eBay faces partial shutdown in patent dispute
Does MercExchange deserve the label "patent troll", or is eBay unfairly profiting from Thomas Woolston's "brilliant innovations" for which he deserves millions in compensation?
Dev Connection
Who said computers have to be all work and no play? Software developer and author Ed Burnette shares his unique view of industry trends, technologies, and personalities.
Ed Burnette
Ed Burnette is a software industry veteran with more than 25 years of experience as a programmer, author, and speaker. He has written numerous technical articles and books, most recently "Hello, Android: Introducing Google's Mobile Development Platform" from the Pragmatic Programmers.
Latest Posts
LinuxQuestions.org members make their choice
A popular Linux community selects its favorite distributions, tools, and applications. Winners include Ubuntu, KDE, Eclipse, Firefox, and MySQL.
Firefox is slow and buggy (but I'm hooked anyway)
Does Mozilla Firefox have weaknesses and bugs? Heck yes, some whoppers. So why do I still use it? Two words: Extensions and Community.
IBM dumps Microsoft? Not.
Despite published reports to the contrary, Linux backer IBM is a long ways away from cutting the umbilical cord to Microsoft Windows. A more gradual strategy of switching to cross-platform capable applications like Workplace Client will give the software giant the flexibility it needs to make that decision later if it so chooses.
Playboy, Pornography, and Eclipse
After using free bandwidth donated by Playboy Enterprises for 5 months, the Eclipse Foundation bows to concerns from the community and removes Playboy from the list of mirrors. Although Playboy hosts many other open source projects such as Apache, apparently they were a little too controversial for the conservative Foundation.
Code generation considered harmful
Matisse, the NetBeans GUI editor, was recently described as "bad" because of restrictions on editing the Java source it generates. This is unfair, however, because the whole idea of generating code is fraught with danger.
BeanShell: groovier than Groovy
Recent blogs calling Groovy the "sleeping giant" overlook a nimble alternative. With its uncluttered design, mature code base, small size, well defined semantics, dynamic language features, and JSR 274, BeanShell looks way groovier than Groovy.
Eolas work-around puts the brakes on Rich Internet Applications
Unless you recode your web pages to use the legally approved contortions, interactive content like Flash (including RIA technologies like Laszlo) won't work the same.
Eclipse: 637, Netbeans: 7
Looking to improve your marketability as a developer? You might want to learn Eclipse.
Who do you trust more than Microsoft?
IBM and Novell announce donations of code and support for the Higgins open source identity management framework.