News (208)

Adobe confirms Flash for iPhone

Adobe has reportedly confirmed that its Flash technology is coming to Apple's iPhone. Read more »

Net neutrality is an 'American problem'

The leaders of three of Australia's largest ISP's have declared the Net neutrality debate as solely a US problem — and further, that the nation that pioneered the internet might want to study the Australian market for clues as to how to solve the dilemma. Read more »

IBM warns standards bodies to shape up

IBM has issued a warning to international standards body ISO in the wake of its approval of Microsoft's OOXML. Read more »

Step aside, Chrome, for Squirrelfish Extreme

Just about every browser out there now is trying to grab the crown for fastest performance for running JavaScript, the programming language that powers many increasingly sophisticated Web-based applications. Read more »

Silicon Valley trip for Qld minister

Queensland's information and communications technology minister Robert Schwarten has scheduled a trip to the US and Canada to meet with global tech giants and top-ranking public sector technology officials. Read more »

Ubuntu debuts Jaunty Jackalope

The Ubuntu project has detailed plans for the April 2009 version of its Linux distribution, continuing its habit of naming its software after animals by dubbing Ubuntu 9.04 "The Jaunty Jackalope". Read more »

Google quietly updates Chrome

Search giant Google has quietly begun releasing a hastily prepared update to its Chrome browser to fix some security problems. Read more »

Chrome's jittered JavaScript kills Silverlight?

The biggest rival for Microsoft's next-generation Silverlight Web technology will be JavaScript, not Adobe's ubiquitous Flash, according to experts speaking at Microsoft's Tech.Ed conference in Sydney this morning. Read more »

Firefox counters Chrome on speed

Mozilla fought back on Wednesday in the US with some performance results to show a forthcoming version of Firefox outpacing Google's new Web browser, Chrome. Read more »

Magnet allows tongue driven PC

Engineers have developed technology that would allow people with severe disabilities to operate a wheelchair or computer by moving their tongue. Read more »

Features (218)

More New SQL Server 2008 Features

Microsoft updates SQL Server on a pretty regular basis. Its newest version, SQL Server 2008, includes some new features not found in older versions. Here's a list of some of them. Read more »

Aussie IT unions rise from the dead

Australia's creaky technology unions have finally awoken from their long slumber and have started to throw their weight around. Read more »

Sleep deprivation can spell big trouble

Most of us operate on short sleep from time to time -- it's the nature of our profession and modern lifestyles. But if skimping on sleep is a way of life for you, watch out: you could wind up functioning below par and incur some serious health problems. Read more »

JavaScript -- a Flash competitor?

Open source software has its problems when it's trying to keep up with proprietary software, but when it does what it's good at -- creating ideas and developing them very quickly in public -- it can be revolutionary. Read more »

Getting to grips with parallelism

Although parallelism may be a new concept for many programmers, there are some for whom the concept is a part of their daily responsibilities. Read more »

A Beginners Guide to Threading

The golden age for programmers is over. For a decade we have been able to get away with writing slow code, knowing that the hardware would pick up the slack. Not so any more, hardware developers have decided that software developers need to raise their game, and get ready for a generation of multi-core processors. Read more »

Programming for Cell

As the Cell has seven usable cores and some exotic memory features, it can offer more parallelism than other chips in the marketplace but it comes at the cost of ease of programming. We discuss the challenges faced by this difficult yet highly parallel architecture. Read more »

Technology saturation affects developers and organisations

Juval Lowy, a member of Microsoft's internal design review team for .NET, has said that there is no doubt that the average developer and average organisation are completely saturated by an avalanche of technologies. Read more »

What does a DBA do all day?

Data integrity is a DBA's number one responsibility, but do you know what else they do all day? Read more »

Inside the San Fran network lockout

A strange sort of techno-drama is playing out in the city of San Francisco, California right now. The blame for the fiasco may not be as easily assigned as it at first appears. Read more »

Video (3)

Should standards be imposed?

Juval Lowy discusses the trade-off of using a highly structured protocol standard for communication instead of a fast and unreliable protocol. Read more »

Scaling fast-growing Facebook

Jonathan Heiliger, vice president of technical operations at Facebook, talks with CNET News.com Editor in Chief Dan Farber about devising the infrastructure to support the social network's hypergrowth. Read more »

Gosling: Realtime Java

James Gosling explains realtime Java and dismisses the perception that realtime means real fast. Read more »

Blog (23)

Spellr.us needs a new dictionary

[blogs:bootstrappr] -- One of the only Australian start-ups to present at the recent round of conferences in the US was Sydney-based spellr.us, which has launched a Web-based tool to check and monitor websites for spelling mistakes. Read more »

Chrome DNS shortcut revealed

Chris Duckett [blogs:betaliving] -- The Chromium Blog has detailed one of the shortcuts that Google Chrome uses to enhance the browsing experience: DNS prefetching. Read more »

Gartner: Social software projects lack purpose

Brendon Chase [blogs:codemonkeybusiness] -- Social software projects fail because IT management lack purpose of their deployment according to the industry analyst firm. Read more »

MyPerfect.com.au has potential

[blogs:bootstrappr] -- Victorian Web start-up My Perfect has a strong story and rationale for why it will succeed. But it has to overcome some challenges and design flaws first. Read more »

The future remains yesterday

Staff [blogs:syslog] -- Remember when MySQL was blazingly fast and cared little for SQL standards? When MySQL regarded a view as something nice from your window and a trigger was treated as a weaponry component? Those days are set to return with a MySQL fork called Drizzle. Read more »

Repent Open Sourcerers

Staff [blogs:syslog] -- The Anglican Diocese in Sydney is moving away from Microsoft technologies, Access and ActiveX provide another way for remote code execution and a local Aussie team wins the Imagine Cup. All that and more in this week's Roundup. Read more »

Programmers in India prefer Google's Orkut

Staff [blogs:syslog] -- Google's Orkut social network isn't just big in Brazil. It's also popular in India, especially among software developers, according to a new survey. Read more »

What's new in GWT 1.5?

Lana Kovacevic [blogs:webanatomy] -- I recently wrote an introduction to the Google Web Toolkit based on Lars Rasmussen's session at the Google Developer Day 2008 in Sydney. Following the introductory session Lars gave us a deeper insight into GWT, particularly what's new in version 1.5. Read more »

Firefox 3 add-ons to make you a better Web developer

Brendon Chase [blogs:codemonkeybusiness] -- Firefox might be a fast browser but it's extensions can transform it into a powerful development tool for Web developers and designers. Here are 10 of the best to get you started. Read more »

RIP: iPhone carrier monopoly

Staff [blogs:syslog] -- Each time an iPhone launch story appears, one can almost feel thousands of credit cards shudder in collective fear. This week the landscape for the iPhone began to crystallise with confirmation of multiple carriers and a very good indication that the iPhone in Australia would be 3G. Read more »

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  • Staff XP stays on life support for longer

    This week's Roundup looks at Microsoft's decision to extend the life of Windows XP, the release of Microsoft Surface SDK, Firefox's new Geode plug-in, Yahoo's new tool -- Smush It and more. Read more »

    -- posted by Staff

  • Chris Duckett The good and truly awful celluloid depictions of computers

    Ever wonder why your lawyer uncle leaves the room whenever you turn over to Boston Legal? Or why your forensic science cousin can't stand crime drama? You know the answer: it’s the horrid trivialisation and dumbing down of an occupation to make it appear entertaining. Sometimes it is so unbelievable that it actually hurts and yelling at the screen is the only outlet. Read more »

    -- posted by Chris Duckett

  • Brendon Chase Apple's iPhone engineers to tour Sydney, Melbourne

    Aussie developers will be able to get up close and personal with some of the iPhone engineers in November to learn how to build applications for the platform. Read more »

    -- posted by Brendon Chase

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