Practical Technology

for practical people.

May 22, 2008
by sjvn01
1 Comment

Is Microsoft Office in trouble?

At first, when I learned that Microsoft was not quickly supporting its own Open XML, but ODF and PDF instead, I thought it was a great joke. Microsoft went to all that trouble to make Open XML an ISO standard, but then they can’t even support it themselves! Better still, Jason Matusow, Microsoft’s senior director of interoperability, and Doug Mahugh, Microsoft Office’s senior product manager had to ‘fess up to its customers wanting ODF and PDF. So much for Open XML and Metro!

What ever happened to Metro, Microsoft’s PDF killer anyway? Did it just die of neglect like Microsoft Bob?

Getting back to the point, I started thinking more about what Microsoft odd document format moves could really mean. Pamela Jones, editor of Groklaw, suspects that Microsoft wanting to work on the ODF ands PFS standard so that it can foul them up with what Matusow called “Engineering tradeoffs.”

I can buy that theory. It’s right out of the Microsoft playbook.

But, still why is Microsoft doing this? Why aren’t they, at least, promoting their own standard?

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May 22, 2008
by sjvn01
0 comments

Latest Red Hat Enterprise Linux released

Red Hat is on top of the business Linux world and it has no intentions of coming down. Its newest release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), version 5.2, is designed to make sure that it stays on top.

Red Hat plans on keeping its big name customers, such as the New York Stock Exchange Euronext cash equity market, by introducing improvements in six major areas with the 5.2 release. These are: virtualization, the desktop, security, clustering and storage, networking and IPv6, and serviceability. On top of this, however, there is another major move forward: broader hardware architecture support.

In particular, RHEL 5.2 provides enhanced capabilities for x86/x86-64, Itanium, IBM POWER and S/390 architectures. These improvements are primarily in performance, power usage, scalability, and manageability. For instance, Red Hat claims that RHEL will support Intel’s Dynamic Acceleration Technology in the Core 2 chip families by enabling power saving by idling unused CPU cores, while also offering performance gains by overclocking busy cores. Red Hat also announced that, for the first time, RHEL has been certified on IBM’s new Cell Blade architecture.

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May 21, 2008
by sjvn01
1 Comment

Microsoft can’t support Open XML

Microsoft did everything it could to make its Open XML pseudo document standard an official ISO standard. Fight, cheat, whatever it took. Nothing was too low. And, at the end, Microsoft won. Too bad after all that, Microsoft can’t even get their ‘standard’ to work in their own products.

No, I’m not making that up. As reported on May 21st in SD Times, Microsoft confessed that they can’t get Office 2007 to support the version of Open XML that ISO just approved. That’s right. Microsoft can’t even support its own standard.

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May 21, 2008
by sjvn01
0 comments

High Tech. Puppy Security

You have a laptop in your bag, an iPod Touch in one pocket, and a mobile phone in another, but what does your poor dog have? Nothing!

This cannot be allowed to continue! Dogs have digital needs too!

So, it is that Zoombak, a GPS locator company, has just released the Zoombak GPS Dog Locator. Seriously.

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May 20, 2008
by sjvn01
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Intel and Wind River driving Linux infotainment systems to cars

Linux is in our computers, our phones, our Wi-Fi equipment, and our TiVos — why not our cars? Intel Corp. and Wind River have been working with both the embedded and automotive industries to advance in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) with open, Linux-based, standards-based, interoperable hardware and software called Open Infotainment Platforms (OIP).

The name of their game is to make it possible for both car manufacturers and after-market vendors to bring new infotainment products and features to market faster to meet consumer demands. According to Ton Steenman, Intel’s vice president of the Digital Enterprise Group and general manager of the Low-Power Embedded Products Division, there has been a major shift in the automobile industry towards adding media and information built-in devices to cars.

“We see car manufacturers wanting to extend the media digital experience into the automobile, and making it so that these devices are always connected to the Internet. The industry has been trying to do this the old way of taking several years to set up a technology and then modifying it slowly as needed. That isn’t doing it for them. They’ve been worked with Intel for two years now on how to unleash stuff quickly. So, we’ve worked on the definition and development of an OIP,” Steenman says.

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May 20, 2008
by sjvn01
0 comments

Network Solutions & Open-Xchange to offer Hosted SMB E-mail and Groupware

Network Solutions, best known for being the grand-daddy of domain name companies is partnering up with German open-source e-mail and groupware company Open-Xchange to offer a hosted email and groupware SaaS (Software as a Service) offering for SMBs (small-to-medium sized businesses). The target? Customers who want a more affordable solution than Microsoft Exchange.

While Network Solutions Inc. (NSI) long ago moved into the Web hosting business, in addition to its bread-and-butter domain business, this joint offering with Open-Xchange marks its biggest step into both e-mail service offerings and open source. Network Solutions has offered POP and Web e-mail services in the past along with Symantec Brightmail anti-virus and spam protection.

Now, with Open-Xchange services, NSI can offer full SMB mail services. For example, according to an Open-Xchange representative, Outlook users will be able to use all their e-mail client’s functionality even without a Microsoft Exchange back-end.

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