Open source, it’s said, is an inevitable force and closed-sourcers who resist will fail. If that’s true, why did the founder of the world’s default big-data processing framework – Doug Cutting, creator of the Google MapReduce-inspired Hadoop used by Amazon.com, Facebook and Yahoo! – have so much to fear from Oracle and Microsoft before they [...]
With $16bn in its pocket, half-reports are running rife about what’s next for Facebook. Is it a smart phone built using ex-Apple engineers? More acquisitions? A reported deal for Norwegian browser maker Opera makes sense for a company answerable to shareholders and that must get out from under Apple. Opera also means millions more customers [...]
Scientists are developing technology to crunch growing volumes of data for intensive apps like search. They are marrying Nobel-award winning work in graphene with new theories in RAM and electron spin to devise a chip architecture combining memory and logic they say spells the end of conventional silicon electronics. I spoke to the physics and [...]
Apple is joining Microsoft, IBM and AT&T as the latest tech company to be prosecuted by the US government for competing unfairly against rivals – this time ebooks, readers and tablets are the problem. Apple’s defense is weak but the government’s chances of winning, taking down Apple and changing the market, are weaker still based [...]
The British government batting hard for the cloud, which it says ill make everything better: lower-cost computing, faster deliver, greater efficiencies and less big vendor lock in. The policy makers are in full flow but so is the hype and branding. I speak to Microsoft’s national technology officer and experts on cloud data lock about [...]
With HTML, Javascript’s become a building block for the web of clouds, browsers and app-stores that feed iPhones and Android devices. According to Google, however, Javascript contains “fundamental flaws” and it’s attempting to persuade other browser makers to go with its Dart language instead. Here, Allen Wirfs-Brock, editor of the ECMAScript 5 standard behind Javascript, [...]
Email-attachment inventor Dr Nathaniel Borenstein rejected Apple’s Steve Jobs twice during the course of his work on digital communications and standards. Today, adding an attachment to an email, text or Twitter page is so simple it’s taken for granted. If Jobs prevailed, however, the web would have been a radically different place. I talked to [...]
With tech companies abandoning Adobe’s Flash and Microsoft’s Silverlight media players for HTML5, the question of digital rights management over entertainment on the web is beginning to surface. Microsoft, Google and Netflix have offered a copy protection proposal that’s been branded “unethical” by the author leading the industry’s work on HTML5. You can read more [...]
Amazon’s cloud has achieved success by being present – always there and relatively easy to access for those on the front line of software development. Now, a rival project building a “Linux for the cloud” that’s backed by Dell, HP, AT&T and others hopes to siphon off potential cloud jumpers with a new, free intro [...]
Firefox shop Mozilla Foundation is reacting against the trend among tech companies of throwing up proprietary app stores that fence off the web, with a store and architecture serving webbified apps to devices regardless of maker or operating system. It might win the approval of a worried Tim Berners-Lee, but Apple, Amazon, Google and Microsoft [...]
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