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Java has its detractors, but according to a recent reading of the Tiobe Programming Community Index, it’s still the dominant programming language, with little change in its overall popularity since August 2007. Runners up? C, (Visual) Basic, C++, and PHP.

(Credit:
Tiobe)

Data from O’Reilly book sales suggests a similar decline for Java and other traditional programming languages over time. Cause for alarm? Not really. It’s just a matter of the web assuming a more vital importance to programming, a trend that will continue to grow. It will, however, take a very long time to make your Java or C skills irrelevant.

That’s the short-term view of the past year. Looking at the longer-term view, however, Java, C, and other “traditional” languages appear to be on the decline while PHP and its ilk are on the rise:

Tiobe Programming Community Index, August 2008

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Intel stated emphatically that the host controller is outside the scope of the USB 3.0 specification and that the company is under no obligation to release the specification before it deems the specification ready for release. Moreover, because Intel is giving it away for free, chipset makers shouldn’t complain, the blog said.

An Intel spokesperson posted a blog on Wednesday stating Intel’s position on the release of the host controller specification related to USB 3.0.

Nvidia is now firing back at Intel. The world’s largest graphics chip maker has responded to Intel’s latest statement on the USB 3.0 specification and said chipset maker SiS has also joined the group of companies at odds with Intel.

Nvidia counters that if it doesn’t get the specification from Intel in a timely manner–meaning now–the group members will be forced to come up with their own host controller, causing a cascade of potential delays. “Effectively, what will end up happening as this plays out (is) the rest of us launch later. But even though we’ve developed to the Intel host controller spec, we may not interpret it exactly the same way as Intel has implemented it.”

“I think they’re overstating the resources and time required to get to a mature spec,” said the Nvidia source.

Nvidia also took exception to this statement by Intel: “Intel is investing heavily (think gazillions of dollars and bazillions of engineering man-hours) in resources to create an Intel host controller spec in order to speed time to market of the USB 3.0 technology.”

A host controller allows computer devices to communicate with the operating system and is a crucial component for implementing USB 3.0 on computer systems.

There are now four companies vying with Intel–all chipset makers: Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices, Via Technologies, and SiS.

And they’re moving quickly to establish their own so-called “host controller” specification. “We’re moving fast. We’ve already staffed it internally. We have resources submitted from all of the companies (Nvidia, AMD, Via, and SiS),” said a source from Nvidia who asked to remain anonymous.

This will lead to further delays, according to Nvidia. “By then, they have become the de facto standard and we have no choice but to go back and respin (redesign) the chip, which then adds another nine months,” Nvidia says. “Effectively, Intel is building in two years of green field–of a market where they’re the sole provider and they can charge whatever they want for their chipsets.”

Here’s a sampling of
green-tech news with quick commentary:

Undersea Volcanic Rocks Offer Vast Repository For Greenhouse Gas, Says Study - Science Daily
"Carbon burial" at a large scale–150 years worth–could happen in undersea volcanic rock, researchers say.
British company launches floating wind turbines off Italy - The Guardian
There are a number of floating wind turbines being developed, but Blue H says its test will be launched later this year.

Maui algae operation will produce biodiesel for power plant - Pacific Business News (Honolulu)
A pollution-to-algae-to-biodiesel project in Hawaii gets a green light.
NREL and Optony Collaborate on Developing Cost-Competitive Approach for Solar Electricity - Press release

The project will combine thin-film solar cells with optics from a new company, Optony, to create a concentrating photovoltaics (CPV) device with potentially cheaper electricity.
Plan to bury climate-warming carbon unveiled - Reuters
EPA looks to create some environmental guidelines because geological sequestration of carbon dioxide is still unproven.

(Credit:
Blue H)

Shell and Iogen announce extended alliance to accelerate a next generation biofuel
Shell does appear to be serious about developing alternate sources of fuels. It ups its stake in Iogen to 50 percent.
Critics Claim WEEE Failed to Deliver in First Year in U.K. - GreenerComputing
The electronic waste directive is meant to increase recycling, but administrators have run into some hitches.

A prototype of Blue H's floating turbine.

“If in fact a person is generating enough packets that they’re the ones creating that situation, we will manage that consumer for the overall good of all of our consumers,” Bowling said.

To keep service flowing to other customers, Comcast plans to impede Internet speeds to its heaviest users for up to 20 minutes, Mitch Bowling, Comcast’s senior vice president and general manager of online services, told Bloomberg in an interview Tuesday.

Instead of focusing on specific applications that may be hogging traffic, Comcast plans to determine “in nearly real time” whether a heavy user is causing congestion, Bowling said.

Comcast reportedly plans to reduce Internet service to customers it deems to be using too much bandwidth, a move that comes on the heels of federal regulators ruling that the Internet service provider violated the law by throttling BitTorrent transfers.

The move follows the Federal Communications Commission’s ruling on August 1 that Comcast’s throttling of BitTorrent traffic last year was unlawful–the first time any U.S. broadband provider has ever been found to violate Net neutrality rules. (The FCC released the text of that ruling Wednesday.) The FCC issued a cease-and-desist order and required the company to disclose to subscribers in the future how it plans to manage traffic.

Comcast, the largest cable provider in the U.S., has been under fire for months after it was discovered the company had been slowing down peer-to-peer traffic on its network. Comcast had said that its measures to slow BitTorrent transfers, which it voluntarily ended in March, were necessary to prevent its network from being overrun. At a public hearing in February, Comcast Executive Vice President David Cohen said, “Comcast may on a limited basis temporarily delay certain P2P traffic when that traffic has or is projected to have an adverse effect on other customers’ use of the service.”

Consumer groups were incensed by the tactic, and the FCC investigation ensued over whether Comcast had violated any of its Net neutrality principles.

AT&T exclusivity simply doesn’t work for Apple anymore, since it’s now one of the leaders in the cell phone space and it’s doing itself a disservice by not opening its popular mobile phone up to the millions of people who have decided against AT&T as their mobile carrier.

5. Steve Jobs announces his retirement date

This one isn’t too much of a stretch and I’m sure many of you would agree that it’s only a matter of time before Apple finally announces that the iPhone will be made available to more carriers.

Check out Don’s Digital Home podcast, Twitter feed, and FriendFeed.

I don’t think there’s any doubt that PlayStation 3 pricing will be reduced by $100 in the next year. As the costs of building the console continue to fall and Sony’s competitors continue to enjoy strong sales thanks to a lower price, the pressure Sony will feel will be too much and it’ll be forced to bring the price of its PS3 down to $299 to compete more effectively against the
Xbox 360 and the
Wii.

Please share your own 2009 predictions in the comments with the rest of us, so we can look back a year from now and see who did the best job.

4. Windows 7 hits store shelves

3. Blu-ray gains little ground on DVDs as streaming takes off

Sorry, but Blu-ray won’t gain very much ground in 2009. So far, its adoption rates are still quite low–around 10 percent to 15 percent each week based on Nielsen VideoScan figures–and both the players and the movies will still cost too much for people to move to Blu-ray in any meaningful way.

Vista has been a PR nightmare for Microsoft, vendors are still upset with the product, and businesses are loath to deploy the OS for fear of incompatibility, security, and stability issues.

Will it work? You bet.

2. Apple ends iPhone exclusivity deal with AT&T

I know Apple zealots and shareholders won’t like to see this one happen, but Steve Jobs will announce his retirement date in 2009. I don’t think he’ll retire in 2009–that would be a disastrous move from a share price perspective as shareholders are looking for a strong leader in uncertain times–but he will announce that he’s had enough and will call it quits by the end of 2010. At the same time, he’ll announce his successor and throughout 2009, he’ll let that person take more of the limelight to quell some shareholder unrest over his departure.

1.
PS3 pricing is reduced by $100

Happy New Year.

Realizing that, Microsoft will ramp up the rhetoric in 2009 and start talking more and more about Windows 7. And at what it believes is the perfect time–March or April, if you ask me–it will announce that Windows 7 will be launching in 2009.

Exclusivity was great for two years, but now that Apple has proven it has its sights set on RIM, it can’t beat the BlackBerry maker unless it makes its iPhone available to any U.S. carrier.

So there you have it: my predictions for 2009. Will they come true? Who knows? But one thing is certain: 2009 will be an exciting year for tech and I hope you keep coming back to The Digital Home in the next year to continue our discussions about some of the most important topics in this industry.

Now that 2009 is only hours away, I thought it was time to unveil this year’s 2009 predictions. There’s no telling if what I think will happen will come true or not, but I thought I’d fill you in on five of my predictions for the New Year.

Meantime, 2008’s breakout success–Hulu– will help lead the charge in online streaming and act as the benchmark all other professional media outlets will try to surpass. While that’s happening, more capable set-top boxes will hit store shelves and more people will find reasons to stream movies into their living rooms instead of popping a disc into their Blu-ray or DVD players.

I’m still betting its launch date will be November 2.

Rather than not being able to turn the thing on, he found he couldn’t get it to shut off.

“After September 11, it became so difficult to travel,” he said, referring to going places with his typewriter.

His first computer was a candy-colored Mac, a gift from his boyfriend Hugh. More recently, he said, he switched to a MacBook Air because he wanted something lighter to accompany him on his frequent travels.

Although he liked his typewriter, he said that he quickly learned it was not a good idea to show up at an airport with anything the security guards weren’t used to seeing.

“It just had a mind of its own,” he said, noting that for an entire day it would keep turning itself back on. The next morning, though, it was back to normal, he said. A computer expert told Sedaris he was lucky he was drinking his tea black–a spill with coffee or sugar would have likely ruined it.

Sedaris was in San Francisco Thursday to read from his latest book, When You are Engulfed in Flames.

But the relationship to the ultrathin laptop got off to a rocky start. Less than a week after buying the pricey portable, he spilled about a third of a cup of tea on it.

I went for the obvious one–Mac or PC?

Sedaris was at a local bookstore to read from his latest tome, When You are Engulfed in Flames. There wasn’t time before his reading for in-depth questions, but I did manage to get in a short one while he signed a book for a co-worker.

SAN FRANCISCO–The staff of Beyond Binary has been working hard, so I decided to take the whole crew on a field trip Thursday night to hear our favorite author–David Sedaris.

“Mac,” he told me.

In the audience question and answer session, he went into more detail about making the switch from IBM (a Selectric typewriter, that is) to a
Mac.

Also of note, Sedaris said he still types with just one finger. I guess that would be the hunt or peck method.

There’s no question that open-source adoption will accelerate. The question is whether companies can monetize that acceleration. I think we can, and in some cases I know that we already are.

Cohen is therefore right to declare:

Which is it?

The online trading company also says its systems have become more reliable under open-source software. On January 22, around the time of an interest rate move by the U.S. Federal Reserve, nearly 55,000 customers logged in at once to Etrade.com, the highest level in the past five years. The site performed at normal levels across all its trading and investing platforms, and the company says it fared much better than the competition.

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It’s both, of course. Cohen is referring to a bit of a straw man when he claims open source is dead, referring to support-based business models that don’t add “proprietary” value beyond the base, open-source code. All successful open-source companies have always had some value-add beyond the base code itself, whether that company is Red Hat, MySQL, SugarCRM, Zimbra, or IBM. We’ve just become more open about calling it out.

Disclosure: I work for Alfresco. Los Angeles Times and E*Trade, both quoted in the BusinessWeek article, are customers. I have informally advised the Collaborative Software Initiative on occasion but have no financial interest in the company.

This is a marathon, not a sprint. We just need to stop thinking sprint in terms of open-source business models, and think more like longer-term plays like SaaS, Google-like data aggregation plays, etc. The money isn’t in support, and it’s arguably not in the software, either. Rather, it’s in the services that surround the software, some of which may be created from software, and some from people. But none of it looks like a pureplay support model, to Cohen’s point.

Today, Thompson is considering expanding E*Trade’s use of the Alfresco open-source content management system. He’s also starting to use open-source techniques for internal software development, such as using smaller, more agile teams and breaking up software projects into modular pieces. “If you look at what’s happened in the last year and you look at what happened in the dot-com era, there are some parallels,” Thompson says. “A lot of people who are under a budget crunch like we were in 2001 will come to the same conclusion about open source.”

BusinessWeek talks out of both sides of its mouth on Monday, on one hand carrying an op-ed piece from Collaborative Software Initiative’s Stuart Cohen arguing that the “open-source business model is broken,” while on the other hand talking up how enterprises are turning to open source to save money and drive productivity in tough times.

So we need more efficient ways to monetize open source. Point taken. But customers aren’t waiting. As E*Trade Financial Chief Scientist Lee Thompson tells BusinessWeek, the benefits of open source are too good to ignore, and go well beyond acquisition cost:

For some companies, the benefits of open source extend well beyond cost savings, to such areas as license management. “Your engineers spend less time on contract negotiation and more time on the technology, which is really what you want them to be doing,” says E*Trade’s Thompson.

Open-source code is generally great code, not requiring much support. So open-source companies that rely on support and service alone are not long for this world. The traditional open-source business model that relies solely on support and service revenue streams is failing to meet the expectations of investors.

Challenges in putting PCHRs to use include limitations by some laboratories in releasing medical results to patients, the fact that a substantial number of medical records are still paper-based, and that the U.S. currently has no universal patient identification system.

Once patients give their approval, companies, government organizations, health-related operators, and others could create applications that would connect to the PCHR platforms.

Microsoft is working with New York Presbyterian Hospital, and Google is working with Cleveland Clinic to have those institutions provide their patients with an electronic copy of their own records.

Under a PCHR, a patient would set up a portal that could authorize their doctors, health care providers, researchers, and family members to provide and share information relating to the patient. Those records and information would be stored in the patient’s PCHR, which would be hosted by Google Health or the Microsoft HealthVault.

But the authors of the report, Dr. Kenneth Mandl and Dr. Isaac Kohane, raise a number of key questions concerning the PCHR service providers, such as whether the service providers will have a research mission and whether they would allow secondary use of any aggregated data of their users. And, of course, the issue of privacy was also addressed (PDF). The PCHR service providers are not under the same regulations as the health care industry, which restricts the sharing of patient information to only those people or entities whom the patient designates under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.

The movement toward consumers controlling their own health records and the means that will get them there raises several issues of concern, according to a report in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Google and Microsoft may eventually become the envy of medical researchers, as the technology behemoths take on the role of hosting health care databases for consumers’ own personally controlled health records (PCHRs).

“Despite these challenges, many consumers with PCHRs will soon control a valuable resource–an integrated copy of their health care information across sites of care,” the researchers note.

The report says that Google and Microsoft’s databases of patient information may eventually grow to be larger and more up-to-date than the databases of other well-known medical research programs. As a result, researchers may find it easier and cheaper to team up with Microsoft and Google when doing their research, rather than relying on a number of sources for data to do their research.

In the end, it’s probably less an issue of cost than quality. Publish something that’s worth viewing or reading and you’ll find an audience–in cyberspace or even outer space.

He may have picked a propitious time to put that proposition to the test. In 2001, the Pew Internet and American Life Project, said that half of the people it surveyed said they looked for free alternatives when a site they used asked them to pay for content. “Just 12 percent of them pay for the service and the rest just decide to stop getting that content or service from an online source.” But by late 2007, Pew found that 28 percent of the people it surveyed paid to access or download digital content online. (That compared with 17 percent the year earlier.)

We’re about to find out. Starting Tuesday, Feldman will begin charging 99 cents to people who want view some of his videos and posts. Here’s the link to his video entry where Feldman outlines his thinking.

But would you pay for the privilege of knowing the latest bit of happenstance pissing him off?

I have no idea whether he can make a side business charging for the occasional post. Neither, apparently, does Feldman, who acknowledges swimming against the tide.

“Why am I doing this? Because I want to. It’s an experiment. I know that most of 99 percent of you aren’t going to pay 99 cents ever. So it goes. But you know what? Content has to be paid for at some point.”

1938 Media impressario Loren Feldman admittedly is an acquired taste. If you’re on the receiving end of one of his skewering rants, I doubt you’ll judge his monologue to be gut-busting hilarious. But the guy’s fresh, and I confess to being a fan boy.

(Credit:
Loren Feldman)

Listen now:

What’s behind those Northern Lights?

Microsoft tries to one up Google PageRank

Also in Friday’s podcast, Amazon and MySpace are looking to team up on music, a convicted spam king is found dead along with his wife and daughter, Microsoft flashes some new search algorithm technology, and NASA explains the Northern Lights phenomenon.

Report: Asus bringing ‘whole-day’ battery life to Eee PC

Tracking food safety with clean tech

AOL to sell Xdrive, close mobile and photo sites

Download today’s podcast

Today’s stories:

Report: Amazon could with with MySpace on music service

Video: waterproof your gadgets

An internal AOL memo reveals the Internet giant is looking to shed some extra weight as it gears up for a potential sale: XDrive, Bluestring, AOL Pictures, and others. Writers for some of its popular blogs have also been asked to post minimally until the end of the month. CNET News reporter Stephen Shankland tells Erica Ogg what AOL has up its sleeve.

Escaped ’spam king’ allegedly kills self, family