Some interesting technology related blog posts I've seen recently…
GPL Java
Jonathan Schwartz (Sun) and Bob Sutor (IBM) both mention the news that Sun has chosen the GPL to open source Java with. Good news!
Me and Sam spent the afternoon trying to write an algorithm to calculate a winning hand in Gin Rummy using Java which wasn't much fun. I'm becoming a fan of Eclipse though.
Google has the ultimate answer
Jake Stride points out that Google has the answer to life, the universe and everything. Shame they don't have the question! Or, perhaps they did, until I visited that URI, at which point the universe was instantly replaced with something even more complicated.
network clients != thin clients
Jonathan Schwartz clarifies why he said “I don't believe in thin clients.” He goes on to explain that web applications don't run on thin clients because web browsers do too much to be considered thin clients. What's important is network clients, not that they're necessarily “thin”.
Open Standards vs. Open Source
In one of the slides from Bob Sutor's talk at the University of Texas, he mentions Open Standards vs. Open Source. He explains Open Standards as an open blueprint which can be developed and maintained in a transparent way and is freely implementable. Open source is a transparently developed implementation, possibly of open standards.
This is interesting because I strongly believe that open standards are even more important than open source. You don't have to believe in open source to implement an open standard, but open standards are crucial. Even if you implement an open standard in a proprietary way, you can still interoperate with an open source implementation of that standard.