CEO of Sun Microsystems, Jonathan Schwartz, has stated that he will soon reveal how much Sun makes from selling Java related services. It has long been thought that Sun has missed a golden oportunity with Java for making some serious cash, and assumed by giving away Java for free it makes money from companies buying it’s hardware on which they run Java based systems. Schwartz did not give a date but will reveal the information soon.
Another exec leaves Microsoft for Google
At this rate within a couple more years Balmer won’t have any execs left working for him at Microsoft – another one just left to join, you guessed it, Google.
Vic Gundotra, a 15 year veteran and ‘platform evangelist’ has left Microsoft to join Google. Gundotra is the second senior exec to leave in the last month – Martin Taylor, who had been working closely with Balmer and with the company for 13 years, was responsible for promoting the Windows Live platform (Microsoft’s online hosted app service, still a work in progress) and marketing Microsoft to beat the pressure from Google.
Apache Derby to be bundled in 6.0 SDK
There has been a lot of noise about this recent announcement – Sun have decided, apparently of their own accord without any buy-in from the JCP committee for Java the 6.0 JSR, that they will bundle the Apache Derby database engine in the 6.0 SDK.
This seems like an odd decision, as many have been commenting, and has recieved a lot of negative press so far. As far as I can tell this is only an addition to the SDK and will not be bundled in the JRE. This is good so it won’t be included in an already large download for the JRE, but it means that if a developer chooses to use Derby ‘because it’s there’ they can’t rely on it being available on their target platform. So what benefit has this added? If it is only targetted at developers, I am sure (I sincerely hope) that if a developer is capable of downloading and installing the SDK or their favorite IDE that they are more than capable of downloading any one of a number of freely available open source databases?
First reviews of Blu-ray DVDs released
Fosfor Gadgets has a link to a site that has the first reviews of the first movies released on the new Blu-ray DVD hidef format.
The conclusions so far by this one reviewer is that there is room for improvement. The review noted that they felt the quality of the video was at times in consistent, as at times was not even as good as over-the-air broadcast HD TV. This doesn’t sound good for Blu-ray so far, which is being touted as superior to HD-DVD. The reviewer says there is definitely room for improvement, and in some ways sounds like the first movies that were released on DVDs with over-compression and showing compression artifacts, the movie studios have got to get to grips with what is possible with the new format and what can be achieved.