Nov 17th, 2008 - A typically eloquent contribution from my colleague Happygeek tells us a great deal about the games console wars. Xbox is outselling the PS3 but they're both being trounced by the Wii. So far so good, but my guess is that the Xbox will still be the long-term loser. And I'll tell you why - the... (Read More)

Oct 31st, 2008 - I almost thought it was April 1st, but no it is actually just a couple of days before the election of the new President of the United States. Which probably accounts for why EA has apparently decided to develop a download content pack for the Mercenaries 2 game which will allow you to play as... (Read More)

Mar 16th, 2008 - A rather interesting article in the EETimes suggests that the holy grail of artificial intelligence, the ability to pass the Turing Test, may become a reality later this year courtesy of a collaboration between IBM and the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The Turing Test was first described by... (Read More)

Apr 17th, 2008 - Scientists from the University of Glasgow in Scotland have developed a nanotech switch, the size of a molecule, which could herald the 500,000 GB iPod. The scientists reckon that the breakthrough means an iPod could increase its capacity by no less than 150,000 times the current storage... (Read More)

Jul 3rd, 2007 - Linspire and Microsoft in agreement over something? Although it sounds unlikely at first glance, that is exactly what is happening as the developer of the Linspire commercial and Freespire community desktop Linux operating systems announces it will join Microsoft in its efforts to improve the... (Read More)

Apr 14th, 2007 - How small can a laser get? Good question, and according to the physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) the answer is very small indeed, one single quantum dot small perhaps. To put this into some perspective, a typical microdisk laser of the type currently used... (Read More)

Oct 29th, 2008 - With loan foreclosures up 176% this year, compared to 2007, it’s high time that we took a good look at the software tool – and the company that makes it – that promises to help troubled mortgage holders work out more favorable terms for their mortgages. In doing so, Computer Sciences (the... (Read More)

Oct 29th, 2007 - Six weeks ago I wrote that video game stocks were going to be a good play for the duration of 2007 - - and probably well into 2008. As I said at the time, anyone with a 12-year-old boy in the house recognizes the familiar hoots and hollers from the den or playroom, when the kids fire up the Wii... (Read More)

Sep 14th, 2007 - I have to admit, on my perch here overlooking Wall Street, of the industries traders typcially jawbone about, video games arean't at the top of the list. Exhibit "A". At a dinner Wednesday night with three options traders over some Kobi steaks and some good wine, all the talk was about consumer... (Read More)

Oct 23rd, 2008 - Research In Motion yesterday released new versions of its BlackBerry development tools, including the BlackBerry Java Development Environment (JDE) Plug-In for Eclipse Beta 2 that's better integrated with the open-source IDE, can perform pre-processing for builds and receives updates through the... (Read More)

Sep 27th, 2008 - Apple this week released an update to its Java Virtual Machine, taking users of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger and 10.5 Leopard to 1.6.0_07. Depending on your operating system, the patch fixes as many as 27 bugs, and chances are pretty good that you'll benefit. There are separate updaters for Tiger and... (Read More)

Jul 26th, 2008 - GUIdancer 2.2 Automates Failure Retires If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Such is the way of GUIdancer 2.2, the latest version of the function-test automation tool from Bredex, which began shipping yesterday. The keyword-driven tool for Java (Swing, SWT and RCP) and HTML can now... (Read More)

Jul 24th, 2008 - "The great thing about standards is that every company gets to have one." The first time I heard that expression was around 1995. Proclaimed by Joel Shore, a former-boss-now-friend, it was one of the many truisms at the time. A good many standards bodies and arbiters have cropped up since the... (Read More)

Jul 2nd, 2008 - The International Organization for Standardization today announced that Adobe’s Portable Document Format is now an ISO standard. Well it’s about time! The PDF has only been around for 15 years! This is great news for all areas of publishing, for Web developers and Web site admins, even... (Read More)

Jun 26th, 2008 - If you’re looking for low-cost GUI-test automation for Java, Qt, Mac OS X and Web applications, here’s a product you might find useful. Have you heard of Squish? It’s an automated function-testing tool from Froglogic. Released today was Squish 3.4, adding support for the May release of Trolltech’s... (Read More)

Jun 16th, 2008 - It’s like TiVo for Java EE apps. At least, that’s what Replay Solutions says about ReplayDirector for Java EE, which began shipping today. According to claims, it’s unlike other software playback/record products because it virtualizes the execution environment and records not only code, but also... (Read More)

May 28th, 2008 - SourceLabs is like the L. Ron Hubbard for the software community; it makes a living on developers in need of self-help. The company today added Eclipse projects to Self-Support Suite, its support tool and service for Java and Linux developers. The suite now counts the copious creations of the... (Read More)

May 24th, 2008 - Maybe it’s all part of a kinder, gentler Microsoft; or maybe it’s something else. In the latest example of Redmond’s increase in openness, the “Evil Empire” in an announcement last week said it backs the addition of the Open Document Format to the American National Standards Institute (ANSI)... (Read More)

May 7th, 2008 - It was the belle of the ball stumbling as she made her grand entrance. Sun Microsystems on Tuesday, hoping to make a big splash at JavaOne with the launch of its shiny new platform for rich internet application development, saw demos of JavaFX repeatedly crash. Like blaming it on the red... (Read More)

Aug 7th, 2008 - Telecommuters are among the luckiest employees out there: we can eat donuts during conference calls (use the mute button, please!), lay our heads on our desks when the mood strikes, and can show up to work in a canary-yellow caftan and no one is the wiser. That is, unless your employer suddenly... (Read More)

Jan 6th, 2007 - Some would say blue, given the amount of sex that can be found on the web. Others might go for black, thinking along the lines of increasing online crime. To many the whole idea of Internet technology is a grey area. But, my friends, thanks to researchers at the Chinese Academy of Science, the... (Read More)

Mar 15th, 2008 - According to reporters at Pocket Lint it would seem that the controversial ban upon the sale of the equally controversial video game Manhunt 2 in the UK has been overturned. The site reports that the Rockstar Games developed title has been edited to the satisfaction of the British Board of Film... (Read More)

Mar 11th, 2008 - Anyone with an interest in the history of computing will know that the first mechanical computer was invented by one Charles Babbage, British mathematician and visionary. If you happen to be in the vicinity of the Science Museum in London you can even see a working difference engine, something... (Read More)

Mar 11th, 2008 - Scientists at IBM have finally managed to get around the problem of electrical interference that prevented signals from working correctly while using the carbon mesh material of grapheme. It means that they can now get on with the job in hand of building nanoscale transistors according to this... (Read More)

Nov 16th, 2006 - Rackspace Managed Hosting has today sent me the formula to create the perfect website, and being a nice chap I felt I had to share it with you, so here goes: Pwebsite = { ((14.14* EaseNav) + (13.56*Speed) + (13.11*CleanDes) + (10.89*Func) + (10.89*Up)) – ((12.63*Pops) + (10.32*Ads)... (Read More)

Oct 30th, 2006 - Tim Berners-Lee has a blog that is, more often than not, worth reading. Certainly that has been the case over the weekend as the inventor of the World Wide Web has been talking about reinventing HTML. Referring to the W3C HTML group Berners-Lee admits that it is important to have real developers... (Read More)

Sep 28th, 2006 - I can recall having great fun talking with ELIZA more than a decade ago. Fun yes, serious AI no. It didn’t take long to get bored with the repetitive question and answer looping even if it was wrapped up in the guise of being intelligent machine driven conversation: an oxymoron then, and still one... (Read More)

Oct 14th, 2006 - There’s a serious amount of money to anyone who can prove that the answer is yes, and rather surprisingly it is online DVD rental service Netflix that is posing the question and providing the cash. It all revolves around the movie recommendation system that Netflix developed, CinematchSM, that... (Read More)

Sep 22nd, 2006 - In what has been called by some commentators the ‘most significant update in five years’ the latest version of Python finally come of age. Python 2.5 not only apparently fixes some 450 bugs discovered since the 2.4 release was, err, released, but also throws in some 350 patches for good measure.... (Read More)

Aug 28th, 2006 - I was reading the Google Code Blog and noticed that Google software engineer Matthias Zenger happened to announce the availability of the updated Google Base Data API last week. This lets you develop applications that can dynamically interact with Google Base, obviously. Perhaps a little less... (Read More)

Aug 18th, 2006 - It has been a busy week for both W3C and anyone who is serious about XML. The W3C XML Core Working Group has published the fourth edition of XML 1.0, and second editions of XML 1.1 and Namespaces in XML 1.0 and 1.1. Forming, as they do, the bedrock for W3C-defined technologies used in the... (Read More)

Apr 10th, 2007 - Microsoft has just announced the release of a Windows Live instant messaging client for its Xbox 360 game console, giving gamers the capability of chatting to their PC friends. There was already a video and voice chat feature via Xbox Live, but this feature enables players to connect with up to... (Read More)

Mar 30th, 2007 - Microsoft has already created a new "version" or "model" of their Xbox 360 console, dubbed "Elite". Aside from its black color and matching headset and wireless controller, it's not that much different, but it has a few important upgrades: They've upgraded the hard drive to make it a whole 120... (Read More)

Jan 24th, 2007 - Many people complain that Java is far too slow to use in most applications that are traditionally written with C/C++. Well, this is probably never going to change unless Java allows itself to be completely compiled instead of bytecode, but IBM is trying to make the state that Java's in better. Now,... (Read More)

Dec 10th, 2006 - Everyone is up-in-the-arms about Nintendo's new console beating Sony's. The sales of the Wii in November (roughly 467,000) are more than double the PS3 sales (147,000), according to NPD. But what most articles about this don't talk about: the PS2 is still winning, and easily. It managed to sell... (Read More)

Sep 21st, 2006 - With all the disscussion about classical computing issues on Daniweb, I thought it was time for an explanation of quantum computing. As I'm sure most of you are aware, a conventional CPU performs operations by switching transistors on and off in order to manipulate values stored on registers. The... (Read More)

Sep 11th, 2006 - When you are programming web pages it is very important to optimize your code for better and faster performance. In this part I will show you how to optimize code for filling multiple dropdownlists with data from Microsoft Access. The same thing is with SQL Server. I'm using asp.net 2.0 and... (Read More)