Keep an open mind, says Spolsky, in a rant about both unwanted mega-architectures, and the way big companies snaffle up all the best coders.

Windows Vista is better at protecting against malware than XP but more easily infected than Windows 2000, according to a study by Australian anti-virus firm PC Tools.

The survey calls into question Microsoft's oft-cited claims that Vista is its most secure operating system.

JavaOne Todd Fast, chief architect in Sun Microsystems' Java Enterprise tools group, took a big gulp of Web 2.0 Kool-Aid at JavaOne while telling professional developers they must embrace a broader definition of "application" if they are to take advantage of the current sea change in the way software is built and delivered.

Oracle is Friday expected to start laying off at least 500 staff, eliminating duplication across product engineering and management, following its $8.5bn acquisition of BEA Systems.

JavaOne US vice president Dick Cheney's 2003 Christmas card was a curious thing. The message? "If a sparrow can fall to the ground without His notice, it is likely that an empire can rise without His help?" This prompted the question: did Cheney and other neocons now view the US as an empire?

Database tools vendor Embarcadero Technologies has snapped up Borland Software's unwanted tools subsidiary CodeGear for $23m - $127m less than initially sought.

As Microsoft encourages the shift towards Windows Server 2008, you might think that the previous versions immediately become obsolete. But demand has shown this to be false, and this is why we at Reg Books have decided to package together the key Windows Server 2003 MCSE and MCSA Online Learning products into cost-effective collections.

It’s also accepted that, if you are looking to upgrade your qualification from Server 2000 to 2008, the upgrade path is unquestionably easier to follow if you first train on Server 2003 and then move on to the 2008 material (not that a straight jump from 2000 to 2008 is impossible).

With this in mind the Online Learning collections below could prove to be the most cost-effective piece of spending you do all year, not only providing the knowledge you need but saving you thousands of pounds on training. Can you afford not to take advantage?

JavaOne Sun today announced the yet-to-launch JavaFX programming language will gather data on end-users activities to help developers monetize software, by selling ads for instance.

Google is spearheading a volunteer workforce it hopes will become the centralized authority for responding to security issues in open source software.

CommunityOne The relationship between business, vendors and coders has been tested at a Sun Microsystems conference in San Francisco intended to express oneness with open source.

The first supported first version of Sun Microsystems' OpenSolaris, AKA Project Indiana, makes its debut today with additional backing from Amazon's Elastic Computing Cloud.

PHP is the latest language getting the NetBeans treatment, with a PHP version of Sun Microsystems' open-source environment hitting early access today.

A Pittsburgh computer consultancy is paying $45,000 in civil penalties over claims it discriminated against legal US residents by advertising only for developers on H-1B visas.

In surreptitiously slipping Safari onto Windows by way of the Apple Updater, Steve Jobs and his minions have tripled the browser's market share.

It's messy, slippery and gets everywhere, particularly the high-quality stuff. Spam is still the scourge of the unwary company, and if you don't know your whitelists from your blacklists, you might want to check out our new primer for some spam management pointers.

Linux developer Hans Reiser's conviction for first-degree murder has re-ignited the debate about the future of Linux's various file systems.

In this post, Glen Stampoultzis posts a very interesting and clever sequence of steps by which he converts a piece of Java code into idiomatic Groovy code. I thought it was a nice article, so I'll do a very short spin on it: taking Glen's final Groovy code and converting it into idiomatic Ruby.

Register Books is offering big discounts on a range of A+ Certification titles that cover everything you need to know to pass the CompTIA A+ Certification exams.

Adobe Systems is throwing open its Flash and AIR file formats to speed delivery of Rich Internet Applications to billions of mobile devices with its tools and players.

Stanford University has mounted some gun turrets to its Ivory Towers. Just a few weeks after rival UC Berkeley revealed a mega-funding engagement with Microsoft and Intel around multi-threaded software, Stanford has returned fire by grabbing money from just about every other vendor on the planet with interest in improving code for multi-core chips for similar research.

Interop 2008 Day two of Interop Las Vegas 2008 opened with a modest IT proposal from Mark Templeton, President and CEO of Citrix.

Qumranet, a rather small software company, wants to make a very large play in the virtualization market with a new product. It's looking for Solid ICE to go up against the desktop virtulization wares from VMware, Citrix, Microsoft and a host of start-ups.

Sony Ericsson is planning to offer developers the opportunity to embed Flash Lite applications inside J2ME midlets, in the hope that two mobile phone application platforms will prove better than one.

SpringSource has picked up on the trend for modular servers with the planned beta release today of the SpringSource Application Platform, its Java application server.

Interop 2008 A decidedly downbeat Bob Muglia took centre stage at Interop this afternoon to preach the gospel of interoperability according to Microsoft.

In the 50 plus acquisitions that IBM has completed over the past five years, none have taken longer to close than the long-awaited Telelogic deal. Nonetheless, the bottom line of the deal is that IBM’s Rational brand will break past the software development lifecycle ghetto into the realm of developing complex products that you can see, touch, and be transported in (think: consumer electronics, automobiles, aircraft).

Microsoft has poached a 17-year Adobe Systems veteran in a sign of where the company is placing its technology bets.

A jury has convicted Hans Reiser, developer of the ReiserFS filesystem for Linux, of first degree murder for killing his estranged wife in 2006 even though her body was never found.

Interop 2008 Citrix is brushing the cobwebs off its NetScaler line today and introducing a new top-end to its web acceleration appliances.

Microsoft has recruited database guru David DeWitt to head up a new database research lab. Based at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where DeWitt was until recently professor of computing sciences, the new lab will focus on advanced data-management techniques.