Kev's Development Toolbox

July 21, 2009

Microsoft u-turns an releases 20,000 lines of driver code to Linux code base

I love it how Microsoft flip-flops about trying to find their way. At one time according to Microsoft there was no future in the internet and they decided to put all their effort into their own closed content dial-up information service (anyone remember the first MSN?). We know what happened after that with the reversal in strategic direction that followed shortly.

This week’s change in direction is the announcement that Microsoft are releasing 20,000 lines of code to Linux to help Linux run on Windows on Hyper-V, and take advantage on optimizations to help Linux run faster when running in a VM on Linux.

Huh? Err, Earth to Ballmer – you were intent on killing Linux, and I’m sure you don’t need reminding about that Open Source stuff that you referred to as a cancer to the software industry – you appear to now be helping Linux run on Windows? What on earth is going on up in Redmond! Are they planning a Microsoft classic ‘embrace, extend, extinguish‘ attack on Linux? If I were running Linux servers commercially I would be massively suspicious of running this Microsoft code on my Linux servers and would avoid it like the plague. I imagine others would have the same feelings too.

July 19, 2009

Yahoo Mail video of times gone by

Yahoo have a interesting collage of video snippets looking back over the years of email and internet access. It’s Yahoo focused, but it’s interesting and a fun look down memory lane.

July 16, 2009

ZeroTurnaround looking for new name for JavaRebel

JavaRebel is one of those products you wonder how you lived without before you found it. We’ve been evaluating it on my current project. It enables you to make code changes and hot swap them into the running JVM on the fly, much more transparently than you’ve ever seen or experienced with any IDE and JVM combo in debug. It actually does some pretty clever stuff on the fly (more info on their site). The end result is you can delay having to restart your app server or redeploy your app, because any code changes you make are patched in to the running classes in the deployed app. Very clever.

Anyway, the company behind it are looking for a new product name, since they’ve been approached and asked to remove ‘Java’ from the name. Head over here to look at the current suggestions.

July 16, 2009

Gates and Balmer: Nothing new about Google Chrome OS. Really? What’s so new with Windows nowdays?

Gates and Balmer surprise me. Well I guess they shouldn’t because their reactions are quite predictable. They’re saying that there’s nothing new about Google’s Chrome OS – it’s just another Linux distro. The thing is, when can you look back at Microsoft’s wonderful offerings to the tech world and say ‘wow, that’s something new’?

Windows 7 is Vista with some tweaks, and probably much the same as the Vista codebase, just rebadged to try and have another go and making some money and trying to shake the negativity around Vista.
Vista was a few visual tweaks above XP.
XP was a radical step forward from 98.
ME was a technological disaster.
98 was 95 plus some bug fixes.
95 was a radical step forward from Windows 3.1.
Windows 3.x was a major step forward from MS-DOS.

Throw 2000 and Server 2003 in the mix that no-one seems to care about anyway. And NT that stole it’s code base from OS/2.

In all honesty, Windows 3.x was a massive step forwards from PC OSes we had before it, but 95 is most likely Microsoft’s most significant product in my mind. Guys – sorry to remind you but that’s 14 YEARS AGO. Maybe you should get off your complacent butts and get something new out the door that attracts the world’s attention, because Windows 7 right now is just not cutting it.