MacWorld Expo predictions, wish list
It’s MacWorld Expo time again. And once again, it’s time for me to go public with my utterly unfounded speculation. Er, analysis. A quick side note: I’ve been carrying a BlackBerry 7230, a Treo 600 and a Nokia 3650 together…
Security: The year ahead
2004 will not see any letup in virus outbreaks 2003 started with the Slammer Internet worm and went downhill from there. It has been labeled the Year of the Worm and called “the worst year ever” by more than one…
Java Product News (updated January 2, 2004)
Sun gives Tiger preview; judf debuts; and zBlueSoftware offers zBlueStudio 1.2 Sun gives Tiger preview January 2 — Sun Microsystems has made available an alpha release of its Java 2 Platform, Standard Edition (J2SE) 1.5 (codenamed Tiger). The 1.5 alpha…
More on getters and setters
Build user interfaces without getters and setters It’s a 25-year-old principle of object-oriented (OO) design that you shouldn’t expose an object’s implementation to any other classes in the program. The program is unnecessarily difficult to maintain when you expose implementation,…
In pursuit of perfection
Can Java become the perfect technology platform? There’s no two ways about it—this article is ambitious. In it, I set out to define the perfect technology platform and see how the Java platform measures up. Then the article flicks into…
Big brother at the wheel
A story in The New York Times (free registration required) portrays GM’s OnStar system as an enemy of personal privacy. From the driver’s point of view, OnStar is a button on your visor. When you press it, your car’s GPS…
Storage technologies lay groundwork for expansion
SATA and SAS fuel faster, denser disk arrays, while iSCSI makes for more flexible storage networks Following the storage market is like watching a three-ring circus: It’s never boring, but there’s so much happening, it’s easy to miss part of…
A tale of two cultures
XML messages mixed with XML documents might unite the GUI crowd with CLI fans I’ve always blended the geeky, command-line-driven Unix style with the mom-friendly point-and-click Windows approach. To borrow a Microsoft slogan, the two approaches are “better together.” Each…
Databases get a grip on XML
Innovative solutions bridge the gap between data objects and documents The next iteration of the SQL standard was supposed to arrive in 2003. But SQL standardization has always been a glacially slow process, so nobody should be surprised that SQL:2003…
Security regroups and rebuilds
Most of the already good products got better, but security was short on innovation in 2003 Perhaps it was the flood of viruses and worms distributed via spam techniques that kept catching everyone off guard. Perhaps it was the abysmal…
