Simon’s Blog

Hot on the heels of my last blog entry where I wrote about Java versus “languages beginning with P”, comes a post from James Gosling talking about why he decided to create Java rather than a new scripting language. He shares some of his experiences of the inappropriate ways that scripting languages [...]

And the award for Clueless Article Of The Week In A Major Publication goes to… Business Week, for a piece entitled, ” Java? It’s So Nineties”. According to the article, Java is no longer “hip” and is losing ground to what is presumably a 21st century technology called LAMP. [...]

In his blog yesterday, Jonathan Schwartz wrote:
Ask anyone who works in a datacenter - space, heat, and power are incredibly important.
Well, Jonathan is correct: space, heat and power are important. But, I think he’s incorrect that you could ask anyone who works in a datacenter this, and get the right answer. Jonathan [...]

So… the “big story” to come out of the recent Les Blogs 2.0 conference was “The Ben and Mena Show”. If you’ve an eye for trivia, you will know all about it by now. What happened was the following. Mena Trott - President of Six Apart - was giving a talk. Ben [...]

Maybe it’s just me - but Firefox 1.5 on Windows XP seems to be full of crash bugs. Previous versions of the browser were pretty solid, but the new version (1.5) either locks up (requiring the app to be killed) or crashes several times a day.
This is not the crash bug being widely [...]

Steve Gillmor thinks that Page Rank as a concept is on its way out, and that “attention” is on its way in. I think he might well be right. To understand why, you first have to understand that Page Rank is simply a hack that makes keyword-based search appear to be [...]

Well, HP has been quick to put up a very helpful webpage warning all us poor customers out here in userland about the dangers lurking behind Sun’s Niagara-based server launch. I quote:
Be careful — there is a waterfall of change lurking around the bend.
Don’t tell me to be careful, HP! You be careful! [...]

OK - here’s the highlights, right as they happen at Sun’s launch for their new Niagara chip and servers based on the chips.
11:04 (ET) People are taking their seats
11:05 The announcer said the program will begin in about three minutes
11:10 Scott McNealy - the Sun CEO - takes the stage. He’s dressed smartly! “Today [...]

Well, today’s the day that Sun Microsystems unveils its new line of servers based on its new chip - the UltraSPARC T1 aka Niagara. The company is expected to offer variants with 4, 6 and 8 cores, and the servers will have super-low power consumption. There’s also been a hint that the [...]

There are plenty of developers who believe that “Java is slow”. Much of their beliefs, however, are not based on experience of developing in Java. Rather they are simply repeating what other people have told them, or what they have read somewhere on the Net. The problem is: it’s not really [...]