Z Trek: The Alan Zeichick Weblog
The Eclipse MLP Project
All I can say is, Ian Skerrett has written one of the funniest blog posts that I've read in a long time. Ian is the director of marketing for the Eclipse Foundation.Z Trek Copyright (c) Alan Zeichick
Microsoft and the WGA failure
Many analysts, myself included, have been increasingly unhappy with the ham-handed way that Microsoft handles software piracy.With Microsoft, beginning with Windows XP, your copy of the operating system had to be validated by Microsoft in order…
The five million dollar logo
Shortly after issuing our press release for the Inc. 5,000, I received a call from Reprint Management Services, a company engaged by Inc. to license stuff relating to the Inc. 5,000 award. Why? We had pasted the Inc. 5,000 logo on our BZ Media…
We’re on the Inc. 5,000!
I'm delighted to announce that BZ Media LLC has appeared on Inc. Magazine’s first-ever Inc. 5,000 list, which ranks the fastest-growing private companies in the United States.BZ Media, founded in 1999, was ranked as the 2,529th fastest-growing…
From SUNW to JAVA
Sun Microsystems is changing its stock symbol from SUNW to JAVA.The symbol has been SUNW (reflecting Sun workstations, the company's original product line) every since the company went public in 1986.Why is Sun doing this? Because Java is a…
Who uses the ExpressCard slot?
My 15” MacBook Pro contains an expansion slot. Called the ExpressCard/34, it’s the successor to the old PCMCIA slot (which, of course, means, “People Can’t Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms”). According to the PCMCIA (okay, the Personal…
Getting Paris Hilton’s old IP address
IP addresses may not be renewable resources. Over coffee one day, my colleague Andrew Binstock suggested a problem I hadn’t considered: Many applications and systems are hard-wire to access specific IP addresses, rather than fully qualified…
Say hello, new BlackBerry
Okay, I’m really hooked: I upgraded my original BlackBerry handheld device to a newer model. The upgrade was carefully considered, and was to solve very specific problems. However, the new model is significantly better than the previous one…
The odd joy of hacking
It's amazing how some people get their jollies — such as by hacking into and damaging an open-source project's Web site. As my colleague Edward Correia wrote about in EclipseSource this week, someone jumped onto the redesigned Eclipse Plugin…
A makeover for SDTimes.com
It’s new! It’s improved! It’s the new SDTimes.com home page, the first visible result of a top-to-bottom overhaul of our Web site. Right now, we have just a few pages redone, but our Web team is working feverishly to change not only the…
SCO: Right winner, wrong case
This week’s news – that a judge ruled that Novell, not SCO, owned the copyrights to Unix and UnixWare – was good news for anyone who believes in open source software, and who also believes in giving customers choice. It was certainly bad…
Novell — not SCO — appears to own Unix
Novell — not SCO — owns Unix.According to a report on Groklaw, a pro-Linux, anti-SCO Web site, there’s been a major breakthrough in the SCO v. Novell lawsuit. To summarize: Dale Kimball, the judge on the case, has concluded that Novell…
Bonds: 757. Splash: 45.
As hoped, Barry Bonds smacked his 757th career home run last night, as the San Francisco Giants beat the Washington Nationals 5-0.Barry's mighty swing also created the 45th home team "splash," as the ball flew out of the ballpark and landed…
Forward thinking on security
Bruce Schneier has written an excellent blog post talking about "backwards thinking" on software security. Using the recent California security review of voting machines as an example (all the machines tested failed — but were conditionally…
Break with the past
Last year, I wrote a pair of "Zeichick's Take" columns for SD Times News on Monday. Unfortunately, they weren't archived onto the Web. However, I'm posting them here now, in response to an MSDN blog entry, "The real cost of compatibility is…
Big boxes at LinuxWorld
Want to see the latest in quad-core servers? Go to the LinuxWorld Conference, going on this week at San Francisco’s Moscone Center. Want to check out Motorola’s latest cell phones? Want to see racks full of blade servers? Want to see the…
Saw it on TV
As I mentioned yesterday, I'm going to see the San Francisco Giants take on the Washington Nationals tonight. It would have been truly memorable to be there in the stands when Barry Bonds hit home run #756.The bad news is that Barry did the…
Sun has nothing to say
Is this any way to build a community?Not only does Sun refuse to talk about the license for the Java Compatibility Kit for Java SE 5 and Java EE 6, but it won't comment on what companies like IBM and Intel wrote in their votes on the Java EE…
New iMacs are pretty but not much new inside
Today, Apple released its next-generation iMac computers – moving away from the white polycarbonate slab introduced with the iMac G5 in 2004 toward a new, slimmer aluminum slab look.The new Macs are pretty, though I fear that the MacBook-style…
Know the drug code
As the parent of a teenage boy, the thought of his using illegal drugs – or abusing legal ones – is a constant worry. Of course, I know that he’s a good boy, and that he understands the dangers. On the other hand, having once been a teenage…
Poor sports
If you're not reading about Paris Hilton or Lindsay Lohan behaving badly, then you're reading about sports scandals. As a resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, I read about baseball great Barry Bonds in the news nearly every day. In part,…
What is Sun hiding?
Why is Sun Microsystems so afraid to let the Java community look at the license agreement for the Java SE 5 Java Compatibility Kit? The JCK is the test suite that third parties, such as the Apache Software Foundation, must use to demonstrate…
What’s a field of use restriction?
I have been asked to be more explicit about the 'field of use restriction' cited in my earlier posting. To be honest, I can't be — yet.The field of use restriction that Apache is talking about is part of the TCK for JSR 176. That is, the technology…
Sun needs to get its licensing act together
There's a debate going on in the Java community regarding the licensing terms for technology compatibility kits. It's not a new debate—the Apache Software Foundation published an open letter on the subject back in April, complaining about…
Software evangelism for dummies
Well, not for dummies — for enthusiasts! You may recall my comments about Guy Kawasaki's keynote address at the Salesforce Developer Conference, where I described him as "the funniest entrepreneur." But whether he's a CEO or venture capitalist,…
Have you listened to SD Times lately?
Last week, Dave Rubinstein chatted with Forrester Research senior analyst Carey Schwaber about Microsoft's three-pronged product announcement for 2008, IBM's patent play and what "release management" means to different groups within an organization.Before…
It’s Appreciate Your Test Team Day!
Well, it's not really "Appreciate Your Test Team Day," but if you read Edward Correia's latest Test & QA Report newsletter story, you'd think it should be.Eddie really hit the ball out of the park with his essay, "QA Teams — Underappreciated…
COBOL consolidation
Sometimes something happens, and you just miss it. That's the case when Micro Focus quietly purchased Acucorp two months ago.Micro Focus and Acucorp are among the few remaining providers of COBOL tools and runtimes. Micro Focus was by far the…
Oracle takes the database lead
With the release of the Oracle Database 11g beta yesterday, Oracle pulls ahead in the War of the Giant Enterprise Databases. With all respect to all the enterprise database companies, the four main contenders remain, in alphabetical order, IBM…
Dying harder, seven clicks at a time
Last night, we want to see the new action movie, “Live Free or Die Hard,” the fourth movie in the Bruce Willis “Die Hard” series. All of the movies in this series have been well done, but this installment was the most fun, mainly because…