This and the fact that the slew of programs that HP expected developers to produce for the machine failed to materialize, led the firm to announce only seven weeks after the TouchPad’s introduction that it was going to discontinue manufacturing... Users quickly found that the WebOS, or something, made the TouchPad’s speed resemble molasses in January compared to its competitors, mainly the Apple iPad OS and Google’s Android. Although it has since announced one more production run of the TouchPad, this is thought mainly to be for the purposes of clearing out inventory and meeting unmet obligations to large customers. The TouchPad, for those of you who, like myself, were too engaged on other matters to notice, was HP’s attempt to crack the tablet-computer market. But according to an article in yesterday’s New York Times, the TouchPad was an example of too little, too late in a number of ways.

As the current (and presumably permanent) stewards of the Java language and platform, Oracle has taken particular pains to evidence its commitment to open source since its acquisition of Sun Microsystems. Oracle continues to press the open source developer button, shrugging off its long-term criticism in this space with this week's release of Solaris Studio 12. The company claims that this new release accelerates performance of SPARC T4 and x86-based applications by up to 300 percent as a result of leveraging Oracle's advanced compiler technology.