Text message this morning from CNN: Unemployment hit 10.2% in October. Microsoft announced earlier this week another 800 employee layoffs to the 5,000 previously announced employee layoffs. If you look at Microsoft's financials you see why, a 14% revenue and 18% net income drop for the last reported quarter, on top of disappointing prior quarters. Read more
Here are the top five benefits of Android from a business perspective (primarily for prospective application developers).
#1 Low Barrier to Entry
Android has a low barrier to entry. There are no costly licensing fees or development tools. In fact, it is possible to develop applications without spending a dime. The primary costs fall into three categories: development and testing expertise, royalty fees (if you decide to distribute using third party app stores), and test devices.
#2 An Ideal Platform for Companies New To Mobile
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Hello, we're Shane Conder and Lauren Darcey. We have one book, Android Wireless Application Development, published and are working on our second Android book.
We'll be guest blogging here throughout the month of November. In just a few days, we'll be at Droidcon in Berlin, Germany.
More to come...
A lot of open source advocates like to rage against the machine at Microsoft, but when a former Microsoft Research employee says that Windows 7 won't stop Linux from market domination, that's an opinion to note. Keith Curtis, author of the book After the Software Wars, says just that. But he goes further. He thinks Microsoft and its customers would be better off if the company ditched Windows and instead built its own version of the Linux operating system. Read more
Look, I hate to bring this up, but there's something we need to discuss: Why haven't I heard from you recently? (No, not you, you've been in touch. It's this guy over here … ) Really, is it too much to ask that you put pen to paper … oh, all right, fingers to keyboard … and tell me what's on your mind?
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In last week's column (which was online only) I continued my exploration of a cool programming system called Runtime Revolution, focusing on the tool's object-oriented, event-driven architecture. This week we'll look at the product's English-like language, a style referred to as "candygrammar" by some cynics.
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I spent yesterday at the Embedded Systems Conference in Boston, which is both nerd heaven and a great place for design engineers to get up to speed on the latest developments in components. Read more
Microsoft shocked the open-source world this summer when it made certain drivers open-source and submitted them for inclusion in the Linux kernel. Now the leader of the Linux driver project has blogged about Microsoft dragging its feet, with developers not responding to his e-mails.
The chastising apparently worked, as Microsoft responded to him soon after. The company reiterated that it is "absolutely committed to this project."
-- Jeff Caruso
Both SCO and Novell are anticipating their next day in court to settle who owns Unix copyrights after a judge Monday overturned a 2007 decision that favored Novell.
In a 54-page decision, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals said it was reversing the 2007 summary judgment decision by U.S. District Judge Dale Kimball of the District Court for the District of Utah that Novell was the owner of Unix and UnixWare copyrights.
The case was sent back to trial. Read more
Microsoft has posted a chart for Windows 7 adoption; the who and where on acquiring the new OS.
Check it out here
Today, IT shops with Volume License Software Assurance contracts can download Windows 7 RTM in English via the Volume License Service Center.
Next up Microsoft Partner Program Gold/Certified Members on Aug. 16.
- john fontana, sr. editor, network world
Rumors about a possible (some say likely) Apple tablet are so intriguing because of Apple's huge success with the iPhone. Gizmodo says its a 90% likelihood we'll see an Apple Tablet within 4 months. One of the more recent debates is whether the tablet would be a MacBook Touch (based on Mac OS X) or an iTouch on steroids (iPhone OS). Read more
Sam Ramji, Senior Director of Strategic Platforms at Microsoft, said some pretty unexpected things during his interview on my podcast this week. I've gone back and listened to the interview with Sam several times, each time picking up a new little tidbit, but also re-enforcing what I heard him say about open source, hybrid and mixed stacks, and heterogeneity. At least in Sam's case, we're hearing things I thought I'd never hear from good old proprietary Microsoft. Read more
Sam Ramji, Senior Director of Platform Strategy joins us to talk about Microsoft’s recent open source code contribution to Linux. During the podcast Sam Ramji and I dive into details about the GPL'd Linux drivers, talk about how Microsoft worked with members of the community during their development, discuss why Microsoft submitted the drivers under the GPLv2 license, and examine what it took to gain consensus within Microsoft to open source the drivers under the GPL. Read more
Think of the annual Pwnie Awards delivered at the Black Hat conference as a geek version of athe Oscars - if they were combined with the tongue-in-cheek Razzies that celebrate the worst of Hollywood.
10 networkiest movies of all time
Twitter, Linux and Red Hat were among honorees that didn't go unscathed this time around. Read more
I am, as everyone must know by now, a huge fan of the netbook and Ubuntu. I have two Asus Eees, running the stock Xandros, but perhaps soon to run Ubuntu, and I've just completed building two more Ubuntu desktops, with one of these is in fact housed in a old carpet cleaner. Read more
If what ComputerWorld is reporting and this blog post is saying, Microsoft may have effectively GPL'd the Linux Hyper-V drivers, whether intentional or not. If you link your code to GPL licensed code, your code is then considered to fall under the GPL license also, provided you distribute the combined code to any third parties. Read more
While Microsoft has made some prior moves to be more friendly towards open source (albeit slightly more friendly), Microsoft's GPLv2 contribution of Linux drivers will be seen as the first legitimate Microsoft move by the Linux open source and user communities. Microsoft's cozy relationship with Novell and SUSE, and their implied threats about Linux infringing on Microsoft's patents, have left most to believe Microsoft isn't serious about working with the Linux crowd. Read more
If there was any doubt Microsoft and Google were out to eat each other's lunch, both companies have proved they're going after the other's core business; desktop OS+apps and search, respectively. Microsoft upped the ante big time with Bing. Google's responding right on the heels of the Google Wave announcement with Google Chrome OS. Read more
Despite what you might be reading on the social networks today about the Mac and Linux versions of Chrome, these are early, unstable versions, not ready for the masses. Google late Thursday released what it is calling "developer-only" versions of Chrome for Mac and Linux, taking the first step in its eight-month-old promise to do so. Read more
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