Developages - Development and Technology Blog

lgmac writes “Think Windows Azure is a stupid name? Ever wonder how iPod, BlackBerry and Twitter got their names? Author Tom Wailgum goes inside the process of creating tech product names that are cool but not exclusionary, marketable, and most of all, free of copyright and trademark gotchas. Here’s the scoop on ten iconic tech products and how they got their monikers, plus a chat with the man responsible for naming Azure, BlackBerry, and more. (What’s the one he wishes he’d named but didn′t? Google.)”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Original post by timothy

It’s only been four months that Ashley Highfield has been with Project Kangeroo, the UK independent TV answer to the BBC’s iPlayer, but it’s been reported that he’s leaving - before it’s even publicly launched.
Highfield was previously at the BBC and oversaw the project that turned into iPlayer, a project that raised much comment and […]

Original post by Simon Perry

WillDraven is just one of many who writes to tell us that Circuit City, the United States’ 2nd largest consumer electronics retailer, has filed for bankruptcy under chapter 11. This news comes as no surprise as the company has been in financial trouble, recently announcing that it will be closing over one fifth of its stores and laying off 17% of its U.S. employees in the process. ‘Larger rival Best Buy, which is based in Minneapolis, has said it might take over stores that distressed rivals close. Yet a flood of discounted merchandise from liquidating Circuit City stores could hurt Best Buy during this holiday shopping season, said Jefferies & Co analyst Dan Binder.’”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Original post by ScuttleMonkey

Sweetshark writes “IBM and Sun joined at the 2008 OpenOffice.org conference in Beijing to announce the ODF Toolkit Union. The ODF Toolkit project will be independent of the development at OpenOffice.org, and will operate under the liberal Apache license. It goes from small tools that simplify using ODF in the software development process to large ODF Java and .NET libraries that can be used within other projects. ‘The future of accessing and distributing software is here today,’ said Michael Bemmer, senior director of Collaboration Engineering at Sun. ‘It is no longer an acceptable business practice to have silos of office document data stored in proprietary formats. The industry has moved forward and is replacing the silos with business content, such as on-premise business applications, software solutions offered over the Internet and applications supported by mobile devices that are critical in Service Oriented Architectures.’ Will this help ODF to make inroads in the business world after the successes on the desktops of users at home?”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Original post by Soulskill

bakamaki writes “I work for a small manufacturing company as a SysAdmin. My boss is a DBA. We are the only IT employees. He recently decided to record hours spent on his projects and then evaluate how much time the databases he writes save the employees. Then he translates that into a $ figure. He’s asking me to do something similar but I’m kinda at a loss. It seems most of the stuff I do is preventative, IE care and feeding of servers and network infrastructure in addition to all the break fix stuff I do for the user base with their desktops. When in this position what do you folks usually do?”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Original post by ScuttleMonkey

Finally Sky and Virgin Media are holding hands again following their bust up dating back to Feb 2007.
The overview? Sky will carry some of Virgin’s channels on their service and Virgin will carry some of Sky’s channels - both agreements last until 2011. They’ll both drop the outstanding High Court actions against each other.
Below is […]

Original post by Simon Perry

mallumax notes Amazon’s new Frustration-Free Packaging initiative. Over several years the retailer hopes to convince many of its suppliers to offer consumer-friendlier packaging. It’s starting with just 19 products from Mattel, Fisher-Price, Microsoft, and Transcend. Until this program spreads to more products, better get one of these (ThinkGeek and Slashdot share a corporate overlord). From Amazon’s announcement: “The Frustration-Free Package is recyclable and comes without excess packaging materials such as hard plastic clamshell casings, plastic bindings, and wire ties. It’s designed to be opened without the use of a box cutter or knife and will protect your product just as well as traditional packaging. Products with Frustration-Free Packaging can frequently be shipped in their own boxes, without an additional shipping box. Amazon works directly with manufacturers to box products in Frustration-Free Packages right off the assembly lines, which reduces the overall amount of packing materials used.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Original post by kdawson

Ostracus writes “Microsoft, Google and Yahoo have signed a global a code of conduct promising to offer better protection for online free speech and against official intrusion.” Anyone want to know what this means for China &amp Australia? I bet it means even less to all of us in America where every major data center has a secret room where the government sniffs our packets.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Original post by CmdrTaco

ISP Review UK writes “The latest annual Wireless Security Survey from RSA has revealed that London is still the world’s wireless network (Wi-Fi) capital, with a total of 12,276 access points detected, exceeding the number found in New York City by more than 3,000. However, the French capital of Paris broke all the records with a 543% year-over-year increase in the number of wireless access points, which compares with London’s 72% (down from 160% last year) and New York City’s 45% (down from 49%). The survey also examined how many of the wireless access points detected were secured with some form of encryption (hotspots excluded). In New York City, 97% of corporate access points had encryption in place (76% last year). In Paris, 94% of corporate access points were encrypted &mdash although in London, 20% of all business access points continue to be completely unprotected.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Original post by timothy

Filed under: Desktops, Laptops

Hope you’re eager to break into that Halloween candy early, because you’ve got some (re)celebrating to do. If you’ll recall, we first heard that laptops accounted for over half of US retail computer sales back in 2003, and in June of 2005, we found that it was somehow worth getting jazzed over once more when it happened again. Here we are in the latter half of 2008 shaking our heads in disappointment, as IDC has amazingly discovered that notebook shipments into the US market have exceeded the 50% threshold for the first time evar. Go ahead and stock up on rave supplies early — we get this weird feeling that we’ll be doing this same song and dance in 2010 or so.

[Image courtesy of DayLife]

Laptop shipments exceed desktops in US for the not-exactly-first time originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 28 Oct 2008 09:24:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Original post by Darren Murph

Subm writes “Lamborghinis, motion-capture rooms, secret new weapons, these are a few things included in the profile of Epic Games and its Design Director, Cliff Bleszinski. ‘A Microsoft employee who works closely with Epic described the company as having a “band dynamic.” Staff turnover is low, and many of Epic’s most senior employees have been friends for more than a decade. This does not seem a very long time until one sits in on an Epic meeting and realizes that anyone over the age of thirty-five achieves the temporal stature of Methuselah. Epic’s recent growth is regarded with wary gratitude by many of its employees, though some miss the old days, when, as Sweeney put it, “we were just a bunch of kids who had some cool ideas and were doing neat things.”‘”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Original post by ScuttleMonkey

An anonymous reader writes “My boss recently assigned me a project, that was all his idea, with two basic flaws that would require me to break multiple web sites’ Terms of Service (TOS). Part requires scraping most of the site, parsing the data and presenting it as our own without human intervention. While we’re safe on copyright issues clearly scraping like this is normally not allowed. At times it might also put a load on those sites. The other is, for lack of better words, a “load balancing″ part that requires using multiple free accounts instead of purchasing space and CPU time for less than $2,000 USD per month. The boss sees it as “distributed″ computing when in reality it’s “parasitic”. My question is am I wrong about the ethics? If I do need to walk how best can I handle it without damaging my reputation and future employment opportunities?”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Original post by CmdrTaco

SkydiverFL writes “Does anyone have an idea for a good solution for using a game console (Xbox 360, PS3, etc.) with a laptop and / or external monitor? I am planning to set up each of my developers at the office with a shiny new Xbox 360, surround headphones, and Gold memberships. The only catch is that I have to do it ‘gracefully.’ I would be grateful for any input on the technical setup and politics (how to get it in and how to work through the politics).” Read on for further details on the situation.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Original post by Soulskill

snydeq writes “Developers seeking job security in the years ahead could find an unlikely edge in Cobol. According to an InfoWorld report, demand for Cobol skills is surging, with salaries on the rise. More importantly, the short supply of offshore Cobol programmers and the fact that mainframes aren’t going away anytime soon are spurring longevity for big-iron skills, with many companies looking to hire in-house Cobol pros to bridge mainframe Cobol apps to the rest of the enterprise. The report provides further evidence that Cobol may indeed be primed for a comeback, with new kinds of Cobol integration jobs emerging to prove old-guard skills are critical to some of the hottest areas of software development today.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Original post by timothy

Filed under: Storage

Toshiba and SanDisk have been in a number of joint ventures for some time now, but it looks like the two companies are now starting what could be a more drawn out break-up process, with SanDisk announcing today that it’s selling 30% of its manufacturing capacity outright to Toshiba in a $1 billion deal. For the time being at least, the two will remain 50/50 partners in the remaining 70% of the companies’ joint factories, though Toshiba will apparently get 65% of the production capacity at those factories. As MarketWatch points out, this latest move comes just a month after SanDisk rejected a $6 billion buyout offer from Samsung, and some analysts are now speculating that Toshiba’s deal will only make the company a more attractive target for Samsung. Nothing is expected to get wrapped up before August of 2009, however, which is when Samsung’s current royalty arrangement with SanDisk is due to expire.

[Via The Inquirer]

Read | Permalink | Email this&nbsp|&nbspComments

Original post by Donald Melanson