software « Tim Anderson’s ITWriting

Open season for patent litigation makes case for reform

By tim, on August 31st, 2010 Follow tim on Twitter

It seems to be open season for software patent litigation. Oracle is suing Google over its use of Java in Android. Paul Allen’s Interval Licensing is suing AOL, Apple, eBay, Facebook, Google, Netflix, Yahoo and others – the Wall Street Journal has an illustrated discussion of the patents involved here. Let’s not forget that

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Six abandoned features from the history of Microsoft Office

By tim, on May 10th, 2010 Follow tim on Twitter

With Office 2010 about to launch, it’s fun to look back at earlier Office launches, especially some of the features which were hyped as breakthroughs at the time, only to be dropped or hidden a couple of versions later. Here are six which come to mind.

Smart Tags

Smart Tags were the big new

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Adobe’s Kevin Lynch: we’re focusing on everybody else

By tim, on May 6th, 2010 Follow tim on Twitter

I enjoyed this interview with Adobe’s Kevin Lynch from Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, where he talks about the Apple problem. Adobe has created a compiler for Flash that creates a native code iPhone application, but Apple’s latest developer agreement prohibits its use.

Lynch presents it as a matter of freedom. Software developers

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Office 2010 offers choice of Open Document or Microsoft XML formats

By tim, on April 23rd, 2010 Follow tim on Twitter

I was surprised to see the following dialog after an in-place upgrade of Office 2007 to Office 2010:

Admittedly there is a strong steer towards the Microsoft formats which, we are told, are “designed to support all the features of Microsoft Office”.

On the other hand, this was an in-place upgrade and

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Microsoft warns against installing 64-bit Office 2010 unless you really need it

By tim, on April 22nd, 2010 Follow tim on Twitter

Microsoft has released 64-bit Office 2010, at least to MSDN and Technet subscribers, with general availability to follow shortly. Now that 64-bit Windows is commonplace, you would think that 64-bit Office is the obvious choice.

Apparently not. Take a read of this technical note before installing 64-bit Office 2010. In essence, it recommends installing

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Intel’s compiler is best for AMD too says software director

By tim, on April 15th, 2010 Follow tim on Twitter

I attended Intel’s software conference in Barcelona earlier this week, and took the opportunity to talk to Director of Software Products James Reinders. I asked him about the complaint from the FTC, which I reported on here, that Intel deliberately underperforms on non-Intel CPUs, specifically those made by AMD. Was it a valid complaint?

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Dancing on a pin: Microsoft belatedly answers Open XML critics

By tim, on April 8th, 2010 Follow tim on Twitter

Microsoft’s Doug Mahugh has replied to accusations from ISO expert Alex Brown that the company is doing little to implement its own Open XML standard. The issue is that the XML document formats in Office 2007 are, from the ISO perspective, meant to be “Transitional” – a compromised format designed to interoperate with existing

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Anders Hejlsberg on functional programming, programming futures

By tim, on April 5th, 2010 Follow tim on Twitter

At TechDays in Belgium Micrososft’s C# designer and Technical Fellow Anders Hejlsberg spoke on trends in programming languages; you can watch the video here.

I recommend it highly, not so much because of any new or surprising content, but because in his low-key way Hejlsberg is a great communicator. The talk is mostly not

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UK government’s open source commitment words not deeds says Ingres VP

By tim, on March 22nd, 2010 Follow tim on Twitter

UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown spoke today about the government’s IT strategy, including a mention for how open source technology can reduce costs:

… we will unleash data and content to the community to turn into applications that meet genuine needs. This does not require large-scale government IT Infrastructure; the ‘open source’ technology that

…continue reading UK government’s open source commitment words not deeds says Ingres VP

Microsoft rolls out its browser choice update – but which is really the best?

By tim, on February 19th, 2010 Follow tim on Twitter

Microsoft is rolling out its EU-required Browser Choice update. File under industry madness; but one thing I found interesting was the choice of words used by each vendor to market their browser.

I only saw the top five in Microsoft’s post; but here are the words:

Google Chrome: A fast new browser.

…continue reading Microsoft rolls out its browser choice update – but which is really the best?

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