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Microsoft unveiled their new mobile OS, Windows Phone 7 Series. Outside of the classically bad microsoft naming, pretty much everybody who saw it was impressed. I haven't seen such positive buzz about a Microsoft product ever. This is good for everyone, as competition drives innovation. Three competitors is better for consumers than only two.
On the mobile browser front it will be the only OS that matters that isn't using a WebKit based browser. And in addition, like both WebKit and mobile FireFox, the mobile Windows Phone 7 Series browser (based on Internet Explorer) won't have Flash support at launch. It's just too resource intensive for mobile devices. Adobe is in danger of losing their incredible advantage with Flash as we move from a desktop to mobile computing world.
Surprised I've never stumbled on this before. JetProfiler for monitoring MySQL. Looks very cool. Can't afford the $395 price, but the free version seems helpful enough. Kind of cool that you run it remotely. I have it on my laptop now collecting data from the server.
Google announces plans to build experimental fiber to the home networks in select communities:
We're planning to build and test ultra high-speed broadband networks in a small number of trial locations across the United States. We'll deliver Internet speeds more than 100 times faster than what most Americans have access to today with 1 gigabit per second, fiber-to-the-home connections. We plan to offer service at a competitive price to at least 50,000 and potentially up to 500,000 people.1Gb/s? Sign me up.
Amazon buys Touchco a New York based start up that specializes in touch screen technology. They will be merged with Amazon's Kindle group.
FaceBook releases the HipHop PHP to C++ cross compiler as open source
HipHop for PHP isn't technically a compiler itself. Rather it is a source code transformer. HipHop programmatically transforms your PHP source code into highly optimized C++ and then uses g++ to compile it. HipHop executes the source code in a semantically equivalent manner and sacrifices some rarely used features — such as eval() — in exchange for improved performance. HipHop includes a code transformer, a reimplementation of PHP's runtime system, and a rewrite of many common PHP Extensions to take advantage of these performance optimizations.Wow. At first I thought this was just another opcode cache like APC or eAccelerator but it looks like this is much more. It will be very interesting to see real world numbers on speed improvements, but if FaceBook is happy with the results that is a pretty strong endorsement.