As part of the early fallout from Oracle's acquisition of Sun, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz has resigned from Sun, leaving with a parting haiku on Twitter. (See haiku on Wikipedia.)
Mr. Schwartz struck me as an interesting CEO. He seemed like one of the first CEOs to post his ideas on a blog, and his strategy of trying to make Sun a more "open" company in an effort to save them was very interesting.
Here's a link to a great story that shows where Microsoft's profit comes from. Remember when looking at that chart that it shows profit, not revenue.
I just read nearly a dozen reports on the Kneber BotNet, and none of the reports mention it, but this BotNet only affects Microsoft Windows computer systems. According to the actual NetWitness report, the top five Windows systems affected are variants of Windows XP (Home and Professional, SP 2 and 3), and Vista Home (SP 0, 1, and 2).
I just wanted to put a quick note out here today to let you know that I'll be moving to Alaska over the course of the next few weeks. Because of this I won't be posting nearly as many new tutorials here during that time, but hopefully the current collection of nearly 2,000 Java, Perl, Ruby, PHP, Mac OS X and Linux tutorials will keep everyone busy for a while, lol.
I'm finally on the road back to Alaska. I don't plan to write any more about this trip on this website, but if you're interested, you can follow my travel adventures on my website about life in Alaska, OneMansAlaska.com.
IMHO, Apple's motivation for their changes to the iPhone SDK developer agreement are clear: They want you to write your code in Objective C, written to the iPhone API, so your apps will run on their phone, and nowhere else.
Too funny ... Apple rejects Mark Fiore's iPhone application "because it included cartoons that ridiculed public figures." Fiore then wins the Pulitzer Prize, and mentions the next day that his iPhone app was rejected.
Immediately Apple "encourages" Mr. Fiore to re-submit his app for consideration in the App Store. (Do you think Apple will "approve" him now?)
Here are some more notes from the New York Times article where I just read about this:
Very cool, in September, 2010, the "handsome android" is scheduled to join the crew of the International Space Station.
Here's a link to the story on popsci.com, including a little video of the android/robot in action. And here's a second link to more background information on the "handsome android", aka, Robonaut2.
Too funny, I just realized I own the devdaily.net domain, so I just posted a goofy website created with iWeb out there, just so there would be something there besides a blank page.
Here's a link to the main devdaily.net web page, and here's a link to the devdaily.net blog, which may or may not contain random thoughts from moi from time to time. Oh, and sorry about those ad banners at the top, that's what you get with "free hosting", lol.
As the Arizona Immigration Law continues to make big news here in the United States, I decided to read the United State Constitution for the first time in thirty years.
As someone who has written dozens of software requirement specifications, the first thing that jumps out at me is that the U.S. Constitution would have never been approved as a requirements specification on my projects. Terms like "people", "person", "tranquility", and "unreasonable" are so vague that from a software decision-making process, they are useless.
All I can imagine at the moment is going up to Mr. Washington and Mr. Jefferson, and saying:
"Excuse me gentlemen, I'm working on the security model for our web app, and I'm wondering if you can clarify a few terms for me?"
Today's announcement that Google is buying BumpTop continues the string of Google and Apple buying up technology companies so fast you'd think they were, well, Microsoft, at least "Microsoft back in the day".
I'm reminded that ~10 years ago Bill Gates said about Sun Microsystems (and I'm paraphrasing here):
"Sun is dead, they just don't know it yet. Their business model consists of selling overpriced servers, and sooner or later the market will realize that."
Having watch RISC processors lose their speed advantage -- and then switching to Linux as a result -- I agreed with that assessment, and in 2009 it finally came to fruition as Sun was bought by Oracle.
Which leads to the question: If Bill Gates could look at it objectively, would he say the same thing now about Microsoft?
Kudos to whoever first noticed that when you type the phrase "How do I" at Google, the fifth item in the list is now "How do I delete my Facebook account".
I'll show that image in a moment, but first, here's a more powerful image from Google Trends that shows the search trend for the phrase "facebook delete account":
Unethical ... amoral ... backstabbing ... stealing ... cheating ... web pundits these days are using all sorts of words to describe Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg. This image says it all:
While Apple and Adobe go back and forth on the topic of Flash, in particular Flash on the iPhone, I woke up to this email message from Apple this morning, showing the Apple Store promoting the Adobe Creative Suite (CS5):
This feels like one of those awkward moments ...
When Doug Bowman left the Google design team, he didn't leave quietly. He wrote two blog entries about his reasons for leaving (Goodbye, Google, and Hello, Twitter).
The NY Times reports that Microsoft SharePoint is thriving during the recession. While Microsoft doesn't reveal actual revenue numbers, they were willing to share that it broke the $1 billion revenue mark last year.
I don't know anything about SharePoint, but that's certainly great news for Microsoft. When it first came out I heard it compared to many open source wiki tools, but this article describes it as having more features than a wiki.
The NY Times reports that the massive denial-of-service attack continues against Twitter today. Twitter continues to fight against the attack(s), but some users are still having problems accessing Twitter services.
All sorts of Apple tablet rumors flying around today:
"Apple Inc. tablet computer will be like a large iTouch and cost about $600, an analyst said on Friday", is one report from bizjournals.com.
Apple released a press statement today announcing that Dr. Eric Schmidt has resigned from their Board of Directors. As I alluded to here (I thought I wrote much more on this, but that must have been an email to a friend), I thought Dr. Schmidt would have to leave at some point, so I don't think this is a big deal, other than it finally happened. The wording on the press release is also raising a little bit of a stir in the community:
Over the last year a lot of people at Apple -- and a lot of analysts -- have said that Apple will be fine after Steve Jobs leaves the company. But if this Wall Street Journal article about Apple is correct, and Mr. Jobs freaked everyone on the "tablet" project out when he came back, then don't you think Apple will be hurt when he's gone?
