Jul 05 14

Solid Edge V17 is to be provided (free) for up to 750 secondary schools in Ireland.

The deal is worth some 133.5m Euro and will be rolled out by Cadtec (Europe)

http://www.cadteceurope.com/.

So far over 200 schools have signed up. Each school will receive 20 fully functional licences and support for teachers in the form of 5 “teacher” home-use licenses.

Read a more detailed report at silicon republic

http://www.siliconrepublic.com/…single5080

Jul 05 08

On the 6th July, the European Parliament voted as follows on the Directive on the patentability of computer-implemented inventions. Read the article on wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directive_on_the_patentability_of_computer-implemented_inventions

648 against, 18 for and 14 abstentions

Thus rejecting the proposal.

The bill was intended to remove individual EU nations patent systems in favour of a Europe wide common process and has been fiercely debated for a number of years. Patent applications will continue to be handled by individual, national patent offices.

Although the directive may have clarified and unified the patent system in Europe, opponents considered it would have been exploited in favour of large software companies wishing to patent software which would limit opportunities for small businesses and the future of open source developments.

Jul 05 05

A nice easy to understand article from the “horses mouth” so to speak ( or Multi-Core for dummies ?) noticed in Technology@Intel Magazine

http://www.intel.com/technology/…/multi-core-0705.htm

Its interesting to note that Intel are predicting that more than 85% of its server processors and %70 of its mobile and desktop Pentium family processor shipments wil be dual-core base by the end of 2006.

(Notwithstanding its current court battle with AMD :) If you want to see what that’s all about you can read the actual court document

http://www.amd.com/…/AMD-Intel_Full_Complaint.pdf

or an open letter from the President and CEO of AMD

http://www.amd.com/…12684,00.html?redir=CORBF02.)

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite PicLens

Jul 05 05

Check out del.icio.us - a bookmarks manager. It provides a web service for sharing bookmarks - everything posted is publicly viewable, so its not a tool for storing private collections.

del.icio.us is a social bookmarks manager. It allows you to easily add web pages you like to your personal collection of links, to categorize those sites with keywords, and to share your collection not only among your own browsers and machines, but also with others.

Find out more http://del.icio.us/

Jul 05 04

3D XML is a lightweight XML based format for sharing 3D data.

Find out more at

http://www.3ds.com/3dxml

Jul 05 02

Are you being driven mad trying to solve fiendishly difficult Sodoku puzzles ?

Here’s a little helper if you ever need a bit of assistance with those really difficult ones SuDoHelper

http://www.sudohelper.com/

Jul 05 02

From a series entitled Anatomy of a software Development Role an interesting article discussing the quality assurance role - to ensure that the software development process doesn’t sacrifice quality in the name of objectives - is available here

http://www.developer.com/java/other/article.php/3515426

Jul 05 01

Nick Benton and Gavin Bierman, scientists from Microsoft Research in Cambridge, have designed an experimental research language that extends C# with new features for writing concurrent programs. A compiler for the language, called Cω (C Omega), is available to the public.

An article talking about C Omega, by the authors, is available at Microsoft Research

http://research.microsoft.com/displayArticle.aspx?id=1271