Practical Technology

for practical people.

June 5, 2008
by sjvn01
1 Comment

Will Linux force Microsoft to give XP Pro more life?

Microsoft has been forced by Linux’s popularity on UMPCs (Ultra Mobile PCs) to extend the life of Windows XP Home. My only question: How long will it take before Microsoft buys a clue and gives XP Pro a new lease on life as well?

The boys from Redmond seem to be in denial. Let me go over the fundamentals for them. 1) Vista is a flop; 2) People want comparatively low-powered, inexpensive computers; 3) Linux runs greats on these PCs; 4) Nothing Microsoft has, except for XP, will run on these PCs; and 5) Microsoft seems to think that only consumers will want these tiny laptops.

Wrong.

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June 4, 2008
by sjvn01
2 Comments

Open-Xchange’s E-Mail for the iPhone

CIOs and CTOs have a problem. Their users want to use their iPhones and iPod Touch devices for business in the worse way and there’s no good way—yet—to get business Internet applications to an iPhone or the like. Well, until now.

Open-Xchange, an open-source e-mail company that usually works with service providers, has released a new Web interface on its Open-Xchange open-source project site.

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June 4, 2008
by sjvn01
0 comments

XP lives! Sort of.

Congratulations Linux. Yesterday was the day you made Microsoft blink. Microsoft has changed its mind and has decided to keep XP Home around after all.

I’m sure that Microsoft’s change in heart was in part due to efforts like InfoWorld’s Save XP efforts, which put names to over 200,000 users who don’t want to move to Vista. I’m even surer though that what really changed Microsoft’s mind is that Linux, and not Windows, was taking over the red-hot UMPC (Ultra Mobile PC) market.

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June 3, 2008
by sjvn01
3 Comments

Why Novell is cashing in on Linux

Novell made some, but not a lot of money from Linux in its second fiscal quarter, which ended April 30, 2008. The real news though isn’t the Linux income itself–$29-million–it’s that Novell year-over-year growth in Linux is up a healthy 31%.

Actually, that’s not healthy. That’s great.

While Linux remains overall a small part of Novell‘s net revenue, $236-million for the quarter, it’s SUSE Linux’s exceptionally strong growth that’s the real story.

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June 3, 2008
by sjvn01
0 comments

Good-Bye Mr. Gates

It was appropriate that Bill Gates’ last major public speech was not to the masses, but to developers at Microsoft’s TechEd conference. We often forget that the billionaire great white shark of the technology business started as a geek.

Indeed, for those of us who have known him for many years, at heart Bill Gates is still a geek. He dresses better than the traditional stereotype and Lord knows he knows more about running a business and stomping on the competition than any three other technology CEOs put together — Steve Jobs of Apple and Larry Ellison of Oracle excepted. But, in his heart of hearts I believe he’s still be more comfortable talking code with other developers than boasting about how much better Windows (fill-in-the-blank) is over its competitors to Microsoft fans.

So, it was only appropriate that instead of talking about Windows Seven, he spent his last minutes as a Microsoft keynote speaker talking about Project Oslo, a new SOA (service-oriented architecture) application development platform and touch-screen technologies. Of course, if all Gates had had was his developer skills, we never would have heard of him. Gates was an OK, but by no means, great programmer.

For all that he was a developer at heart; it was his “take no prisoners” business mind that made Microsoft number one.

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