Pete Wright abandons Microsoft and Windows in favor of Ubuntu Linux, Apple Mac and Ruby on Rails

Once in a while it’s interesting to hear about someone who has been completely entrenched in a given technology suddenly pack their bags, get up and leave, and take on completely new technology.

Pete Wright, well known for authoring several best selling Visual Basic books, has just done exactly that – decided enough is enough and has completely walked away from anything Microsoft related in favor of Ubuntu Linux, Mac OS X and Ruby on Rails instead. In his blog he gives the following reasons:

“Vista looks like a pile of crap compared to Mac OS X and Ubuntu with GLX. Their software (Microsoft) is buggy, overpriced, and stress inducing. Their development tools are staid, designed and developed by committees to solve every problem you could ever conceive of, while being ideally suited to solving none.”

Wow. Strong words for someone who has been living the Microsoft life for such a long time. This is an interesting read.

More info on Sun’s hiring of the JRuby developers

This has caught a lot of attention over the last couple of weeks. Sun has recruited the two main developers of the JRuby implementation of Ruby on Java, Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo.

Tim Bray, Director of Web Technologies at Sun, as posted this article on his personal blog that answers some of the questions about this move and the reasons for why Sun is taking an interest in JRuby.

The main reasons given for this move seem to revolve around Sun and the Java communities current interest in supporting and running dynamic languages on the Java platform. Since what Nutter and Enebo have implemented so far is a version of Ruby that runs on the Java platform, this fits well with this current interest, and of course brings the advantages and associated hype of Ruby and of course Ruby on Rails to Java.

8 Core Mac Pro tower? Possible with new Quad Core Xeon and Core 2 Intel processors

The new Mac Pro desktop machine ships with 2x dual core Intel processors, which by itself really is a monster of a machine. Later this year though, Intel will be shipping quad-core Xeon and Core 2 processors. A pair of these in a dual processor machine like the Mac Pro will give you 8 cores. Yes, 8.

AnandTech have a review on their site where they obtained a pair of these new CPUs and installed them in a Mac Pro, and confirmed that yes, Mac OS X on a Mac Pro will recognize and run with 8 cores. Now that’s some horsepower.

Windows Live Search goes live (looking strangely familiar)

Microsoft will be releasing it’s ‘Windows Live Search’ service, after more than a year of running it in beta.

The new search service will incorporate the ability to search websites, news, images, local information, and presents the results in a fashion remarkably similar to Google. In fact the front page looks like Google, the results are displayed like Google, the sponsored ads appear like Google, and they offer the similar abilitity to search for sites, images, local information, etc, … just like Google. Take a look at Microsoft’s ‘Google clone’ here…