Java

Microsoft just got a patent for disabling your operating system until you pay an "agreed-on sum of money." Also we find out that the Palm Pre is going to sell out, which means Sprint can save a load on advertising. And Moblin is out for beta testing, even if you think the name is dumb.

Palm Pre to run $549 off-contract http://www.engadget.com/2009/05/19/palm-pre-to-run-549-off-contract/

Sprint's CEO thinks there will be a Pre shortage, decides … Read more

Updated 12:30 p.m. PDT with Apple comment

Macintosh security consulting firm SecureMac.com on Tuesday issued a critical warning for what it says is an unpatched Java security vulnerability in Apple's Mac OS X.

According to the man credited with discovering it, Landon Fuller, the Java flaw even affects the latest version of Mac OS X, 10.5.7, released just a week ago. Fuller has gone so far as to release a proof of concept for the security hole.

The vulnerability could be used to perform what SecureMac refers to as "drive-by-downloads," or the … Read more

Things were looking promising for Yahoo's mobile repositioning. By April 1, Yahoo had a redesigned mobile Web site, a richer but similarly-featured iPhone app, and plans for a Java phone edition, of which we got to take a sneak peek. However, that final Java app is no longer going to materialize, at least not in its originally planned form. Yahoo recently released a message to beta testers explaining that the company "has decided to cease development of the Yahoo Mobile smartphone app effective Wednesday, May 20th. So you will not be provided access to the beta program for … Read more

SpringSource announced Monday its acquisition of Hyperic, a move that signals a new phase of commercial open-source competition.

Until recently, open-source vendors like SpringSource seemed content to play the low-cost commodity foil to the broader product portfolios of their proprietary peers. No more.

SpringSource, the company behind the Spring Framework, the leading open-source application framework for Java, has been nudging beyond its roots for some time. Most recently, SpringSource announced commercial support for Tomcat, arguably the world's most prevalent Java application server. It has also released tools to expedite and facilitate the development of Java applications.

In these ways, … Read more

Skilled technologists tend to be able find jobs in economic downturns, even if they don't find their ideal positions. But getting a raise in a down economy is a tough trick to pull off. The good news is that jobs in open-source software and niche application skills actually saw pay increases, according to research from Foote Partners.

Foote Partners tracks pay for 371 certified and noncertified IT skills, and its first quarter research shows that pay for noncertified skills in Linux rose by more than 28 percent, while Apache and Sybase noncertified skills saw 25 percent increases in pay. … Read more

Dan Baigent is senior director of corporate development with Sun Microsystems. He's also one of the most candid inside observers on the failures that brought Sun to the point that it had to be bailed out by Oracle in a $7.4 billion acquisition, down from Sun's bubble-era peak of a $200 billion-plus valuation.

In a series of blog posts, Baigent starts to identify Sun's top 10 failures, and their consequences, as he seeks to describe how Sun got to this point.

Actually, he only managed to get his first three reasons posted before the posts were … Read more

Even at the cutting edge of cloud computing, Web-based applications can be frustrating to write and to use.

Spreadsheets can't sort data well, there are lags between mouse clicks and the program's response, graphics look Mickey Mouse rather than lavish. But Google, among the most aggressive cloud computing advocates, is trying to address some of those shortcomings.

The company has released experimental but still very much real software that brings in some of the power of the PC, where people often use Web applications. Google Native Client--first released in 2008 but updated with a new version Thursday--is a browser plug-in for securely running computationally intense software downloaded from a Web site. And on Tuesday, Google released O3D, a plug-in that lets Web-based applications tap into a computer's graphics chip, too.

The projects are rough around the edges, to say the least. Native Client--NaCl for short--is more security research project than usable programming foundation right now, and O3D exists in part to try to accelerate the arrival of some future, not necessarily compatible, standard for building 3D abilities into Web applications.

But both fundamentally challenge the idea that Web apps necessarily are stripped-down, feeble counterparts to the software that runs natively on a personal computer, and they come from a company that has engineering skill, a yen for moving activity to the Internet, and search-ad profits that can fund projects that don't immediately or directly make money.

"There are things you can do in desktop apps that you can't do in Web apps. We're working very hard to close that gap, so anything you can do in a desktop application you can do safely and securely from a Web application," said Linus Upson, a Google engineering director. … Read more

While the vast majority of Sun Microsystems' current revenue derives from hardware, a new Goldman Sachs report ("CIO view on the Oracle/Sun deal: IT battle lines are being redrawn") suggests that the hardware business is the part of Sun that gives Oracle the least strategic value; Java, Solaris, and MySQL provide the crown jewels of Oracle's newest acquisition.

While Oracle called out Java as "the most important software Oracle has ever acquired," the executive team provided little detail as to what Oracle expected to do with the open-source programming language.

Goldman Sachs provides some … Read more

Updated at 11:20 a.m. with links to the project.

Google on Tuesday released software called O3D to bring accelerated 3D graphics to browsers, a significant effort but not the only one to try to endow Web applications with some of the computing muscle that PC programs can use.

O3D is a browser plug-in for Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome that works on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, but Google hopes that eventually, the technology will be built directly into browsers. It provides an interface that lets developers' Web-based JavaScript programs tap directly into a computer's graphics chip, which could mean better games and other applications.

Google touted the technology in a blog post. It includes a video demonstration, complete with a soothing voice-over and a spacey ambient-music soundtrack, for those who don't want to install the plug-in. … Read more