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Microsoft has enjoyed a virtual monopoly on the PC desktop for two decades.  Though the Apple operating system is superior to Windows in many ways — especially for simplicity and usability — Apple’s closed-system approach has ensured that Apple OS will never be more than a strong niche player.  Open-source Linux has made significant inroads in the server market, but the lack of singular vision and decent user-interface has kept it as a hobbyist toy on the desktop.

This has allowed Microsoft to continue to own the PC desktop, in spite of major missteps, such as Windows ME and the disaster that was Vista in its first year, with significant incompatibilities, endless security warnings, and user-defections back to Windows XP.  Microsoft’s new operating system — Windows 7, which is expected to ship later this year — has been receiving mostly positive reviews.  And not a moment too soon, because along comes Microsoft’s greatest threat to its stranglehold on the desktop in twenty years.

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially target netbooks.  Later this year, Google will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010.

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Microsoft is applying its Community Promise to the C# programming language and Common Language Infrastructure (CLI).  This means that anyone can freely build, sell, distribute or use programs with C# and the CLI without signing a license agreement or otherwise communicating to Microsoft.  This applies to all distribution models including open source and GPL.  Under the Community Promise, Microsoft will not assert its Necessary Claims.

In other words, build all you want with C# and .NET, Microsoft won’t sue you for copyright or patent infringement.

Specifically, this announcement applies to the ECMA 334 (C#) and ECMA 335 (CLI) specifications.

“The Community Promise is an excellent vehicle and, in this situation, ensures the best balance of interoperability and flexibility for developers,” said Scott Guthrie, Corporate Vice President for the .NET Developer Platform.

ComponentArt is hosting the 2009 Summer Silverlight Coding Competition.  Author of the best application as selected by their expert panel and the community will receive a grand prize of $10,000 USD.  Authors of the two runner-up applications will each receive ComponentArt licenses (a $1,299 USD value).

Applicants are not required to use ComponentArt’s products to enter the competition.   Community voting opens on July 7, 2009.  Expert Panel judging starts at the end of September, so you can continue improving your app until then.

Silverlight Coding Competition

TheDailyWTF describes how poor database design and user error bankrupted a small chain of pet stores.

“MegaPetCo” was upset that its website ran incredibly slow.  Consultant Rick discovered MegaPetCo was using a single shared database for its website and everything else in its business — sales, payroll, HR, inventory, tax records, invoices and maintenance tickets.  The database was incredibly simple: a single table with hundreds of columns.  It probably had humble beginnings as a spreadsheet and organically grew into a vast monolith over the seven years that MegaPetCo was in business.  All told, the database had millions of rows in a single table.

Then one day a developer was optimizing the database and removing records that MegaPetCo no longer needed.  All it took was a single, poorly-formed delete query to wipe out each and every row in the database table.  MegaPetCo’s sales immediately ground to a halt, along with everything else in the company.  And of course — you guessed it — there were no backups.

Within a few months, the company filed for bankruptcy and was forced to close every one of its stores, laying off several hundred people along the way.

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More Stupid Stuff

Systemax Inc., a leading multi-channel retailer of computers, electronics, and industrial products, has purchased the Circuit City brand, trademark, website and other assets.

They’ve recently launched the all-new CircuitCity.com website, which offers values on a huge inventory of brand name computer & electronics products, at what they claim are the most affordable prices in the industry.

Hopefully this won’t be the same “affordable prices” that Circuit City offered its customers during its going-out-of-business sale.  Although most items were 40-50% off, this was based on hyper-inflated retail prices, which meant that Circuit City’s sale prices were often higher than what you could find at Best Buy or Amazon.com.  I was able to find a few good deals at the time, but most items were picked-over expensive crap with no return policy.

The new CircuitCity.com features low everyday prices, world-class 24/7 customer service (because they haven’t fired their experienced staff yet, as did the old Circuit City), and a wide selection of products.  You’ll also enjoy advanced search capabilities and enhanced content, which includes photo galleries and videos of thousands of the most popular consumer electronics and computer products & accessories.

Microsoft has announced retail pricing for Windows 7 that includes an option to preorder the operating system at a substantial discount. 

From today through July 11, U.S. consumers can preorder an upgrade from XP or Vista to Windows 7 Home premium for $49 or Windows 7 Professional for $99.  However, XP customers must do a clean installation of Windows 7.

Also starting today, buyers of new PCs with Vista installed will receive a free upgrade to Windows 7 when it becomes available.

Retail boxed copies of Windows 7 go on sale October 22.  Microsoft plans to charge $119 for Home Premium, $199 for Professional, and $219 for Ultimate.

In Europe, the EU’s anti-trust ruling has forced Microsoft to ship a special “E” version with the Internet Explorer web browser removed.  Therefore, the European launch will be delayed, and all users must perform a clean installation, even if purchasing an upgrade.

Early reviews are generally positive and indicate that Windows 7 is much better behaved than Vista was when it was first released.

Story at CNN

If you create software development tools, you’ll want to consider building on the Visual Studio Shell.  A streamlined Visual Studio development environment, the Visual Studio Shell provides the core foundation so you can focus on building your application’s unique features.  Flexible customization options help you deliver optimized experiences for specific markets.  Note that the Visual Studio Shell is royalty-free for building and deploying applications.

The key benefits of the Visual Studio Shell:

• Faster development. The Visual Studio Shell accelerates development by providing a base integrated development environment that can host custom tools and programming languages.
• A familiar environment. Developers can build on the Visual Studio platform and provide end users a familiar user interface, speeding the learning curve for both.
• Optimized for languages and tools. Created in response to requests from our partners, the Visual Studio Shell gives you the option of integrating your tools with Visual Studio or creating an isolated, custom-branded application.

Visual Studio Shell

Last week I purchased a cheeseburger at McDonalds for $1.58.  I handed $2.08 to the young woman behind the counter.  She stood there, holding the nickel and 3 pennies, while staring blankly at her register.  I sensed her discomfort and tried to tell her to just give me back two quarters, but she hailed the manager for help.  While he tried to explain the transaction to her, she started crying in frustration.  Why do I tell you this?  Because of the evolution in teaching math in the United States over the past six decades:

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This is part 10 in a series of articles on obscure programming languages.

What is JADE?

JADE is an object-oriented software development platform.  It has its own programming language that seamlessly integrates an application server and object-oriented database management system.  JADE also provides APIs for other languages such as .NET, Java, C/C++ and Web services.

As a programming language, JADE’s main competitors are Java and C#, while as a database it competes with other object-oriented databases and post-relational databases such as Versant, Caché and Matisse, as well as with traditional relational database software packages such as Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server. 

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Most programmers know that throwing exceptions takes a relatively long time to execute versus normal processing.  Some say throwing exceptions is as much as two orders of magnitude slower than passing arguments (that’s 100 times slower for non-geeks).  However, another article claims there’s almost no impact to throwing exceptions, unless you are running your software in a debugger.

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