The virtual utopia controlled by Steve Jobs will expand greatly, bringing even more of the world under the thumb of the Apple CEO. That's the most promising—and dangerous—development to emerge from Apple's big products rollout today.
Last night Google rolled out a bug that would be comical if it weren't so astounding and grating: Open your Gmail inbox, and old school ragtime music starts playing, and can't be stopped. The solution: Use less Google.
Have you ever debated Microsoft's .NET Framework vs. Java with anyone? Has your father ever disowned you for embracing the latter? If so, then this Java 4-Ever spoof trailer will speak to your heart (and make you laugh).
A National Security Agency director just bragged to a Senate subcommittee about his agency's close "cooperation" with Microsoft to, err, "enhance" how Windows 7 guards a user's privacy. Doesn't that just make you feel all warm and fuzzy?
Facebook obsessives were atwitter last night about a "Lite" new version of the social network, which strips away much of its ballooning trove of information. Wait, how did Facebook get so cluttered in the first place?
Speaking at Google's developer's conference in San Francisco today, Sergey Brin launched some fresh nomenclature into the jargony culture of computer programmers: "Page's Law." He was trying to make a point about the speed of Google's Web apps; instead he's done co-founder Larry Page a huge favor.
Antivirus software company Kaspersky Lab plans to sell 20 percent of the company for $100 million to investors in a private placement next year, according to Russian newspaper Kommersant. Oh, this is juicy: Founder Eugene Kaspersky owns 50 percent of the company. His ex-wife, Natalya Kaspersky, owns 30 percent. […
Looking past the fail that is Vista, Microsoft is working on a next-generation operating system codenamed "Midori." Eric Rudder, a senior vice president at Microsoft whose name has been floated as Microsoft's next CEO, will be developing the new OS. Shockingly from a company known for slogging away at version after…
The European Commission's Software Quality Observatory for Open Source Software has released a "software quality checking platform" called Alitheia Core, designed to formalize quality control over open-source code. It doesn't boost my confidence that the demo site is throwing 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable…
Microsoft can't convince customers that they need the new version of Office anymore, so they'e begun to sell it as software-as-a-service, bundled with security software. "Security is basically the No. 1 thing that gets attached with a PC," said Microsoft group product manager Bryson Gordon. The product, code-named…
Weary of the ad-supported world of Web 2.0? Outside the echo chamber of Silicon Valley, there are software developers who write code that won't change the world, but that customers will pay real, five-figure license fees for — enough to sustain a growing, private business. It's all about finding a market that works…
While Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg tries to convince the world 20 million SuperPoke users have value, her minions are busy trying to convince enterprise developers to build applications that actually do. "One area we've seen a lot of value for the social graph is in the enterprise because it's a completely different…
When a partnership like Google and Salesforce.com's gets announced so publicly, it's a safe bet that the message is meant for investors and rivals, not customers. Look at the substance of their new partnership: Salesforce.com for Google Apps amounts to adding a tab to link the two Web-based services. Salesforce.com…
Can Microsoft's army of programmers write software for the Web? Judging by a spate of recent outages, no. Hotmail, Messenger, and other services targeted at developers and partners have broken down recently. Which is bizarre: Writing an operating system is a vastly more complex affair than coding a website. "Like…
Software developer and essayist Joel Spolsky went dumpster-diving into Microsoft Office's intractable file formats, the curse of freedom-loving Unixtards like me. Spolsky's findings? The formats were designed to make Office run fast on 20-megahertz CPUs with 1 MB of memory, yet to also remember all the options set…
If Microsoft's $44.6 billion Yahoo bid tells us anything, it's that Vista doesn't matter. But some in Redmond have not gotten the memo: "New customers should feel great about buying Windows Vista today," blogs Microsoft executive Mike Nash. The source of his optimism? Windows Vista Service Pack 1 has been released…
Enterprise IT is boring ... except when it gets lowdown and dirty. LIke it's starting to between Microsoft and VMware. Last week, Microsoft announced a "vision and strategy to accelerate virtualization adoption." We could relay the details, but they're full of jargon like "System Center Virtual Machines Manager…
Oracle has acquired BEA for $8.5 billion. Sun has acquired MySQL for $1 billion. These events are not coincidence. Oracle, which already makes a database, wants to add BEA's software on top of that database. Sun, which makes application servers and other software which connects to databases, wants to slip MySQL in…
