Slashdot Mirror

When it comes to java, here is an interesting discussion http://javaboutique.internet.com/reviews/ruby/. Ruby on rails is always worth considering for the future especially as Oracle has severely tainted java.

Computer programming languages, it not something you choose for today and especially not yesterday, it's all about tomorrow. Trying to guess trends, which languages are losing popularity and which are gaining popularity and obviously if you are pursuing income which will pay the most.

Surprisingly coding can be like farming, picking the most popular code just like the most popular crop, doesn't pay the best in a flooded market. Picking the code with least competition but really fits specific needs pays really well and it well take your competitors a few seasons to catch up (you can't just change crops as you have to change tools as well).

Which language, the easiest to learn, the most compact, the easiest to read, the most flexible and it works well with the internet. Unfortunately that's really not all that fixed and changes from year to year, we all know which were but trying to guess which will be is pretty elusive.

"(gopher was a menu-driven text-only precursor to the Web; I got my first online gig programming gopher sites)" - Posted by timothy on Thursday April 29, @06:16PM

I was using GOPHER SITES via WsGopher 2.0 here (a 32-bit GUI program, way, Way, WAY "back in the day", circa 1994-1995, iirc on the dates) -> http://cws.internet.com/file/11502.htm

APK

It's amusing that this sort of mindless consumerist jingoism should be spewed by someone from the USA, which has until recently exhibited such drastically low subscriber ARPUs and unit penetrance that pretty much all manufacturers and cellcos didn't even bother to release any of their high-end phones in that country. Relegated to a backwater in the global mobile business, the USA would probably have remained so for many years had Apple's success with its high-end featurephone not encouraged them to begin to accelerate deployment of better models within the USA. However, because US consumers are still markedly stingy when it comes to paying for services, the USA's selection of phones and services is still quite poor. Why do you think all the large billing and distribution companies are EU or Asian? That's where the real money is. Half a billion high-spending EU consumers, 2 billion high-spending Asian consumers. The USA can muster up 300m low-payers, and many of them are effectively locked into multi-year hire-purchase schemes by incumbent and regional cellcos. Just not that attractive a proposition.

Also, I believe that the "Japan" thing you are rferring to is, again, not based on sales, but in fact the recent impression monitoring and market research by Admob (now part of Google). The same surveyors also found that only 22% of Japanese mobile consumers wanted to carry a "smartphone", with just under 50% saying that a simple call phone was "enough". Also, the recent Japanese growth of 350% in mobile Safari impressions is coming from a long period of virtually no growth, and a tiny installed base. It's easy to show 350% growth in one quarter if your installed base is tiny. Maintaining that for a full year will prove more difficult. Even with the sales boost, Japan's Iphone consumers still represent only 3% of total global Iphone consumers. By comparison, the UK accounts for 8%.

I'm sure you're going to counter these statements by some ill-informed personal assertion without anything in the way of links of reason. However, I am done with this line of debate. The links speak for themselves.

Application Patent Date: November 20, 2007

Online Prior Art at the Regex Library from 2004:

^(?!000)([0-6]\d{2}|7([0-6]\d|7[012]))([ -]?)(?!00)\d\d\3(?!0000)\d{4}$

Put that into your favorite Javascript regular expression object and write a stupid onChange reference to it in your HTML and ... tada! Too complicated? Here's some more prior art. Or here. A little bit of Googling must be too much for the USPTO.

Are we suddenly shocked to discover one line of code can be patented when a whole mess of code can be patented?

You do realize that is just a patent application publication, and that nothing has actually been patented, right? Just because it's a silly application doesn't prohibit the USPTO from publishing it.

Depending on the backlog for that particular area, it probably hasn't even been picked up by an examiner yet.

^(?!000)([0-6]\d{2}|7([0-6]\d|7[012]))([ -]?)(?!00)\d\d\3(?!0000)\d{4}$

Put that into your favorite Javascript regular expression object and write a stupid onChange reference to it in your HTML and ... tada! Too complicated? Here's some more prior art. Or here. A little bit of Googling must be too much for the USPTO.

Are we suddenly shocked to discover one line of code can be patented when a whole mess of code can be patented?

"OpenOffice is part of a patent cross-licensing deal between Sun and Microsoft that resulted from all the anti-trust cases that Sun won. If OO is detached from Sun, it loses that umbrella patent protection and would likely be targeted by Microsoft"

What umbrella patent protection?. According to this Microsoft gets Sun to find any 'patent violation, and pay for any subsequent litigation. Not much protection then. I don't know any other company who would have the cohones to get a rival to sue it's own custoners and pay for the privelage :)

'Sun Microsystems may have saved itself from years of costly litigation when it settled with Microsoft over their long-running Java dispute, but a clause in the landmark deal has open source supporters parsing its potential impact'

'The provision allows Microsoft to "sue or otherwise seek recovery from an authorized licensee of OpenOffice" that was in use prior to April 2. In this way, Microsoft could in theory file suit if it finds pieces of OpenOffice that it contends infringe on its Microsoft Office patents'

'Under their agreement, Sun must notify Microsoft if a claim surfaces and must let Microsoft take control and responsibility for fighting the charges in court. Sun must also help Microsoft defend its case against a potential OpenOffice licensee. For its troubles, Microsoft will reimburse Sun an undisclosed sum for certain damages, according to the filing'

Then you might know of a product called PowerTier, later renamed to DataXtend CE. That was an ORM for C++ and Java from Persistence, which was also acquired by Progress. We started using that at version 5 or 6 around 2000/2001 time frame.

Like this? Breakout is a fairly simple game that requires only minimal animation. That makes it relatively easy to program. That doesn't mean it can't be done better. The breakout example I linked to it pretty choppy once you slow it down to a reasonable speed.

I wrote a DHTML version of Pong a while back that is far superior. Here's a link. The underlying architecture was very primitive when I wrote it, not having features like the Canvas tag available. And yet it is one of the better Pong variations on the net. (If you don't mind my saying so.) The reason for its superiority is simple: 95% of people who write a game don't understand what makes games interesting.

In the case of Pong, nearly all variations are too slow and the AI consists of stupidly following the ball. Well, that's not very fun. The ball should bounce fairly quickly and the AI should respond like a human. How do you make AI respond like a human, though? Simple: It should not act robotic and it should make mistakes.

The AI for Pong stops moving the paddle when the ball is traveling in the opposite direction. This helps remove the "robot" feel of the opponent. Next, the computer is limited to the same rate of movement as the player. This gives the player a chance to sneak one by the computer. (Since the ball is faster than the paddle.) Finally, the AI has a bit of jitter in its algorithm. Rather than moving with the ball, it computes where the ball is expected to be. A random amount of jitter is then added to the computation so that the computer has the possibility of "misjudging" where the ball will actually arrive. By adjusting the jitter, the game can be made to play on easy, normal, or hard. (Use the options menu to set the difficulty. Though for some reason, the menu doesn't work on Chrome. So just be aware of that issue.)

Another game that is rarely done right is Tetris. Take the Jetris game in the "GameJS" link. It's a nice tech demo, but it's a sub-par game. And not because the game is of the "classic" Tetris variety. (My own Tetris game was of the same variety.) It at least gets the coloring right in that each piece is a specific color. (Though adhering to the Tetris standards for coloring would have been an improvement.) That's a good first step. The bigger issue is that the piece selection does not have a very good distribution of pieces. I regularly get three or four of the same piece in a row. That should never happen in a good Tetris game. Programmers need to take steps to ensure that the player will never get more than two of the same piece in a row. The Tetris "Bag" algorithm is a good solution to this that makes the game more fun. Another good trick is to ensure that pieces always arrive in the default rotation.

Anyway, the point of my rant is that the technology is rarely the problem. A good game programmer can make a fun game out of nearly any technology. An inexperienced game programmer with no understanding of what is "fun" can make any technology look like the problem.

1. It was a rib at Javascript. Don't take it so seriously. :-)

2. Are you talking about JS or PHP? Because in JS, != is less restrictive than !==. != will attempt to coerce the types prior to comparison. Thus you almost always want to use !== to prevent automatic casting of types.

e.g. ('12' != 12) would evaluate to false while ('12' !== 12) would evaluate to true.

More info

The news is that this dude says he did the www, not Al Gore.

If by "This Dude" you mean Tim Berners-Lee, then it's not at all news.

Al Gore built the internet (in that he's responsible for legislation encouraging it being built), while Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web.

Should anyone be unfamiliar with that distinction, it is discussed to some satisfaction at http://webopedia.internet.com/DidYouKnow/Internet/2002/Web_vs_Internet.asp and a quick google search for, say, "internet vs. www" should give you more information.

Also, Al Gore's legislation encouraging the internet into existence happened around 1988, while TBL did his web-thing in 1991. The years are pulled out of http://www.firstmonday.org/ISSUES/issue5_10/wiggins/ which is not my ass.

with Windows 95. Then they started acting like a monopoly.

Exhibit 1: "Government interest in Microsoft's affairs had begun in 1991 with an inquiry by the Federal Trade Commission over whether Microsoft was abusing its monopoly on the PC operating system market. ... the Department of Justice opened its own investigation on August 21 of [1993], resulting in a settlement on July 15, 1994 in which Microsoft consented not to tie other Microsoft products to the sale of Windows ..." (timeline)

See MS Litigation page and Court TV Library for more details.

Another former competitor, approximately coëval with Windows 95, was BeOS. Microsoft settled an anti-competitive complaint brought by Be Inc. in 2002.

Windows 95 had barely been released when Sun launched complained of breach of contract followed by serious anti-competitive claims in 2002 regarding Microsoft's Java tactics.

This is not the legal record of an honest company. The leopard never changes its spots. Gates was a "sharp" businessman from the day he opened office. (Which is a polite way of saying, white collar criminal.)

As an ex-Austin customer of Time-Warner ISP, I would say that the first suspect in any service outage should be TWC's incompetence. I finally switched to their new, local competitor: Grande Communications and have been thoroughly pleased ever since. The final straw for me was a network outage for my entire neighborhood that was identified on wednesday, they sent a guy out thursday, then said it would require a tier-2 tech to fix, who won't come out on the weekends, and friday is all booked up. So our whole neighborhood didn't get back online until monday.

Apple is a significant stockholder of Akamai and uses their distributed load balancing service for iTunes content. Before I'd suspect a server-side problem with Akamai (who knows a little bit about networks), my first go-to for troubleshooting would be TWC (who has demonstrated that networks are hard).

Seth

The consumer never had the choice.

Go back earlier, Mosaic 1.0 displayed the webpage and its address in 1993: [screenshot].

The keyboard "stinks" for me. I could not type well, but I only gave it half an hour. I see a lot of frustration in my future if I get an iPhone. But for usefulness, the five way rocker is great. I don't need a stylus anymore, once you know how to get around in all the Palm applications.

I appreciate your opinion, I just didn't find my experience to be the same. After my disappointment with the 650, I am never buying another Palm (unless they seriously change their act), ditto Nokia (the 6822 seemed like a good idea at the time).

I don't play chess, but there are options.

NaturalMotion isn't quite as dynamic as it may appear. It's not doing a full physical simulation most of the time. There's still considerable use of motion capture data and kinematics. Blended approaches like that are the norm in animation; full control of a humanoid character with real physics is still not that great. There's continual progress, though. Today, we have the MIPS and many of the algorithms. When I was first working on this, we had 20 MIPS, and things were rather slow. We could get the theory to work, but the hardware wasn't there yet.

Much of this was done a decade ago, by Motion Factory, which was a Stanford spinoff. That was purely kinematic, but produced reasonably good movement. Eventually, Softimage/Avid bought that company, but didn't do much with it. Boston Dynamics has also done work in that area.

I've seen a few places that now offer "e-rebates." So you can just fill out the rebate info at their website instead of mailing it in.

http://old-siliconvalley.internet.com/news/article .php/741951

They do ask but the government in China does everything it can to make sure those voices are not heard. See this constantly updated entry in Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_i n_China You can see from this page http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/02/testimony-i nternet-in-china.html how hard it is for seaarch engines to cope with the problems in China. Most importantly, when people do cry out they are taken to court by the Chinese government. You can see an article about such cases here. http://asia.internet.com/news/article.php/3600251

Using http://javascript.internet.com/ makes you a DHTML *programmer*? Or do we need more fodder for http://www.thedailywtf.com/?

Somehow, this scares me...

It's more sophisticated that you might think:
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/google/
http://siliconvalley.internet.com/news/article.php /1488031

Notice:
http://www.google.de/search?hl=de&q=nazi&btnG=Goog le-Suche&meta=
Ergebnisse 1 - 10 von ungefähr 28.300.000 für nazi. (0,03 Sekunden)
http://www.google.fr/search?hl=fr&ie=ISO-8859-1&q= nazi&btnG=Rechercher&meta=
Résultats 1 - 10 sur un total d'environ 28 300 000 pour nazi. (0,05 secondes)
http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en- us&q=nazi&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
Results 1 - 10 of about 29,900,000 for nazi [definition]. (0.04 seconds)

See the search count numbers? Don't blame it on language. Lets search for Nazi in ... Japan:
http://www.google.co.jp/search?q=Nazi&btnG=%CF%EE% E8%F1%EA+%E2+Google&lr=
Nazi 29,900,000 1 - 10 (0.05 )

Neat, huh?

Keep in mind, unless you specify google to focus on your language, the search results should be _exactly_ the same across local sites. Except if they tamper with the results, which both Google and Yahoo do for Germany and France.

Research on Similar experiences with china:
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/china/

Sadly, you can't test the Chinese version from outside China. cyberlaw sometimes has a proxy running in China that will allow you to test it, but its currently down. A google filters those results based upon whether your IP block is Chinese or not.

Here's someone's test. You don't have to believe it, I guess:
http://www.dit-inc.us/report/google200409/google.h tm

Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_words_blocked _by_search_engines_in_Mainland_China

Interestingly enough, looks like our Congress criters may be trying to change this behavior:
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-6026733.html

It's really not as bad these days as you might think. Pretty much everything supports getElementbyId() - only IE4 and similarly stone-age browsers don't, with a combined market share of less than 1%. So, frankly, leaving them out in the cold wouldn't be exactly tragic - and if you do want to extend legacy support to them it's a simple matter to check for the non-existence of that function, and add a 'wrapper' with the same name which uses document.all or document.layers to have the same effect.

That way your entire code is free of if-this-browser/else-this-browser crap: it all just uses the standard DOM, except for one tiny wrapper function at the very start of your code.

For an example of this technique see: http://javascript.internet.com/snippets/getelement byid.html

(I found a better version of this technique a few weeks ago, but I can't seem to find it now. You get the idea though.)

Overall though, I don't really like javascript at all, I must admit.

I don't know if anyone else has experienced this, but it seems that Firefox 1.5 is the only browser that struggles with this javascript. It works fine with 1.4 and with IE. I havn't tried Opera. I've submitted the problem to Mozilla but I never heard anything back. Maybe someone here is smart enough to figure out a quick fix to the javascript to make it work properly in all browsers.

The script in question can be found here. Enter in the first date like MMDDYY and it will convert it over to MM/DD/YYYY. Problem is, it drops off the last digit. Makes it MM/DD/YYY. Oops!

No, I believe it is illegal. Check out this article about people who were charged for using Pump and Dump tactics, which I believe are illegal. (I am not a lawyer, but if it sounds sleazy, it could be illegal.)

Whoa.. thanks for the quick flamebait...

why even bother reading the post? "I am mod, hear me roar!!"

Read the original post:
"At some point I'd like to be able to have 400 of my best images already pre-zipped and loaded to my web host for quick download. I'm wondering how best to secure the images to prevent unauthorized download but also make it relatively easy for the typical un-savvy client."

Isn't that just calling for an adult-website-type solution? That's exactly what adult websites do: they have their posting of their product, be it pictures or videos, and when you buy access to those, you get provided with a username and password, which usually lasts only a few days. Isn't that what the OP is asking for?

But, for the idiots who have their scripts set to mod "Flamebait" if it reads the word "porn" (pornpornpornpornpornpornpornporn!!!!), here's some simple javascript solutions (if you want more security, I would suggest .htaccess):

http://javascript.internet.com/passwords/gatekeepe r.html
http://www.javascript-page.com/passwords/

Article about it

Yahoo! Buzz

With all the talk about mult-core processors, there has often been mention of Oracle's per-core licensing fees. And remember the whole debacle with the state of California's Oracle contract.

- Greg

Carl

"A petaflop is roughly a human brain-second. Peta is equal to a million gigaflops or a million gigahertz Pentium processors. So we're crossing to a transition of computing power (equivalent to what's) in your head. What will we do with it, or it with us?

PXA
MVNO
AD2P

BEST advice EVER for Internet sales.

I don't understand how or why, but it seems that NO ONE knows that with credit cards if you don't get what you paid for then you can charge back the money to the seller. Further, if your card gets stolen or your card # gets abused or leaked on the internet you are only legally liable for the first $50 of fraud, and then CC companies generally don't even take you for that $50 and better yet if you report the fraud before any charges are made you are liable for NOTHING. NOTHING.

So seriously, quit messing around with direct bank account stuff on paypal (which IMO is very dangerous), and quit using debit cards for payment because CREDIT CARDS, while evil, offer the best protection you can get. What's sad is the number of people who pay their bills when they see fradulent charges and try to get it fixed directly the merchant, this is ok if you trust the merchant and just think a mistake has been made, but if you pay the bill then your ability to recover the money goes down significantly. Don't pay it if there are fradulent charges on there, call the CC company, they will take care of it and give you a new statement to pay. AOL exploited its customers ignorance of this rule when it fradulently continued to charge customers credit cards after customers canceled their accounts. They managed to steal away a coupla extra bucks and stave off their crisis since they knew that their customers wouldn't dispute the charges and that they could just tell the customers to go screw. Then again what is it that everyone says about AOL users again? Apparently AOL is aware of this too ;)

Just be sure to pay 100% of your balance every statement. And don't try to abuse this system, card companies will figure out your game, they've got Frank Abagnale on their side.

The IRS? HAHAHAHA! The IRS has so badly mismanaged their IT projects that they're generally recognized as the worst of the bad government contract managers. Their old data system is barely limping along but after spending tens of millions they're no closer to a working replacement than they were two years ago.

Here's one example there are many, many more.

We can all breath a giant sigh of relief if they get the new main system online before the old one throws in the electronic towel. Any time you ask anyone in the IRS group how things are going, you'll always get the Air Force salute (shoulder shrug) in response.

Here's a great article about how worried Google is about their brand becoming a generic term.

Because of the quality of it's search engine Google has, over time, became a part of speach. How many times have i heard people say "i just googled for it" or "i found this and that after some googling". Internet search is now associated with google, its the mindset of the vast majority and that is going to be very hard to compete with.

Yes. But this is also a problem for Google, since they will have problems trademarking a generic word.

And once Google equals "internet search", they will have a hard time defending the name in court.

Besides the confusion you see here, one may note that ExpressCard, besides the name, is not new at all. It was originaly named "NEWCARD" and announced 2 years ago.

FYI, you can find more about its history here, here, and here.

Just in case you were curious, this video is hosted on The Internet

Nintendo's been very friendly about third party software and hardware developers/hacker

Somehow I find that hard to believe, although there is a lot of gameboy hacker stuff out there, it probably has more to do with original Gameboy being an obsolete product than with Nintendo's "generosity". Here are a few examples of "Nintendo friendliness":

* Nintendo tries to stop emulation scene from moving into handheld market

* Nintendo didn't want people to play music on thier gameboys

* Yahoo sued for not doing Nintendo's (and others) job of IP rights enforcement

Nintendo is no better than MS or Sony. If you can argue ANY console maker is hacker-friendly, it woud be Sony--they offered at least half-hearted support for running Linux and hacker/developer tools on the PS2. Has Nintndo done anything like that lately?

In any case, in the past 20 years, Nintendo has proven that it'll play hardball. If you don't have your game stamped with their Seal of Quality and pay a buttload of royalties to them they'll barely tolerate you at best, and sue your a$$ out of existence at worst.

``Unsolicited bulk email'' seems like a pretty good definition to me, but I guess that's not quite good enough for the brainiacs at FTC.

Well, I haven't had the annoyance of Javascript alt-click blocking since I started using the extension. Just tested with this script, and no problems. I'm also a mousegesture user, so alt-click blocking interferes with my regular use of the browser. (BTW, I think Firefox now includes some built-in protection from this abuse -- but the extension adds some extra assurance.

This has been gone over at length on Groklaw. IBM HAS taken action. No matter what SCO does, IBM still has a huge countersuit under something called Lanham Act . Methinks SCO is in a bit of trouble

Back in 2000, this was the original plan of a Washington, DC startup called ZebraPass. They failed spectacularly.

Which is exactly why Google fought to keep itself out of the dictionary. Once googling becomes a generic term that means "to perform a web search" your friend will not have to say that he A9d for it. He'll say that he googled for it despite the fact that he used a different engine. I'd say we're almost at that point now.

That's why. Every new router, switch and other device on Intel's "Internet 3", replacing all the old hardware, will of course need processors...

This is the same reason Intel is putting so much research into DARPA's Smart Dust concept. Right now Smart Dust is a bunch of engineers geeking around (or to some extent, a solution looking for a problem), but when/if it hits big, and micropower sensors are deployed in the hundreds-thousands-or-millions at a time, they would love to step up to potential manufacturers (before ARM and everyone else do) and say "hey, we've already got nanowatt CPUs tailored to that application, whattdya say?"

(Of course, don't discount the Engineers Having Fun factor either.)

...Unocal. I find it hard to believe that they'd be doing anything dodgy like this.

Sheesh.

It's not like they're The Carlyle Group or anything.

"Where on earth is child porn legal"

In the United States. You can have pictures of children engaged in sexual activity all you want. The stipulation though is they must be drawn / computer generated.

That is the problem with this discussion, people are flinging around the term 'child pornography' and are not bothering to define what they mean. Is nudism photos in the pile? Stories about children having sex? Paintings? Define what you mean, or people will cast such a big net around the world 'child porn', famous paintings or plays like Romeo and Juliet will be censored as well.

• math.hws.edu/javanotes/
• www.mindview.net/Books/TIJ/
• javaboutique.internet.com/tutorials/Thread0/
• www.labsoftware.com/Java/

Actually, it's demonstrably superior to Java's way, as Java doesn't maintain the Liskov Substitution Principle. With no subclassing, Limbo doesn't have this problem.

I wouldn't say that Limbo's way was superior in the same way to all languages with subclassing, as that's a matter of taste. I'll just say that IMHO, the main obstacle to writing sound, maintainable programs is the problem of complexity.

A big contributor to the complexity of a system is the amount of interdependency between its components, which is often encapsulated by class/module interfaces. In a system with subclassing, I cannot understand a subclass unless I have understood all its interface superclasses; likewise I cannot understand a class implementation unless I have understood all its implementation superclasses.

Instead of encapsulating complexity behind an interface as narrow as possible, subclassing promotes unnecessary interdependency between software components, and therefore makes for a more complex and less maintainable system.

This page has more references on this kind of thing.

You'd end up keeping the receive patterns and that one in sync, which would be pain

That's what type checking's about, dude! As far as I can see, with Erlang message passing, if you accidentally send a message of the wrong type, it'll just hang around, lost in transit. The type checking on Limbo channels is just the same as that on function calls, and that's great. For looser, untyped, interconnections, you've got files (which in Inferno can represent any external resource).

That's not to say I don't think that Erlang isn't cool - I do, and I like functional programming languages. I'm just saying that Inferno has a great deal to offer too, and perhaps more in some areas.

http://www.internet.com/icom_cgi/print/print.cgi?u rl=http://www.15seconds.com/issue/040112.htm

CA/Fujitsu abandoned their Jasmine OO database product, and it looks like Progress is allowing ObjectStore to wither on the vine.

Oh, AND WE NEED 64-BIT DATABASES AND 64-BIT PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES LIKE YESTERDAY!!! SQL's 32-bit BLOB just doesn't cut the mustard. Hell, the following won't even compile on Java 1.5:

public class SixtyFourBit
{

public static void main (String args[])
{ long theLong = 1;
theLong <<= 32;
theLong += 1;
System.out.println("theLong = " + theLong);

double [] theDoubleArray = new double[theLong];

}

SixtyFourBit.java:11: possible loss of precision
found : long
required: int

Thanks!

Does anyone have any experience with Microsoft's new ObjectSpaces persistent object initiative for .NET? Some overview here:

http://www.internet.com/icom_cgi/print/print.cgi?u rl=http://www.15seconds.com/issue/040112.htm

CA/Fujitsu abandoned their Jasmine OO database product, and it looks like Progress is allowing ObjectStore to wither on the vine.

Oh, AND WE NEED 64-BIT DATABASES AND 64-BIT PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES LIKE YESTERDAY!!! SQL's 32-bit BLOB just doesn't cut the mustard. Hell, the following won't even compile on Java 1.5:

public class SixtyFourBit
{

public static void main (String args[])
{ long theLong = 1;
theLong <<= 32;
theLong += 1;
System.out.println("theLong = " + theLong);

double [] theDoubleArray = new double[theLong];

}

SixtyFourBit.java:11: possible loss of precision
found : long
required: int

The current IBM POWER4 and upcoming POWER5 chips are both dual-core chips. Here is a nice presentation(PDF format) about the POWER5; you can see in the die photos where there are two cores. There have also been rumors of a dual-core PowerPC based on it, but nothing concrete yet.

Broadcom (which bought SiByte) markets a dual-core, 1GHz 64-bit MIPS chip called the BCM1250 which has a lot of integrated networking goodies.

Finally, it bears pointing out that on the other side of Intel's severed corpus callosum, they're also working on a dual-core chip.