’re bringing the conference to the Bay Area: April 16-17, 2007, in San Mateo. That’s between San Francisco and San Jose, at the northern end of Silicon Valley. This year, we’ve shortened S-3 to two days: […]
The strongest threat toward Microsoft’s revenue is Linux. Any consumer who is running Linux on a desktop isn’t going to use Microsoft Office, can’t leverage the features of Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player. Beyond an Xbox, it’s unlikely that a Linux desktop user will pay for any Microsoft products or services. Any IT department […]
It’s been five years since IBM launched Eclipse as an open-source project. The technology had been incubating inside Big Blue since the late 1990s as a next-generation Java IDE, but IBM’s announcement that it was open-sourcing Eclipse, on Nov. 7, 2001, set the platform on the path to super-accelerated growth. Today, Eclipse is second only […]
With the release of QuarkXPress 7 for the Mac OS X, the move toward Universal Binary — applications which contain bits for both Intel x86 and PowerPC processors — is progressing very well. In studying my own software usage with Apple Activity Monitor, the only business-critical non-x86 binaries on my iMac are Microsoft’s Office 2004 […]
It’s a terrible pun, but I have to make it: A group of us were discussing the new Battlestar Galactica series (we’re hooked), and the characters on it. Someone said that Sharon “Boomer” Valerii was a sympathetic, brave character. “Yes, she’s a brave little toaster,” I replied — and then ran to Google to see […]
Am still waiting for the Sun SPOT kit. The contact at Sun who offered to send me a kit doesn’t have an ETA. And from the comments on Sun’s mailing list, the company’s SPOT team doesn’t have an ETA either. Postings on that list indicate problems regarding the RoHS compliance of the hardware, which means […]
A couple of other points regarding Oracle Linux: What does this mean for Oracle’s non-Linux operating system partners, Microsoft and Sun? Microsoft, while competing against Oracle’s database with SQL Server, likes being a high-volume platform for running Oracle 10g, as well as Oracle’s many applications. Expect to see Microsoft to gently step up its assaults […]
Yesterday, BT acquired Centerpane Internet Security, best known as the home of Bruce Schneier, one of the top computer-security experts in our industry today. Bruce, who founded Counterpane, will stay on as CTO. I’m sure that was a key part of the deal. While Centerpane has an impressive gallery of services clients, the real asset […]
Much ado was made yesterday about Oracle’s announcement that it’s releasing Red Hat Enterprise Linux as its own Unbreakable Linux. To quote from Oracle’s own announcement, Today Oracle announced that it would provide the same enterprise class support for Linux as it provides for its database, middleware and applications products. Oracle starts with Red Hat […]
As someone who started his academic career intending to study astronomy, I can’t help but admire Brian May, former guitarist from Queen. I had no idea that he’d been a Ph.D student in physics/infrared astronomy at Imperial College, London. May’s new book, “Bang! The Complete History Of The Universe,” came out this month. Z Trek […]
At Oracle OpenWorld today (which I did not attend), Dell introduced its first AMD-based servers, the PowerEdge SC1435 and PowerEdge 6950. Both are rack-mounted systems. The SC1435 is an entry-level pizza box with two dual-core Opterons; the 4U-high 6950 uses four chips. When you couple that with Apple’s move to Intel processors, and Sun’s supporting […]
Homer’s Iliad has two Greek heros named Ajax. One is the giant king of Salamis, known as Ajax the Greater. The other is the prince of Locris, and called Ajax the Lesser (though, presumably, not to his face). It looks like Microsoft’s Atlas project (named after another mythological figure) is more like AJAX the Greater. […]
I stumbled across this three-year-old article, “Blogs: The Latest Option In Raising Your Voice Online,” written by Reid Goldsborough for Information Today. Reid interviewed me about blogs in early 2003, and my fundamental misgivings about their role in journalism haven’t changed. Most blogs don’t have editorial oversight, or any sort of objective review, and as […]
Microsoft has issued several security updates for Office 2003 since Oct. 6, but they won’t install on my 64-bit Windows system. (It’s clearly not my weekend for working with software.) My big HP workstation (two single-core 2.6GHz Opteron processors, Win XP Pro x64, SP1) just won’t accept the seven “high priority” updates issued for Office […]
A four-day outage for “scheduled maintenance”? That’s pretty bad for Software as a Service, but that’s the score with the Sun Grid. The Sun Grid Compute Utility was announced at the 2006 JavaOne conference, as a high-performance cluster that ordinary developers and customers can “rent” for $1 per CPU/hour to work with Java on a […]
Today (Friday, Oct. 20) is the last day for discounted registrations to the Software Test & Performance Conference — tomorrow, the full conference passport price increases by $200. We’ve got a great conference for development and test/QA professionals, Nov. 7-9 at the Hyatt Regency Cambridge. There are lots of timely classes, including new tracks on […]
We had a retirement party on Wed. night for Lindsey Vereen, now Editor Emeritas of Software Test & Performance. I’ve worked with Lindsey off-and-on since 1991, when we were both at Miller Freeman. Lindsey (pictured) edited publications like Design Automation and Embedded Systems Programming, and also chaired the Embedded Systems Conference. He came over to […]
After Red Hat purchased JBoss and created an integrated offering with Linux and a commercial-grade open-source Java EE app server, it was only a matter of time before Novell did the same. The answer has a singularly uncatchy name of “Integrated Stack for SUSE Linux Enterprise,” and launched this week out of a Novell partnership […]