Over the last couple of years Google has attracted some of the smartest and most influential people in the IT industry, and has attracted significant engineers from other companies such as Microsoft and BEA. CNet.com have an list of some of the more famous employees and their backgrounds – take a look here.
PS3 – CNN Money says will still ship in 2006
Despite rumours flying that the PS3 will not ship in 2006 due to higher than expected component costs, and the fact that the copy protection scheme for BluRay disks has not yet been finalized, CNN Money is speculating that Sony are forced to ship this year, otherwise the loss in market share to Microsoft’s XBox360 may not be recoverable.
Although the article does not quote any sources, CNN Money is saying that the Spring 2006 launch in Japan is now very doubtful, but a Novemeber launch for the US is still planned.
Netbeans 5.0 presentation and demo
Haven’t seen Netbeans 5.0 yet? Javalobby have a presentation by Roman Strobl, a Netbeans Evangelist, giving an overview and demonstrating using features in the IDE.
Having lived in the Eclipse world using IBM based IDEs (WSAD and RAD) for the past 3 years, I must admit that Netbeans is looking more and more impressive, and is definitely worth a look. I have been put off from taking a look since using it briefly in 2000/2001 (I think) and I wasn’t very impressed at that time – the UI appeared too clunky to me and wasn’t very easy to use. Now it is looking very impressive – very slick and polished.
Think extending Eclipse with plugins is easy? Take a look at the demo on adding ‘actions’ to Netbeans… an incredibly simple wizard driven approach to add new functionality to Netbeans.
IDC report shows Windows servers outselling Unix-based servers?
I find this report very hard to believe and the results must be seriously skewed somehow, but IDC have a report called Server Watch, which apparently shows Windows server boxes outselling Unix boxes in 2005 (by $17.7bn to $17.5bn).
Not unexpectedly, in terms of web server software market share Apache still dominates the market running on more than 3 times as many web servers as Microsoft IIS, has has done so consistently since the mid 90’s with no signs of Microsoft even getting close. Although this server survey is just a web server survey, this makes me question the usefulness of IDC’s report of server sales – does this include various Linux flavours, and since being free, are they included in IDC’s report? Probably not. So in terms of sales Windows servers may be leading Unix, but in terms of installations I have no doubt that there are more Unix based server installations in the wild than there are Windows, and I doubt even Microsoft would argue with that.