Month: March 2004

Microsoft have been found guilty of anti-trust behavior in the EU courts, and have been fined $613 million.

The final decision regarded the integral bundling on Microsoft WIndows Media Player into the operating system, and that it gave Microsoft an unfair advantage over othercompeting Media companies. As a result they will also have to remove Media Player from OS.

A product release on java.net caught my eye this morning, for Omnicore’s CodeGuide IDE.

This IDE has a ‘back-in-time’ debugger feature that allows you to step forward and backwards through your code as you debug. This is superb feature that would allow you to step back through the code after you have found a bug causing an exception. In other debuggers, once you have reached the exception, depending on the error handling in your code, you’ve already stepped too far and missed the point where the bug actually occurred, and you probably need to restart and get to the same place again to see exactly what happened.

With this ‘back-in-time’ feature you can step backwards to examine the code that has already executed, without needing to restart.

Tim Bray, one of the initial developers of the XML spec, recently joined Sun as a Technology Director.

In his blog he discusses why he chose to work for Sun, and discusses the current drawbacks of the .NET platform.

His main points about .NET:

• Java hits the 80/20 point in terms of functionality – 20% of the initial effort in developing the language achieved 80% of the goal (the remaining 80% of development of the language and platform has been filling in the last 20% of features used by the few), whereas .NET arrived on day 1 with so many features (in traditional Microsoft bloatware style), but falls short of meeting 80% of the goal.
• .NET is created by a company that has a history of delivering client side applications, whereas it can be argued the most important aspect of a web-based business application today is what goes on at the backend

The BBC are currently looking at using Java to add interactive features and content to their TV programming, for example to allow viewers at home to take part in quiz shows.

More info here