Stephen L. Michel

What does the Apple/Intel thing mean? It may not mean an awful lot. The first question that springs to mind is, will Macs be cheaper? Maybe, in the long run. And Mac users will probably get faster processors sooner now than they would have from IBM. But probably not as fast or as soon as we would have if Steve had climbed into bed with AMD instead of Intel. In the portable arena, the changes will be more dramatic; the G4 & G5 have been notoriously difficult to produce in minimal wattage systems. What it doesn't mean, especially in the medium term, is that you'll be able to buy a shrink-wrapped copy of OS X to run on your inexpensive no-name PC clone. Apple will probably continue to control the hardware as much as possible, selling its own Macs, and making sure that you ... (more)

Does LAMP Challenge J2EE?

The acronym LAMP is gaining critical-mass credibility among developers. Staying away from describing how it will "light up" or "illuminate" the development landscape, let's just simply say that LAMP is an acronym that generally means Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. LAMP is a collection of open-source tools that provide full-service web solutions. One of the things that makes LAMP so popular ... (more)

Can MySQL/LAMP Challenge Oracle, Microsoft, and Sybase?

This week's MySQL User Conference in Santa Clara, CA, looks to be the biggest and most important gathering of the MySQL faithful yet. Those signed up for the conference are getting hit by at least an email a day, inviting them to stop by such-and-such a booth to see so-and-so's new product. There are a lot of reasons for this, but the overarching one is the recent releases of two versions ... (more)