Archives for October 2005
The Register’s recent story about Sun “still” not having any customers for their $1/CPU/hour computing service, has stimulated Microsoft’s Charles Fitzgerald to assert that the economics of utility computing don’t work. Charles thinks it’s a fundamental problem. That is, because the cost of bandwidth is high relative to the cost of compute power and […]
The last few years have seen great strides in the availability of free (as in beer) graphical development environments. Netbeans and Eclipse being the most important for Java developers. However, there’s one important feature that’s missing from these two leading free tools; something that I think developers would find massively useful. And that […]
Wow! I’m speechless! The recent problems with Xbox 360 demo pods are nothing compared to this. According to The Inquirer, all of the first crop of games for the Xbox 360 are single-threaded. That is truly shocking, and spectacularly bad news for the console, whose launch is just a few weeks away.
The […]
Many people haven’t yet realised that mobile phones are big news when it comes to portable video, photos, games, messaging and playing MP3s. This is especially true in the US where, even amongst the usually clued-in geek crowd, cries of, “People just want to make calls on their phones!” on popular web-sites are not […]
So, OpenOffice 2.0 has shipped. I’ve been using the beta for what seems like ages, and it’s a pretty good product. Truly it’s a massive step forward from the version 1.x releases. Jonathan Schwartz has written today about why Sun and Google will not be driving a rewrite of OpenOffice in AJAX. I […]
The announcement of the video iPod has got many people talking about watching video on the move. Without having experienced portable video, most people think that watching it on a small screen will be no match for watching a big screen television. While this is true to some extent, it’s not as true […]
As noted over on java.net, Evans Data Corporation has reported that Swing is now the dominant GUI Toolkit for Northern American developers.
Java Swing with 47% use, has surpassed WinForms as the dominant GUI development toolkit, an increase of 27% since fall 2004.
As someone who’s been developing Swing user interfaces ever since the technology was released, […]
Some people say that there many talented developers (sometimes also known as hackers) out there wanting to found Internet companies. And, if you look at Technorati, you’ll see that the most popular software development search term out there at the moment is AJAX. From which we might conclude (as if we didn’t […]
Last week, I needed to get hold of a new wireless presentation controller (i.e. a remote control for PowerPoint). Usually, I would buy this kind of thing on-line, but this was for a presentation I had to give first thing the next morning. So, I needed to go to a store. A quick survey of user reviews of these devices told me which model was the best to buy, and off I went to my local computer superstore. The problem was that when I arrived, I found they were out of stock. What happened next - a kind of manual mash-up of services - really made some of true benefits of mobile location-based services crystallise in my mind.
I have written before about companies selling Blu-ray technology and services losing their focus on providing benefits to consumers. That time was about hardware manufacturers having the capability to remotely disable your Blu-ray player. Now, there’s another problem - ripping Blu-ray discs to hard drives.
According to Engadget, Blu-ray will not allow content to […]