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5月25日 No PDC for 2007Microsoft canceled (or “is rescheduling”) its “Professional Developers Conference” (PDC) that was going to take place in Los Angeles early October.
The PDC was never an annual event like the TechEd; it took place when Microsoft had new technology to announce. For instance, .NET was announced during PDC 2000.
In the official announcement at http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/events/bb288534.aspx they say: “Windows Server 2008, SQL Server codenamed ‘Katmai,’ Visual Studio codenamed ‘Orcas’ and Silverlight will already be in developers’ hands”.
So the official notice induces you into believing that they are cancelling the show not because the new technology is late but actually because it’s early! Well, that’s a first!
I am not happy; I already had my airline tickets because in order to get a mileage award ticket with United you have to be really early! 5月11日 OpenXML and OpenDocumentI accepted an invitation from the main Brazilian Standards Organization (“ABNT”) to participate in a committee that is discussing the adoption of standard ECMA 376, a.k.a. “OpenXML” as an ISO standard.
ECMA 376 is the document format used by Office 2007 applications. It’s XML-based and, because of that, sometimes seen as a competitor to another ISO standard, ISO 26300:2006 a.k.a. OpenDocument or ODF, the format introduced by Sun’s StarOffice application suite. One might think that there are many articles around comparing the two. Oddly enough, the only references I find are at Wikipedia: Of course, one can check the proposed standard, but at 6k+ pages, it’s a daunting task.
At first one might thing that it has just to with expressing rich documents, pictures and tables. But the thing is far deeper than that because it encompasses three main document formats:
The objective is not only to show the documents – that can be done by using PDF - but to allow the editing without losing their very rich characteristics.
Do the formats compete or do they complement each other?
OpenDocument was a “clean sheet” design and is much simpler – and thus easy to manage and implement. OTOH, ECMA 376 was designed to support all the characteristics of existing Office documents – and then some, with the introduction of new stuff in Office 2007. It’s more complex but also more expressive, especially if you consider that Office is a very mature and feature rich application suite.
How important is it to preserve current Office documents without changing them? There are several converters available, but given the different semantics of both formats, it’s quite likely that a conversion will lose information. So this seems to be the question: should we kill ECMA 376 and impose ODF as a “good enough” format or also adopt ECMA 376 for its richness and let the market decide what to do? 5月9日 Sun offers the US$50 PC, I mean phoneIn the same news about their new Java Mobile Edition, Sun proposed the “US$50” phone as a “computing device for the masses”. This makes a lot of sense, as I mentioned before:
Of course, now Sun poses itself against the “$100 laptop crowd”: http://news.com.com/Sun+aims+for+ultra-cheap+cell+phones/2100-1012_3-6182301.html?tag=nefd.lede.
This is a funny sight. The $100 laptop people (http://www.laptopfoundation.org/) used to be very anti-Microsoft. Now they are fighting “one of their own”. Maybe that’s the reason why they announced support for Windows XP:
“$100 laptop" project adds $75 and Windows: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2003683191_hundreddollarlaptop27.html Java proposes a new Java Mobile Edition (JME)I an interesting move, Sun decided to revamp its Java phone software (JME). It’s about time: the Java Mobile Edition is so limited that it reminds me of my time programming the Apple II (I am not kidding, the platforms are quite similar).
This new version is supposed to be more similar to the Java Standard Edition that runs on desktops. This makes a lot of sense: current smart phones are more powerful than desktops at the time of Java’s debut. For instance, 200-400 MHz CPUs are the norm now, back then a brand new desktop had a 66-100 MHz CPU.
Of course, in terms of hardware, a cell phone that runs this “new JME” can also run Microsoft’s Compact Framework (CF). There are technical differences, of course. Microsoft software demands Windows CE; Java probably will run on a broader OS base. OTOH, after being behind for years, Microsoft now has a head start: it’s been shipping CF for years now; rough edges are polished, users are used to it; there’s a third-party software base, the business process are hammered out, developer tools are excellent etc etc etc.
I would bet on Microsoft. It seems that their long term vision and persistence will win out against all odds, again.
5月2日 The $100 laptop now costs $175 and countingThose who read my blog know that I am not an enthusiast of the “US$100 notebook”:
Now they claim to have a US$175 machine: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2003683191_hundreddollarlaptop27.html. It is still more of the same vaporware, “we are almost there”, “the manufacturer will get little profit”, bla bla bla. Of course, now that you are at US$175 you can round up to US$199, add taxes, sales commission, shipping, warranty and technical support. Stall for one more year and you will end up at US$300, at around the price of a new entry-level “real” laptop in late 2008! No big deal. No miracles, no “helping the poor of the world”. Give some time and Wal-Mart and its Chinese suppliers will probably be able to pull this off in a grander and more effective way. Meanwhile, while pretending to “help the poor kids of the world”, the demagogues will have had their high salaries paid for many years, several nice trips abroad and contacts with high-level officials worldwide. This will certainly be useful for any future career once MIT fire their butts - they can’t be that stupid, can they? UPDATE: Reading carefully, I see that MIT already ditched those folks. Now they spend their time at a NGO: http://www.laptop.org/, squandering the money the rich clueless of the world, like a good NGOs should. If you want help those people buy more first class tickets to exotic destinations, check at http://www.laptopfoundation.org/participate/. Credit cards accepted (really!). |
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