Articles, notes and random thoughts on Software Development and Technology
PC maker Dell has announced it’s buying out storage giant EMC for $67bn, the largest buyout in tech history.
As PC hardware sales continue to drop and cloud-based services continue to grow replacing on-premise hardware, this is likely only the first mega merger in a continuing trend as ‘traditional’ IT hardware companies re-invent themselves to adapt to the changing cloud-based marketplace.
I have to admit I have zero interest in a new Windows phone. It just doesn’t do it for me. The UI looks like a random mess of data competing for my attention. A poorly designed random mess at that. Anyway, that aside, Microsoft announced their new flagship Lumia phones running “Windows 10 Mobile-whatever” and the general consensus in the press seems to be “they look great but who cares because no one is going to buy them”.
A selection of stories:
The point made by cnet is rather interesting. In the US, apparently only AT&T has signed up to carry the new phones, although the deal is not exclusively with AT&T. Which you can only read between the lines as the other major US carriers, Verizon, T-Mobile and Sprint have all passed on carrying the phone. At least so far. If AT&T turns out to be the only carrier then this, as cnet points out, is an unusual move to launch a new flagship phone with only one carrier. If you were Microsoft you would want at least 2 or 3 of the major carriers to be promoting and selling the phone, but only AT&T is interested. This can’t be good for potential sales.
Anyway, as TechCrunch says, this is the phone OS that no-one buys, even if it is the best version yet, so who cares. Maybe no-one. Have to wait and see if it turns out to be a surprise hit or not. But I wouldn’t bet on it. Or buy one.
After upgrading to El Capitan (10.11) last night, I lost my XCode command line build tools. You can reinstall by doing:
xcode-select –install
and then following the prompts to download and install.
More info here.
That’s an alarmist question, but recent goings on at Oracle suggest something is changing.
Today there was an eye opening story on InfoWorld about a letter from a ‘former high ranking Java official’ (maybe one of the Java Evangelist team recently laid off?), that
… the company [Oracle] was becoming a cloud company, competing with Salesforce, and “Java has no interest to them anymore.” The subject line cited “Java — planned obsolescence.”
This follows the recent layoffs in August/September of several key players on their Java evangelist team: Simon Ritter, Cameron Purdy, James Weaver, and others.
Maybe I’m scraping the barrel for facts here, but I noticed earlier this year that the java.net site hadn’t been updated with any new stories or updates since April:
And @javanetbuzz, who used to tweet Java related stories from the java.net site hasn’t tweeted since February 18th this year:
Incidentally, this might just be horribly bad timing, but both java.net and netbeans.org websites have been down today:
So have Oracle been quietly ramping down their Java related efforts this year? JavaOne is only 3 weeks away at this point – is there going to be some news or announcement from Oracle about their plans for Java, or are they just going to continue as if nothing has changed?
Updated: As I wrote this, java.net is back with this message (although this is dated from a few days back, so I’m assuming this message was already there on the site for a few days):
