Odd headline given the date

So to is July 5, 2007, right?  7/5/07, if you live in the U.S.  Given the date, the byline linked to below at supercomputingonline.com is just a bit confusing then.  Here's my problem...

I've some friends who work for Boeing Aircraft here in Seattle.  They have told me that the Dreamliner won't even be unveiled until July 8, 2007 (7/8/07, get it?  The 787 unveiled on 7-8-7?  Never mind...)  Flight tests won't be for a while, and the first delivery isn't scheduled until May 2008.

So aren't the guys at supercomputingonline.com jumping the gun a bit when they call the Dreamliner a "highly successful aircraft"?  We haven't even seen the thing yet - until 7/8/07, it's vaporware.  Highly successful vaporware, to be sure...

800,000 Simulation Hours Helped Create Design For Highly Successful Commercial Aircraft

del.icio.us tags: technology, journalism

Windows losing ground with developers

A yearly study done by Evans Data, reported by InfoWorld (and being discussed on Slashdot), shows developers targeting Windows platforms fell to 64.8% this year, from 74% in 2006.  Developers targeting Linux rose from 8.8% to 11.8% a year ago - seems small until you realize that's a 34% increase, and Windows dropped 12%.

A comment by caywen on Slashdot caught my attention:

Microsoft's big developer hotness is supposed to be all these great .NET technologies. But the lack of Vista adoption might be putting the brakes on developer enthusiasm because Microsoft is failing to lead the way in showing the end result benefits of it. COM didn't really catch on until Microsoft started demonstrating how hot it was through dogfooding and releasing applications architected on it. With it came a greater degree of modularity and flexibility that they demonstrated compellingly well with IE, Office, Visual Studio, etc. To this day, Microsoft hasn't delivered any real WPF+WCF applications - at least none that a significant number of people care about. They should be pumping out amazing applications that can be showcased on Vista, causing developers to envy and copy them, and causing customers to actually want Vista because of the hotness the developers *and* Microsoft are offering.

I'm not sure how accurate the explanation of the adoption of COM is, but there is a case to be made otherwise.  I'm curious how many of you out there are waiting for MS to lead the way to application nirvana...

del.icio.us tags: developer microsoft windows

Parasite Economy Latches onto New Host

This is a month-old commentary from Cato, but it's still current in geological time...  Basically, it laments the politicization of Google, comparing it to the politicization of Microsoft a few years ago.  It's a different view on the Google v. Microsoft battle you hear about amongst lawmakers, and it's dead on.

Parasite Economy Latches onto New Host

del.icio.us tags: government, capitalism, technology