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Struggles on AJAX interop project
The OpenAjax Alliance is once again finding it tough to enlist support for its projects, despite representing some of the biggest players - with the most resources - in software biz and on online.…
More reliance on compliance
In brief Enterprise software omnicorp CA has acquired Palo Alto, CA-based IDFocus to blend the firm's identity management software with its own CA Identity Manager.…
Yesterday's issues at 40
Forty years ago today, at the height of the Cold War, around 50 computing experts gathered in the southern German market town of Garmisch to change history.…
Bezos unreformed
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2010 or bust
Start your clocks and count the delays: Microsoft has named the first half of 2010 as the window for the next version of SQL Server - codenamed Kilimanjaro.…
Get your apps in the sky on the net
If there was an index for how many times a vendor hops onto a new buzzword and tried to slap it on every product in their catalog, then it is probably safe to say that IBM would be the most actively traded stock on the Cloud Computing Exchange.…
Class-action call up
Little did Microsoft executives realize when they blessed the seemingly brilliant wheeze of "Windows Vista Capable" as a way of flogging the operating system that the idea could turn into a bitter pill their company might have to swallow.…
The Ten Commandments or a waste of time?
Fail and You If there's one thing that's never affected by economic downturn, it's the mobile handset market. This phenomenon is most evident at the underground parties and dive bars in San Francisco, where it is a well known yet unspoken tradition that in any given group of hipsters, the one with the cheapest phone must always buy the first pitcher of Pabst Blue Ribbon.…
Where’s the point of no return?
Reg Reader Workshop Who could fault the base principles of agility? I was recently talking to a CIO of a European telco, who was totally bought into the strategy of delivering services as fast as possible to customers. In this fickle, subscriber-based market time literally means money won or lost relative to the competition.…
Parity on C# 3.0 and LINQ
The open-source implementation of Microsoft's .NET is due to hit its second release today, with many .NET 3.5 features and a few notable exceptions.…
Jeff Kantor, on building and managing a 150 Petabyte database
Interview It makes for one heck of a project mission statement. Explore the nature of dark matter, chart the Solar System in exhaustive detail, discover and analyze rare objects such as neutron stars and black hole binaries, and map out the structure of the Galaxy.…
Some projects less open than others
Microsoft is posting code to its much-trumpeted CodePlex open-source projects site using licenses and conditions that go against the principles of open source.…
But is there hope?
Poll results The Reg reader poll run earlier this week as part of our agile development workshop produced a set of results that do not paint a particularly inspiring picture. When asked how distributed software development was managed within organisations, almost half told us things were not that great. About a third gave feedback indicating that they were just about doing okay, but only one in five said things were managed well.…
Schtop. This email client is not ready yet
Mozilla has pushed back its development schedule for Thunderbird 3, the next version of its email client. A planned beta of the package will now be described as a third alpha build.…
Buckling to OEMs?
Never mind that Microsoft has kicked off a hyped ad campaign to convince the public to buy Windows Vista PCs, - it's also given users more time to switch back to Windows XP.…
Not just 'idiotic' - 'misleading' too
IBM, EMC, Microsoft and others have been blasted by the father of Representational State Transfer (REST) for making "misleading" and "idiotic" claims about a proposed specification for applications to talk to different vendors' content management systems (CMS).…
More online bribery
Believe it or not, Microsoft has added a Vegas-style slot program to its Dutch search engine to lure users away from Google. If useful search results don't work, then money or prices probably will.…
Release candidate stealth
Microsoft has come a step closer to releasing the next version of its Silverlight browser plug in.…
Recovers from trip
WebKit - the framework that underpins Apple's Safari, Google's Chrome browser, and its Android phone platform - has become the first browser to pass the full Acid 3 test.…
Unix not the only fruit
Amazon's Elastic Computer Cloud (EC2) will let you run applications on Microsoft's Windows Server and SQL Server database from this autumn.…
Adobe handkerchief solves streaming snafu
Amazon has plugged a potentially revenue-draining flaw in its video streaming service by incorporating content encryption.…
Jobsian reality check
Apple is scrapping its controversial and unpopular "fucking" iPhone non-disclosure agreement (NDA).…
Making the most of distributed resources
Reader Poll We’ve had some great responses back on the article we posted earlier in the week, about how software development is becoming increasingly distributed with the twin prongs of outsourcing (vs keeping things in-house) and offshoring (vs keeping things local). Unsurprisingly perhaps, the most spleen is vented on failed offshore projects.…
Microsoft prefers to 'obsolete ourselves'
Microsoft will let loose a new operating system, Windows Cloud, at the company’s annual developer conference later this month.…
Restful Dublin state
Microsoft is adopting REST and ATOM-based feeds in its application server to boost development and management of Windows server applications.…
Pull the other one
Why does the Open University set its students gibberish, Verity Stob asked here recently? We decided to investigate. As our enquiries continued at the Open University, it became harder to find anyone who took the issue seriously.…
Awaits Jobsian blessing
Adobe Systems could soon join the ranks of frustrated tech companies building versions of their software for Apple's Jesus Phone.…
The bug that wouldn't die
A Reg journo was bemused this morning when he rebooted his Mac and the machine decided that Safari - not Opera - should be his default web browser.…
'Classic' meets 'full,' fails to show
The long-awaited merger of Microsoft "classic" and "full" Hotmail services has got off to spotty and painful start.…
Anything for scripting
Corporate rivals have temporarily sunk their differences to find ways to fine-tune the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) to a variety of popular dynamic languages.…
'Look, we're over here...'
Microsoft yesterday updated its Windows Live versions of Hotmail and Maps, in its latest attempt to appear relevant in the online world.…
You don't know sidejack
Protecting passwords is important, but do you take the same care with your SESSIONIDs? You should.…
Necessity meets invention
Microsoft is softening its attitude on shipping open-source code with Windows with a decision to distribute the handy jQuery JavaScript library with Visual Studio.…
ALM, take three
Microsoft claims it will have "nailed" the application lifecycle management (ALM) companion to Visual Studio with the third iteration - Visual Studio Team System 2010, codenamed Rosario - when it ships.…
Have things really changed in the past few decades?
Reg Reader Workshop Anyone would think the kids of today had invented globalization.…
Beware the flying herring
Microsoft believes it has "lost" a generation of developers who might have embraced Windows and .NET, thanks to the Mac and open source frameworks and operating systems.…
Wary of corporate agendas
Everyone loves open source - well, everyone apart from Microsoft, that is. The only problem with open source is deciding how much code control you're willing to relinquish, especially when open source puts your precious bits and bytes - and ultimately your own product plans - into the hands of your competitors.…
Black market inflation
Apple's clampdown over access to information on the iPhone's Software Development Kit (SDK) has plumbed new depths, forcing a book publisher to withdraw a programmers guide scheduled for December 2008.…
Week one roundup
Reg Reader Workshop Reader research conducted via the Reg Technology Panel over the last few years has consistently indicated the importance of application development to organisations large and small. Contrary to some of the things we hear, the need for software design, build and maintenance capability has not been killed by packaged applications, and certainly not by some of the latest ideas such as software as a service (SaaS) and cloud computing.…
Get your Cocoa-based client here
A rough alpha version of BitTorrent client uTorrent for the Mac has tipped up on The Pirate Bay website.…
Browser transmutation for privacy fans
German developers had developed a cut-down version of Chrome that doesn't send usage data back to the Google mothership.…
JBoss past, app server future?
Exclusive SpringSource, steward of the ever-popular Spring open source Java framework, is getting an operations specialist from the investment community with an application-server background.…
That's what development release means, people
One of the most frustrating aspects of open source but commercially supported software is that it takes many orders of magnitude of freebie customers to attain a base of core customers who will pay for a glorified product with commercial-grade installation and ongoing tech support. There is always a temptation to try to monetize the vast installed base of users who are making use of the so-called development or community editions of programs. But Red Hat isn't going for it.…
From Toy Story to tough times
Steve McIntyre knew he faced a huge task when he took on the job of Debian project leader nearly six months ago. But he didn't reckon on the scandal of a major security bug, followed by a massive clear-up operation within a few days of taking over.…
Vista in full frontal shocker
Microsoft will be showboating Windows Vista, mark two 7 at its forthcoming Professional Developer Conference (PDC) event next month, where developers will be able to get their mitts on a pre-beta build of the operating system.…
(Not) a hardware provider
OpenWorld 08 Men pushing a dream need to know when to let go. Otherwise like Captain Ahab you go to your destruction, or like Bill Gates, obsessed by the Tablet PC, become a comedic sideshow.…
Framework flattery
Hands on Ruby on Rails has become a popular framework for developing database-based web applications using the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern.…
Have your say
Reg Reader Workshop The latest Reg Reader Workshop on Agile Development has got off to a flying start with some lively discussion of whether today’s developers are more creative than their counterparts of 20 years ago.…
Open sesame
Big Blue has issued a thinly-veiled threat to the international standards body ISO following its approval of Microsoft’s contentious Office Open XML document format.…
Just off the production line
Mozilla published a new version of its Firefox web browser on Tuesday that fixes five security vulnerabilities, two of which it rates as critical.…