Stories by Joab Jackson

Google technologist derides Oracle's lack of developer focus

When it bowed out of the JavaOne conference this year, Google cited Oracle's lawsuit over Java use in Google Android. But one Google technologist suggests a second possible reason for Google's reticence: Oracle's lack of focus on developers.

ActiveState prepares Python for databases

ActiveState has updated its distributions of the Python programming language so that they provide developers easier access to databases, as well as new ways of creating GUIs (Graphical User Interfaces), the company announced Wednesday.

Twitter API has new third party sign-on method

Users of obscure third-party Twitter applications may be surprised to find that their apps no longer work, if the app creators of those apps haven't been keeping up with changes in the Twitter API (application programming interface).

Red Hat board gets military leadership

The managing board of enterprise open-source software company Red Hat has elected a retired U.S. Army officer, General Henry Hugh Shelton, to serve as chairman, the company announced Monday. Shelton takes the place of Matthew Szulik, who was the former CEO of Red Hat.

Purdue app slows servers when cooling fails

While chip manufacturers continue to make their processors ever more powerful, at least one customer has found it useful to slow these chips down, at least long enough to keep them running when the data center air conditioning falters.

Red Hat offers its cloud APIs as industry standard

As the industry call for cloud interoperability grows more fervent, open-source enterprise software company Red Hat has submitted its cloud platform, Deltacloud, to the DMTF (Distributed Management Task Force) as a potential standard for cloud interoperability, the company said Wednesday.

Eucalyptus strengthens its back end

Two months after releasing version 2 of the enterprise edition of its open-source cloud software, Eucalyptus Systems has posted a new version of the software's base platform, the company announced on Wednesday.

Time waits for no one: 'leap seconds' may be cut

Sparking a fresh round of debate over an ongoing issue in time-keeping circles, the International Telecommunications Union is considering eliminating leap seconds from the time scale used by most computer systems, Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).

HTML5 raises new security issues

When it comes to new security issues, the security team for the Firefox browser have the new version of the Web HyperText Markup Language, HTML5, foremost on the mind.

Choice domain names pitched as investments

Forget real estate, the stock market or Internet startups, the new way to make fast money is to invest in domain names, argues a domain name brokerage that will auction off a passel of domain names on Wednesday in New York.

Web could be stylized by new W3C font platform

While Web publishing continues to challenge the printed page as the primary means of sharing text, in one aspect it still lags way behind Johannes Gutenberg's 500 year old technology: Web developers have a relatively measly choice of fonts. Now the standards body for the Web is hoping to bring online the rich variety of type styles long available to print.

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