Development > Opinions

For the last several months Microsoft has been pushing for their Office Open XML (OOXML) office suite file specification to be accepted as an international standard by ISO, presumably to help them gain traction for future government contracts (look, this file specification is an ISO standard, it must be good).

If Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and the State Board of Education have their way, soon every California student will have to pass an algebra test to graduate from the eighth grade.

You don't have to be a programmer to be a mobile innovator. All you need to do is open your eyes to the fact that a smart phone or QWERTY handset is a personal computer, sans legacy baggage. In the future, user-facing computers will have more in common with the high-end mobile devices of today than with the eight-core desktops and quad-core notebooks of 2009.

The question of why so many Google products are classified "beta" -- and classified thusly for so long -- has knocked around the tech press for some time. However, no one really seemed to know the answer, at least no one outside of Google.

Last week I said I would look at Google Chrome "from a developer's perspective." I should have specified what kind. I meant I was considering it from a Web developer's perspective: What does it mean for Web application builders to have yet another browser enter the already-crowded field?

I love lampooning the FOSS community. These self-righteous cyber-hippies are almost always good for a blog entry or two per month. And because many of them can't resist airing their own community's dirty laundry, I have no shortage of story ideas to choose from.

I'm continually amazed at how the premier Web properties are willing to share what they are doing. We get to peek behind the curtain routinely. Google and Yahoo both have good lab pages, but there's some seriously experimental stuff on the Mozilla labs page. Here's what they're up to.

For a technology that has been in stable release since May 22, 2000, PHP 4 has finally reached the end of its official life. With the release of PHP 4.4.9, official support has ended and the final security patch for the platform issued.

There you are, sipping your latte while banging out code in Django, Drupal, and Ruby, and feeling pretty cutting-edge. Sure, those are the hot skills of the moment, and they'll probably help you land your next job. But take a minute to think about the guys who came before you and the tools, particularly COBOL, they used. And give 'em some respect. They deserve it.

I was all set to give this week's column over to a new register-direct implementation of a JavaScript interpreter that's many times faster than all currently available implementations. It's not exactly growing hair on a billiard ball, but a nitro-boosted JavaScript will put a shine on AJAX and keep my most beloved language on track to becoming the gold standard for dynamic languages.

Two entries in a row about .Net. What is this blog coming to?