Sun’s OpenSolaris community fracas: not just a name thing

By tim, on February 22nd, 2008 Follow tim on Twitter

While I was at Sun last week I was following the discussion in the OpenSolaris community about the naming and repositioning exercise which saw a Project Indiana become the official OpenSolaris distribution. Some of the external members most deeply involved in OpenSolaris were immensely frustrated not by the decision itself, but by the way

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Microsoft moves to protect its Office business in format war

By tim, on February 22nd, 2008 Follow tim on Twitter

Here’s a key snippet from yesterday’s interoperability announcement:

We’re also designing new APIs for Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint applications that will enable developers to plug in additional document formats and allow users to select those formats as their default for saving documents.

Translation: if OOXML fails to get ISO standardisation, and/or if the

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Sun’s Jonathan Schwartz makes the case for free and open source software

By tim, on February 21st, 2008 Follow tim on Twitter

I interviewed Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz last week, and wrote it up for Guardian Technology. By the way, the picture is much better in the print edition.

Sun is gambling on open source – not only open source, but free software. This is possibly easier for Sun that it would be for, say, Microsoft

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Contemplating an in-place upgrade to Server 2008? Read this first

By tim, on February 19th, 2008 Follow tim on Twitter

Microsoft evangelist Neil Hutson has a detailed post describing what happens when you upgrade to Windows Server 2008. As with Vista, the new upgrade procedure is actually a clean install into which your old stuff gets copied afterwards:

Instead of just installing new versions of binaries over those of an existing computer, the new

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Microsoft promises WPF DataGrid, big performance improvement for .NET clients

By tim, on February 19th, 2008 Follow tim on Twitter

Microsoft’s Scott Guthrie posts about coming service updates to client-side .NET (Windows Forms and Windows Presentation Foundation). He says we can expect:

A new, quicker and more efficient setup framework 25%-40% faster start-up for applications using .NET 2.0 and higher, and smaller runtime footprint More hardware acceleration in WPF, plus better video performance and

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Mono at Mix08

By tim, on February 19th, 2008 Follow tim on Twitter

Back in 2003, I blogged about how Miguel de Icaza could not get his proposed Birds of a Feather session approved at Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference.

There’s always been ambivalence at Microsoft about Mono. Extending the value of .NET – good. Making it possible to ditch Windows – bad. Mono events at Microsoft conferences

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Google the "official innovation provider" for Republican convention

By tim, on February 19th, 2008 Follow tim on Twitter

Google is to be the “official innovation provider” for the Republican Convention, according to the convention’s official web site. Thanks to Valleywag for the link. “It’s another huge step in making our convention the most high-tech savvy in history”, enthuses the Convention President Maria Cino.

The convention’s official website, www.GOPConvention2008.com, will eventually feature a

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Writing for a global readership

By tim, on February 19th, 2008 Follow tim on Twitter

Seeing the Comscore report on British media sites (which confirms the amazing reach of the BBC web site), and the amusing commentary from Chris Matyszczyk, prompted me to check out my the stats for this site and blog, which I track occasionally through Sitemeter.

I was aware of writing for a global

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Vista SP1 report

By tim, on February 18th, 2008 Follow tim on Twitter

I’ve installed Vista SP1 on several machines. Takes ages, but otherwise it’s been without incident.

This does not dramatically improve Vista (in my experience); but then again, it wasn’t that bad before. It does seem to speed up Explorer and zip extraction. It tames UAC slightly – some operations that used to require several

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Images of Sun

By tim, on February 17th, 2008 Follow tim on Twitter

I’ve posted a few snaps and comments from Sun’s Global Media Summit, including an exciting pic of the apparently eco-friendly Santa Clara datacenter. Exciting? You be the judge. I’ve not put the pics directly on this blog as they can be a nuisance if you are subscribing and have a slow connection.

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