News (279)

Strike vote fuels IBM Australia debate

A potential impending strike action at one of IBM Australia's Sydney facilities has sparked debate about whether it was still worth striving to work at one of the largest and most prestigious technology firms in Australia and the world. Read more »

Mozilla offers do-it-yourself mashups for all

Mozilla released an experimental browser plug-in on Tuesday that aims to connect the Web with language to help users perform common Web tasks more quickly and easily. Read more »

Gates: Privacy a 'challenge' as software advances

As software gets more powerful, privacy issues pose an "interesting software challenge," says Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates. Read more »

Georgia accuses Russia of co-ordinated cyberattack

The Georgian embassy in the UK has accused forces within Russia of launching a co-ordinated cyberattack against Georgian websites, to coincide with military operations in the breakaway region of South Ossetia. Read more »

Interview: Red Hat's new CEO

Red Hat's new chief executive officer, Jim Whitehurst, talks about the Linux maker in an extensive interview with ZDNet Australia sister site CNet News. Read more »

BT bets on open development

BT, long considered a risk-taker in the telecommunications market, has laid a US$105 million bet to open its network to application developers in the hopes of creating innovative voice services. But will other phone companies take a similar gamble? Read more »

No Yahoo talks; Windows 7 on track

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said Thursday in the US that its on-again, off-again talks with Yahoo were firmly in the "off-again" phase. Read more »

EU vote forces ISPs to disconnect pirates

A high-level European vote on communications legislation will take place on Monday evening, raising fears that alleged file-sharers will be denied internet access by their internet service providers. Read more »

Open source Symbian handsets expected in 2010

Nokia plans to acquire the rest of Symbian, open source the mobile operating system and launch its first handsets in two years. Read more »

Sun: We screwed up on open source

Many open source developers remain sceptical of Sun because their memories of the company focus on Sun's interactions with the community in 2001/2002, which Sun's chief open source officer Simon Phipps concedes was a period where Sun "screwed up". Read more »

Features (161)

Why would anyone choose Windows over Linux?

Why would anyone choose Windows over Linux? This article lists some of the advantages of Linux over Windows. Read more »

A change of management primer for IT consultants

Determining the ability of the client organisation to cope with a major IT project can help consultants find the most appropriate solution. Learn how evaluating the client's roles, resistance, and resilience can help you gauge their capacity for change. Read more »

Multi-core state of play

It promises to be the biggest revolution in programming since object orientation -- but it remains virtually unheard of to most developers. Thanks to the development and uptake of multi-core CPUs, developers must begin to consider truly programming in parallel. Read more »

Programming for Cell

As the Cell has seven usable cores and some exotic memory features, it can offer more parallelism than other chips in the marketplace but it comes at the cost of ease of programming. We discuss the challenges faced by this difficult yet highly parallel architecture. Read more »

Employ refactoring via Visual Studio to write better code

Refactoring is the practice of making your code cleaner and clearer without affecting the functionality. Find out what's included in Visual Studio's Refactor menu, and discover a couple of Visual Studio add-ins that bring refactoring to the Visual Basic community. Read more »

Hacking with no technology

The typical image of a hacker is a kid hunched over his keyboard in the wee hours of the night staring at commands on his computer screen that unlock the secrets of the national government. But the woman sitting next to you at Starbucks fiddling with her digital camera could be just as dangerous. Read more »

Tips for overcoming a fear of public speaking

For those of us not in the sales, marketing, or entertainment fields, a fear of speaking can make us physically ill. Unfortunately, there's no magic courage pill you can take. But there are some tips for being successful at speaking. Read more »

Seven aspects of a great user experience

The spotlight at this year's Web Directions South UX conference in Melbourne was on user experience. Andy Budd, a designer and developer at Clearleft in the UK, contributed to the theme of the day with his presentation -- "Designing the User Experience Curve". Read more »

The truth behind Ballmer's revision of history

While speaking in Moscow, Microsoft CEO and Yahoo suitor Steve Ballmer said, "Yahoo was never the strategy we were pursuing, it was a way to accelerate our online advertising business... We will spend money on some acquisitions. You can do a whole lot of things with $50 billion." Read more »

Building Microsoft code inside the tornado

Q&A -- Vice president S 'Soma' Somasegar shares his views on how interoperability and open source will help Microsoft. Read more »

Video (4)

Gosling: How Java handles multi-core

James Gosling, the man behind Java, speaks of the benefits of the Java VM (HotSpot) and how it can deal with multi-core environments Read more »

LinuxWorld: Merrill Lynch on going stateless

At the LinuxWorld conference in San Francisco, Jeffrey Birnbaum, managing director and chief technology architect at Merrill Lynch, speaks about using cloud computing to reduce the complexities and costs of financial services. He discusses the move away from dedicated machines and why old ideas like virtualization have become useful again. Read more »

Adobe: Silverlight is years behind Flash

Mike Downey, principal evangelist at Adobe, talks about RIAs and how good competition validates Adobe's move into the area. Downey then speaks on Silverlight and says that it is "years behind where the Flash Player is today". Read more »

Why security appliances can make you less secure

Security appliances can introduce vulnerabilities into an organisation's network because they often include older operating systems and vendors rarely inform customers how to properly update them, according to Microsoft's Roger Grimes, who was speaking at the AusCERT 2008 conference. Read more »

Blog (24)

Going the extra step but not the extra mile

Chris Duckett [blogs:betaliving] -- I've always been a big fan of going the extra mile with error messages, it's a good way to show that you actually care about the product to take the time to customise it even when things are amiss -- and yes, things will go wrong, you will not create the perfect application. Read more »

Targeted for hacking by reporters at my table

Staff [blogs:syslog] -- I should have known it was only a matter of time. I've been covering security conferences on and off for about 14 years and considered myself lucky not to have been hacked, that I knew of. Until Thursday. Read more »

Jonathan Schwartz's free software foundation

Staff [blogs:syslog] -- Sun has become its own free software foundation, open sourcing everything from Java to Solaris, and acquiring the open source MySQL database for $1 billion in January of this year, as a way to grow its revenue. Read more »

Outsourcing made wrong

Staff [blogs:syslog] -- Outsourcing is hot! Every major corporation around the globe is outsourcing all or part of their software development -- and unfortunately the result is lots of unsuccessful projects. Read more »

You've got patched flaws!

Staff [blogs:syslog] -- Patents and Symantec were made to look very silly this week. Microsoft said that open source was a bigger threat than Google and no prizes for guessing which month the final version of Firefox 3 will appear in. Read more »

It's ego check time for Intel, Negroponte

Staff [blogs:syslog] -- I'm especially puzzled over the inane dustup that erupted this week between Negroponte's nonprofit One Laptop Per Child and Intel. Read more »

You shall be replaced by a small shell script

Staff [blogs:syslog] -- This week's roundup covers OSDC, Google's attempt to get school kids into open source, the roel of automation in software development, why we hate salespeople and more. Read more »

Web survey confirms the obvious

Nick Gibson [blogs:byteclub] -- Web Design blog A List Apart has published the results of their first annual survey of web professionals, and the results should surprise absolutely nobody. I'll take this opportunity to break down the results (Warning: statistics ahead). Read more »

Adobe's MAX Conference 2007, Day One Keynote

Andrew Muller [blogs:nouveauricheinternet] -- The big event of a Flex, Flash or ColdFusion developer's year is Adobe's annual conference held this year in Chicago. Builder AU's Andrew Muller attended this year and reports on the first day's opening. Read more »

Simonyi tells programmers to leave the Dark Ages

Staff [blogs:syslog] -- Charles Simonyi -- legendary Microsoft programmer and space tourist -- doesn't have many good things to say about the current state of his own profession, software engineering. Read more »

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  • Staff Shadow chasing in browsers

    The punching and counterpunching continued in the ongoing web browser development bout. Each time one browser closes a feature gap, a new feature appears in one of the others -- how we ever put up with the years of browser stagnation, I'll never know. Read more »

    -- posted by Staff

  • Chris Duckett Safari gets Gears

    Since its release in May last year, Gears has supported only Internet Explorer and Firefox browsers. With the addition of Safari into the Gears fold, it closes the loop of major browsers to support Gears Read more »

    -- posted by Chris Duckett

  • Renai LeMay MyPerfect.com.au has potential

    Victorian Web start-up My Perfect has a strong story and rationale for why it will succeed. But it has to overcome some challenges and design flaws first. Read more »

    -- posted by Renai LeMay

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