Google’s new OS could hit Microsoft where it hurts

Quoted in a blog post by Andy Goldberg, Andy provides a quote that I suspect a lot of Microsoft sycophants will be telling themselves over the next year:

"Google may or may not have the experience and capability of actually producing an operating system and getting it deployed," he said. "It may not realise how hard it is."

Anyone who takes this line should remind themselves: Chrome OS is not an operating system! - it is browser-based windowing system running on top of an open-source OS; and Google can definitely handle that. Moreover, google has spent the better part of the past decade doing OS design and implementation. It's just that they haven't been selling it, they have been using it internally.

How to Write an Equality Method in Java

Martin Odersky, Lex Spoon, and Bill Venners have written an article on How to Write an Equality Method in Java. Given the amount of traffic my post on the same topic has attracted, I thought I might take a look. Their solution is the best I have seen, and well worth a look, but the article suffers the same problem as every article I've read on this topic: it fails to properly define equals().

A Java equals() method should implement a test for bisimulation.

To me, the remarkable thing about the Artima article is that it provides and example where the traditional getClass() approach I have previously recommended fails to implement bisimulation. The good-news is that this is a rather artificial use-case, and as such isn't going to be causing many bugs. The bad-news is that the fix requires a helper method defined at the topmost concrete class, and the need for it isn't intuitive.

Anyway, if you program in Java you need to read and understand this article.

Scala and Various Things.

Not quite ready to move across yet - however capturing some links to make life that little bit easier when I do. I'm hoping these approaches will work as well for Elmo/OTM as they do for Hibernate.

• Hibernate and Scala
• More Scala + Hibernate
• Scala + Hibernate overview
• Lift thread with interesting comments

I'll be updating this with any more links I want to save for a sunny day.

A couple more links worthy of rereading:

• monads-are-elephants-part-1
• monads-are-elephants-part-2
• http://james-iry.blogspot.com/2007/10/monads-are-elephants-part-3.html
• http://james-iry.blogspot.com/2007/11/monads-are-elephants-part-4.html