Programming

Google's expertise in translation has begun to pay dividends for an entirely separate project, its Chrome browser--as well as any other software using the open-source spell-checking package called Hunspell.

Chrome combines WebKit's spell-check infrastructure with Hunspell's multilanguage library of correctly spelled words to supply spell-check in 27 languages. But many widely used words were missing from Hunspell, and Google used its translation expertise to fill in the gaps.

Here's the explanation in a Wednesday blog post from Google programmers Brett Wilson and Siddhartha Chattopadhyay:

"The Hunspell dictionary maintainers have done a great job creating … Read more

Sun Microsystems plans to launch JavaFX Mobile on Thursday, the second of a three-stage debut of technology it hopes will ease software design while modernizing its Java technology

JavaFX Mobile is a software layer that handles user interface elements such as graphics and animations on mobile phones. It's closely related to the JavaFX for desktops and laptops introduced in December and the JavaFX version for TVs that's still not released.

Sun is also announcing a few partners it's lined up to endorse the technology: mobile phone makers Sony Ericsson and LG Electronics, mobile phone network operators Sprint … Read more

IBM announced Wednesday plans to deliver its software via Amazon Web Services, in a move to push its software into the clouds.

IBM will use Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to offer its customers and third-party developers its software based on a pay-as-you-go system.

Under the arrangement, users will have access to IBM's DB2, Informix Dynamic Server, WebSphere Portal, Lotus Web Content Management, WebSphere sMash and Novell's SUSE Linux operating system software.

IBM is also providing free Amazon Machine Images for development and testing purposes, which is designed to allow developers to quickly build pre-production applications.

Big … Read more

Chrome programmers have switched out a third-party software package in favor of their own as part of Google's attempt to speed its open-source browser up more.

The change came with a key component for processing JavaScript text called regular expressions. "As we've improved other parts of the language, regexps started to stand out as being slower than the rest. We felt it should be possible to improve performance by integrating with our existing infrastructure rather than using an external library," according to a Chromium blog post by programmers Erik Corry, Christian Plesner Hansen, and Lasse Reichstein … Read more

With Web applications imposing new demands on Web browsers, a previously behind-the-scenes programming technology called JavaScript is getting new visibility, and Opera is the latest case in point.

The Norwegian browser maker announced on Wednesday a new JavaScript engine project called Carakan.

Carakan runs JavaScript code about 2.5 times as fast as the Futhark engine in the alpha version of Opera 10, programmer Lars Erik Bolstad said in an Opera blog post.

Opera's main business is browsers for mobile phones, and its current JavaScript engine is optimized for minimum memory demands, but now performance is the priority, Bolstad … Read more

As the chief open-source officer at Sun Microsystems, Simon Phipps spoke to ZDNet Australia about the MySQL acquisition and community engagement on OpenOffice.org and OpenSolaris.

Q: In the beginning of 2008, Sun spent $1 billion on the acquisition of MySQL. Given Sun's huge reduction in Australian revenue, and the global shedding of jobs, was this a prudent acquisition? Phipps: It's a bit soon to be making that sort of judgment. Asking that question now is a bit like asking a company to change its product strategy on the basis of the share price.

MySQL is a long-term … Read more

Baby New Year faces a tough time finding a job in this climate.

U.S. job cuts announced in January soared to 241,749 across all industries, marking the largest monthly cut in the past seven years, according to a report released Wednesday by Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

The computer industry ranked No. 3 among the industries facing the biggest ax in January, with 22,330 layoffs announced.

For an industry already under siege, it offers little encouragement after the tech sector exited last year with 186,955 job cuts in the telecommunications, computer, and electronics sectors. That figure was … Read more

Correction, 12:50 p.m. PST: This story initially mischaracterized a statement made by John Challenger regarding the severity of recent tech-related job cuts. He does not expect them to be as severe as those during the dot-com bust. Also the percentage figures cited within the various sectors reflect the increase in layoffs last year compared with 2007, and not the percentage of jobs cut.

Job cuts in the tech sector increased 74.2 percent in 2008 compared with the previous year, as the industry was battered by an unrelenting wave of layoffs, according to a report released Thursday.

Last … Read more

Gartner sounded a warning on Wednesday about the impact on software of the rapid growth of multicore chips and the number of threads each processor can handle.

In a research note, the analysts argued that software is struggling to keep pace with the fast growth of multicore processors, first from two and four cores per processor, and now to eight and even 32 cores in high-end servers. With 32 processors per socket already shipping, four years from now machines could host 1,024 processors, Gartner said.

Analyst Carl Claunch said: "Many of the software configurations in use today will … Read more