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Java development on OS X. Things that need to be done.

Part of my development efforts in the past few months has been based on Java and since MacOS X is the operating system of choice for me I usually use it for Java development. On the C/C++ and of course Objective-C front, MacOS X is doing alright, despite the largely obsolete development tools involved. It has, not only due to Apple’s engineering efforts, a top-notch (albeit not the fastest one) compiler, gcc, a good debugger, gdb and an excellent RAD API, Cocoa. So, on this front I have no reason to ditch OS X and choose another platform for my…

Apple as innovator, from Tim O'Reilly.

Just happened to stumble upon an interview by Tim O’Reilly (if you don’t know who he is, maybe this is not for you). In that interview he speaks of Apple as an innovator in the computing industry. One of the comments in the article are what made me want to write a few things about it. One of the readers mentioned how much more exciting, enthousiastic and meaningful the computing industry was in the 1980s. And yeah, he did mention Atari, Commodore Amiga and one could also add Spectrum, Archimedes and of course NeXT, on whose Operating System, MacOS X…

DRM, privacy, the way the net is turning out to be!

Well, I have managed to correlate several – seemingly unrelated – things again to my own surprise. Think for a sec. about the way the unipolar governing of the world by — currently — the US, personal freedom/privacy, the power provided to the world by electronics and computing. I just watched Colossus: The Forbin Project, a cheesy 1970 sci-fi film about a computer similar to SkyNet in Terminator, that decides to take over the world: fortunately not immediately killing the whole of mankind plus Colossus, the computer at hand, joins forces with an equivalent Soviet computer called Guardian and combine…

DSL, connectivity, progress: things not happening in Greece

It is not the first time I am writing about my frustration with internet connectivity in Greece. In a country such as Greece, with more than 60% of its land being in the form of islands or mountainous terrain, making human communication and transportation difficult, one would think that advanced telecoms would be available to the masses; one would also reasonably expect that those services would be cheap, so that most people could enjoy them. Unfortunately, this is far from true; Despite being an EU country, I am sorry to say that Greek transportation and connectivity is among the worst…

Desktops of the future…

It was in 1990 that Microsoft released Windows 3.0, making the PC the dominant platform as it is today, by providing a cheap, easy to use environment for people to use and developers to program (without the horrible Apple royalties that had to be paid for Macintosh development at the time). Windows 3.0, as other graphical desktops before it (Atari, AmigaOS, GEM Desktop etc.) all borrowed from Xerox’ innovation which was commercially introduced to the world with the Macintosh in 1984. But all of those technologies, the concept of a file and a folder represented by a 2D rectangular entity…

ADSL and broadband in Greece. How far behind are we?

I am in my room in Madrid in a hotel that provides free ADSL to every and each one of its rooms. I must admit I was impressed. Downloading files, checking email and surfing was generally a pleasure with transfer rates ranging between 16 – 55KB/s (something pretty impressive considering at least one other person in the hotel was using the service!) The sorry state of Greek broadband options for consumers along with the fact that Greece is the only out of the European “15” states (and one of the few out of the European “25” of the future) that…