Practical Technology

For years, decades, the big companies didn’t tend to wage patent wars on each other. The reason is simple. Major patent holders don’t tend to target other major patent holders because of MAD (mutually assured destruction). Or, in other words, if you sue me, I sue you, and we can both burn potentially hundreds of [...]

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Jeff Dean, a Google Fellow who has been with the company since 1999, gave a speech at the Web Search and Data Mining meeting in 2009 where he unveiled how Google puts together its data centers (PDF). Because the meeting was in Barcelona, Spain, his speech didn’t receive the attention it deserved in the United [...]

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On May 26, Apple’s market capitalization stood at $223 billion. That took it, for the first time, higher than Microsoft, which had a market cap of $219.3 billion. Apple, not Microsoft, not Google, was at the top of the technology business mountain. And that marked the end of an era: The PC is no longer [...]

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I didn’t see this coming, but now that Google has announced that it’s working with Adobe to integrate Adobe Flash into its Chrome browser it makes perfect sense to me. To quote Google’s Linus Upson, VP of Engineering: * When users download Chrome, they will also receive the latest version of Adobe Flash Player. There [...]

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The core idea behind HTML 5, the latest proposed version of the Web’s foundation markup language, is to make all resources, not just text and links, widely and uniformly usable across all platforms. Well, that was the theory. In practice, things aren’t going to change that much from today’s Web, with its reliance on proprietary [...]

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