Developers

What a nut I was. Back when Sun Microsystems and Microsoft announced they would be joining forces on interoperability between Sun, nee Java, and .NET -- remember Steve Ballmer of "Ballmer and Butthead" fam] and Scott McNealy sitting side by side -- I thought they meant it. I pushed the envelope, jus...

In Search Of: CEO to turn IT organization that operates like a terrorist group into a Microsoft-like outfit. Vision and big-picture mentality not required. Management, administrative and detail skills sorely needed. Ability to deal with a chairman who occasionally goes off reservation during press i...

Google has announced that it's taking Google Gears to the road, a move the company said is intended to make sense out of the dense and complex process of developing for the mobile Web. Google Gears, previously only available for desktops, is software that enables device users to access online servic...

The Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley is nestled into the Berkeley Hills just off the fire trail where runners from around the area come to take on the brutal 3.5-mile climb. The lab, though, doesn't feel like it's part of Berkeley. It's located a few miles from t...

Drupal, the wildly popular open source social publishing system which has been downloaded more than 2 million times since it was released in 2001, will soon be available as a commercial distribution. The news was announced at DrupalCon Boston 2008, a convention of Drupal users, being held in Boston ...

Give office workers familiar with the Microsoft XP operating system an opportunity to try the same navigational tasks at a Linux-based desktop. Then step back and wait for the reaction. First will come the surprised look. Then questions like "where did the command line go?" will soon follow. That's ...

In the world of Rich Internet Applications, the battle for hearts and minds -- not to mention eyeballs and desktops -- heated up this week when Adobe Systems took the wraps off the beta version of its Adobe Integrated Runtime and slotted it for public release. Adobe AIR, according to the buzz on the...

Google Thursday launched a wiki-like Web information-sharing tool that the search company hopes will become a quick-start collaboration platform and a place to tie together work done on its growing family of productivity applications. Google Sites is built on the Jotspot platform, which Google acqui...

Wikis are finally becoming a useful tool for collaboration and information sharing in the workplace. However, like all business tools exposed on the Internet or corporate intranet, IT managers have to view their deployments with a stern eye regarding who can use them and what corporate information m...

AMD has open sourced more than 3,000 routines in its AMD Performance Library for multi-threaded programming. These routines, which will make it easier to build media and other applications for multi-core processors, have been posted under the Apache license on SourceForge.net. With more than 170,000...

Microsoft is making broad changes to its technological and business practices in an effort to make its most popular products more open and interoperable with those from other vendors. Driven by industry changes, competitive pressures and legal realities, Microsoft laid out a variety of moves designe...

Mozilla has been working diligently toward the upcoming final launch of Firefox Version 3.0. With the recent release of the browser's third beta edition, the company's engineers have wrapped up the major challenges and are focused on incremental changes. Now they're working at tweaking the browser i...

Mozilla is up to its elbows in code as it works toward the final release of the third iteration of its Firefox Web browser. With the launch last week of the browser's third beta version, the open source developer has given some 500,000 developers and testers the go-ahead to put the application throu...

Sun Microsystems is acquiring Germany-based virtualization software provider Innotek and, with it, its increasingly popular open source x86 virtualization product VirtualBox. The deal comes on the heels of Sun's recent purchase of open source database developer MySQL for $1 billion. VirtualBox enabl...

SCALE is no Macworld. First of all, the Linux community doesn't have a charismatic marketing genius like Steve Jobs hawking products on a stage with a three-story screen behind him and an audiovisual program to make U2 jealous. No, we've got Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman -- and they're not her...