Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, and Shantanu Narayen, Adobe’s CEO, recently met to discuss closer ties between the two companies, according to the New York Times. The Times, quoting two sources familiar with the matter, said the meeting took place at Adobe’s San Francisco offices.

Analysts have suggested that closer links between the two companies could help Microsoft challenge Apple and Google in the smartphone market. Bloomberg also quoted an analyst, Katherine Egbert, who said that the two companies would benefit from closer links between Microsoft’s .Net platform and Adobe’s creative tools.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/microsoft/8050671/Microsoft-merger-speculation-boosts-Adobe.html

Yikes… I’d hate to see Microsoft Photoshop and Microsoft Flash. At least Silverlight would likely die out.

Just a few days ago France started warning thousands of file-sharers as part of the controversial Hadopi anti-piracy law that was introduced there earlier this year. Upon receiving their third warning, alleged copyright infringers will lose their internet connection for several weeks.

Across the pond in the United States, there is an Internet provider that has single-handedly implemented a similar scheme. Suddenlink, one of the top 10 cable companies in the country, disconnects subscribers for six months after they have received three DMCA notices. According to a company representative, Suddenlink is required to take this action under the DMCA.

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So the RIAA/MPAA finally found a way around trying to prove people are stealing music/movies in court rooms, just get the ISPs to do the dirty work instead… brilliant! :\

Here is a benchmarking test posted by Microsoft showing the significant gains from IE8 to IE9. Microsoft still has some catching up to do to speed ahead of Google Chrome.

Firefox is answering back with JaegerMonkey in Firefox 4 to catch up with the new IE9 browser.

Computerworld – Information technology has always been a fast-changing field. But nothing compares to the expected sea changes in the next decade that will impact the career plans of every generation of IT worker.

“The rate of change has accelerated dramatically,” says Alain Chesnais, president of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and founder of Visual Transitions, which specializes in computer graphics and social networks. Consider, he says, that graphics chips are doubling in capacity every six months. That translates into a thousandfold increase in capacity over a five-year period — the average shelf life of most game platforms. “We’ve never seen anything like it in any industry,” he says.

As the effects of these types of advances ripple across the corporate world and combine with the forces of the Web, mobile computing, consumerization and virtualization, “traditional IT organizations won’t look [the way] they do now,” says Thomas Druby, an IT executive and former CIO at a large insurer.

“Help desks, network and desktop support, LANs, telecom — all those things are becoming a commodity that organizations will pay someone outside the company to do [so they can] focus their money and talent on niche areas that bring higher business value,” Druby says. These niches, he adds, might require the services of business process specialists, people who can analyze and present business data, security experts and vendor relationship managers.

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Five years after Sun Microsystems began a bold effort to rejuvenate Solaris by attracting outside programming involvement, Oracle apparently is scrapping what remains of the OpenSolaris project.

Oracle acquired the Sun Microsystems version of Unix in January, but has shown little of Sun’s interest in building a vibrant external community of programmers around Solaris to match some of Linux’s collaborative advantages. The OpenSolaris board has been left in limbo with no contact from the company for months. Even with no official communications, though, Oracle’s inattention sent a strong indirect message that OpenSolaris wasn’t on the company’s priority list.

Now Steven Stallion, a programmer who worked on OpenSolaris for four years, published an Oracle memo Friday that appears to lay out the company’s new Solaris position. Oracle didn’t respond to my question about the memo’s authenticity, but it passes the sniff test for me, and it’s another blow to OpenSolaris.

Sun released Solaris source code under an open-source license called the Community Development and Distribution License. That license will continue to be used, meaning at least some of Solaris will be openly available, but only as an afterthought rather than in a way that would let outside programmers actively shape the software as it’s created, it appears.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20013687-264.html

1. You no longer complain about how slow, buggy, and crash-prone your PC is. Instead you complain about how slow, buggy, and crash-prone your smartphone is. And now you’re doing it in the checkout line at the supermarket.

2. You automatically assume that every screen is a touchscreen, but you have to touch them all just to make absolutely sure. This explains why you’re no longer allowed to enter Best Buy.

3. Someone else is named Mayor of McFatty Burgers in Foursquare before you are, and you wind up depressed for a week. Don’t worry, you’re still King of the Dorks. Would you like fries with that, Your Highness?

4. You waited in line for 24 hours and spent hundreds of dollars for the latest, greatest iPhone, yet you spend most of your time using it to simulate flatulence. Still, it could be worse–you might actually be that gassy.

5. Nothing is fast enough for you anymore. ATMs, TV remotes, microwave ovens–all now suffer from too much “lag” for your tastes. Fortunately, pressing buttons repeatedly while swearing like a sailor does, in fact, alter the time-space continuum.

Read the rest of the ways here.

The enterprise software giant (Oracle) roiled Silicon Valley late Thursday evening by filing a lawsuit against Google over Java patent violations. Oracle said Google’s Android mobile operating system infringes on the intellectual property that Oracle acquired in its January purchase of Sun Microsystems. Google uses the Sun-developed Java software platform as part of its Android platform, which Oracle says violates seven of the patents it now owns.

Here’s where it gets really confusing: Both Java and Android are open-source platforms. Neither Google nor Oracle make any money from their open-source software creations. Their source code is available for free, and any developer can essentially do they want with it.

http://money.cnn.com/2010/08/13/technology/oracle_android/index.htm

Cloud Hosting Diagram (source: theplanet.com)

While I love the flexibility of dedicated hosting, I needed to find an alternative to help ease the costs of running the server. At Kettering University, where I work, we have been migrating dedicated servers to virtual environments. This allows us to host 4-5 different servers on one large big server. Now this trend is catching on in the hosting industry as well. For example my host, theplanet.com, has created a new line of servers called “Cloud Servers” essentially this is the same concept that Kettering uses, although it is automated! I received my new “virtual” server in about 15 minutes. The new server allows me to have total control (except for selection of the OS, which is Cent OS). So I can install anything I want like a dedicated server and all for roughly half of the cost! So far I’ve been pretty pleased, the new server has actually handled the demand of my sites better than the dedicated host (that I purchased in 2006).

Some main differences are the pooling of resources mainly in hard drive storage (SAN). Sites with high database usage may have issues due to latency issues, although my sites that have large mySQL databases (10 Gbs or so with roughly 100 users accessing the information at once) haven’t had any issues at this point.