Technology - InfoWorld

San Francisco - A Google executive Thursday heaped praise on Apple's iPhone, even with his company set to challenge Apple in this same space with its Android mobile computing platform.

San Francisco - Sixty-hour work weeks with no overtime or comp time, a BlackBerry hitched to your belt 24/7, mandates from managers who have no clue what you actually do ??? all for a job that could be outsourced tomorrow. Is it finally time for technology workers to form a union and demand better working conditions?

San Francisco - An impending update to Java might sound like just an incremental release, based on its cumbersome naming: Java Platform Standard Edition 6 Update 10 (Java SE 6 u10).?? But the upgrade actually features technology considered critical to reviving the concept of client-side Java applets.

San Francisco - Microsoft is boosting integration of functional programming with its Visual Studio 2008 software development platform.

San Francisco - Virtualization is becoming increasingly important in the datacenter as a way to respond quickly to the varying server demands.

San Francisco - They're back! Just when you thought the "browser wars" were over, with the two camps ??? Microsoft and Mozilla.org ??? settling in for a kind of intransigent d??tente, along comes Google to stir things up all over again. Clearly, Google is unhappy with the current state of browser geopolitics and feels it needs to roll its own in order to ensure a robust base for its myriad hosted applications (that is, Gmail, Google Docs, and so on).

San Francisco - Wikis are deceptively easy to use and install, so are nowadays found in all sorts of IT departments, especially as quick and simple project management organizers.

San Francisco - With an upgrade to its software development framework for PHP scheduled for release today, Zend Technologies is mixing in client-side AJAX capabilities with server-side PHP functionality.

San Francisco - YouTube is part of the social fabric of the Internet now, with ???watch this video??? e-mails of the new millennium replacing the joke-list e-mails of the '90s as high-level corporate time-wasters.

San Francisco - VeriSign is in many ways synonymous with managing the Web, thanks to its handling of key DNS root servers and of name resolution for .com, .net, and other domains. In recent years, it's had both strong ups and strong downs.

San Francisco - Anyone who has worked in IT for more than five minutes knows that the field has been in a dramatic transformation for the past 10 years, invading and conquering other organizational domains such as communications and security, while also wrestling with the new issues that technology has wrought such as employee mobility.

San Francisco - Aptana, which has enabled Web 2.0 development via JavaScript, Ruby on Rails, and PHP with the Aptana Studio IDE, has added Python to the mix through its acquisition of Pydev, which was announced this week.

San Francisco - A decade ago, European countries leapt out of the gate to take the lead in the radical open source movement -- none more so than France -- and left U.S. developers in the proverbial dust. Through policies and high-profile projects, the French Republic for years has been advocating for all open source all the time, in government and education.