Cody Taylor

CWmike writes “Microsoft will deliver a release candidate of Windows 7 in about two weeks, the company’s Web site revealed Saturday. According to a page posted on Microsoft’s partner program site, Windows 7 Release Candidate (RC) may be available to paying subscribers to Microsoft’s developer and IT services before May 5. Partners will be allowed to download the release candidate on that date, the first Tuesday of the month. ‘Partners: If you have a subscription to MSDN or TechNet, you can download Windows 7 RC now,’ the page read Saturday afternoon. ‘Otherwise, you can download Windows 7 RC starting May 5, 2009.’ The link to the download, however, shunted users to the TechNet download page, which did not list Windows 7 RC as one of the available files. This is the second time in just over three weeks that Microsoft’s Web site has leaked information about Windows 7 RC. Accidental, or buzz-builder?”

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VonGuard writes “On April 9, ECMA International produced the final draft for the first major update to JavaScript since 1999. It’s called ECMAScript 3.1, but will soon be known as ECMAScript, Fifth Edition. You’ll know it as JavaScript, the Next Generation. Mozilla will begin implementing these features after Firefox 3.5, and Microsoft is already showing prototypes behind closed doors. The question, however, is what this will change for JavaScript coders. To get those answers, I tracked down Brendan Eich, Mozilla’s CTO and the creator of JavaScript. I transcribed the interview without any editorial since he explains, perfectly, what’s changing for programmers. Long story short: Json will be safer, getters and setters will be standard, and strict mode will make things easier to debug.”

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snydeq writes “Lawyer Jonathan Moskin has called into question the long-term impact last year’s Java Model Railroad Interface court ruling will have on open source adoption among corporate entities. For many, the case in question, Jacobsen v. Katzer, has represented a boon for open source, laying down a legal foundation for the protection of open source developers. But as Moskin sees it, the ruling ‘enables a set of potentially onerous monetary remedies for failures to comply with even modest license terms, and it subjects a potentially larger community of intellectual property users to liability.’ In other words, in Moskin’s eyes, Jacobsen v. Katzer could make firms wary of using open source software because they fear that someone in the food chain has violated a copyright, thus exposing them to lawsuit. It should be noted that Moskin’s firm has represented Microsoft in anti-trust litigation before the European Union.”

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CWmike writes “Mozilla is pondering dropping support for Windows 2000 and Windows XP without Service Pack 3 when it ships the follow-up to Firefox 3.5 in 2010, show discussions on the mozilla.dev.planning forum by developers and Mozilla executives, including the company’s chief engineer and its director of Firefox. ‘Raise the minimum requirements on Gecko 1.9.2 (and any versions of Firefox built on 1.9.2) for Windows builds to require Windows XP Service Pack 3 or higher,’ said Michael Conner, one of the company’s software engineers, to start the discussion. Mozilla is currently working on Gecko 1.9.1, the engine that powers Firefox 3.5, the still-in-development browser the company hopes to release at some point in the second quarter. Gecko 1.9.2, and the successor to Firefox 3.5 built on it — dubbed ‘Firefox.next’ and code named ‘Namoroka’ — are slated to wrap up in ‘early-to-mid 2010,’ according to Mozilla.”

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RadiusK writes “Starting today, developers can get an early look at the SDK for the next version of the Android platform. Version 1.5 introduces APIs for features such as soft keyboards, home screen widgets, live folders, and speech recognition. At the developer site, you can download the early-look Android 1.5 SDK, read important information about upgrading your Eclipse plugin and existing projects, and learn about what’s new and improved in Android 1.5.”

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Apple sent out an e-mail to developers opening the doors to live push notification testing. Ars looks at push and tells you how it measures up to notifications from SMS and e-mail.

gilgongo writes “It’s more than 10 years since people started making a living writing web page markup, yet the job title (and role) has yet to settle down. Not only that, but there are different types of people who write markup: those that approach the craft as essentially an integration task, and those that see it as part of UI design overall. The situation is further complicated by the existence of other roles in the workplace such as graphic designer and information architect. This is making recruitment for this role a real headache. So, how do you describe people who ‘do HTML’ (and CSS and maybe a bit of JavaScript and graphics manipulation)? Some job titles I’ve seen include: Design Technologist, Web Developer, Front-end Developer, HTML/CSS Developer, Client-side Developer and UI Engineer. Do you have any favourite job titles for this role?”

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narramissic writes “Sun Microsystems’ chief open source officer, Simon Phipps, said in an April 11 blog post that Google committed a major transgression by only including support for a subset of Java classes in its App Engine development platform. ‘Whether you agree with Sun policing it or not, Java compatibility has served us all very well for over a decade,’ Phipps wrote. ‘That includes being sure as a developer that all core classes are present on all platforms. Creating subsets of the core classes in the Java platform was forbidden for a really good reason, and it’s wanton and irresponsible to casually flaunt the rules.’ Phipps characterized his remarks as non-official, saying: ‘This isn’t something I could comment on on Sun’s behalf. My personal comments come purely from my long association with Java topics.'”

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snydeq writes “Despite the productivity promises of Apple’s forthcoming 3.0 firmware update, jailbreaking should continue to push the iPhone’s productivity envelope, as users increasingly demand the Holy Grail of smartphone power use: applications that run in the background, InfoWorld reports. Copy and paste, video recording and streaming, Internet tethering, and content search are just a few of the features over which iPhone users have sought to jailbreak their devices — a practice Apple itself has done little to crack down on. Jailbreak apps circumvent hardware and software restrictions that Apple says ensure a consistent, responsive user interface and optimal battery endurance. In particular, jailbroken phones can run apps in the background, a capability Apple reserves for its own apps but prohibits in third-party programs. Jay Freeman, creator of the Cydia iPhone installer and Cydia Store, however, believes a free-market approach is the best way to satisfy power users’ demands for features without compromising the performance of their iPhones. And given Apple’s App Store overcrowding, it seems likely that jailbroken phones and app venues like Cydia Store will continue to be popular with iPhone customers and developers, even after the 3.0 firmware ships.”

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Eurogamer has an article which takes a look at how various game companies deal with gold spammers in their games. Some, like Mythic, take a hard stance, literally telling farmers and sellers to “go to hell.” Others engage in an arms race to block such behavior, sometimes to the detriment of normal users. “In fact, a former Jagex source tells me that when Jagex banned all IPs connected to gold selling, ‘they lost 10 per cent of their membership, and still haven’t recovered in terms of numbers since they did it two years ago. Even though they have almost stopped gold selling in RuneScape, it has cost them two million active accounts; i.e. there were four million players, there are now two million players, of which less than one million actually subscribe.'” Still more companies are experimenting with real money trading (RMT) to at least establish some control and security over the situation.

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