Software

Microsoft Vista Announced
After a morning of fishwife-hot rumours, it’s been officially announced that the next version of Microsoft Windows – previously code-named Longhorn – will be known as Microsoft Vista.
Although wags are already suggesting that the word might apply to the distant view of the product consumers will get for many months/years, Microsoft remains confident of an ontime release in the second half of next year.
Naturally, a big new product needs a suitably uplifting tag line, so the cappuccino-supping, flipchart-flapping, brainstormin’ visioneers at Redwood have come up with:
“MicrosoftVista. Clear, Confident, Connected: Bringing clarity to your world.”
The story was first broken by anonymous sources close to the company (that generally covers anyone from the cleaner to the guy who delivers the water cooler) who revealed that Microsoft had unveiled their new name in Atlanta during the company’s internal sales event, known as the Microsoft Global Sales Briefing (that’s ‘MGB’ to those in the know).
Possibly because of a fear of failing to release the product in the year bearing its name, Microsoft has once again shied away from its earlier practice of releasing dated operating systems (Windows95, Windows98 etc).
The current major version of Windows originally regaled under the name of ‘Whistler’ during development before being christened WindowsXP prior to its public release.
Brad Goldberg, a Microsoft product manager, said that the first beta of Vista is slated for release on Aug. 3 and will be targeted at developers and IT professionals.
Goldberg stated that Vista’s three design goals include better security, new ways to organize information, and seamless connectivity to external devices.
A second test release is anticipated to be debuted before Vista’s full release next year.
More details about the new operating system’s features will be announced on August 3.
Video of whooping Microsoft Execs
22 July, 2005
European Parliament Says Non! To Software Patents
The European Parliament has voted overwhelming against a controversial bill that might have led to software being patented.
Euro MPs voted 648 to 14 to reject the Computer Implemented Inventions Directive, declaring that that no one liked it in its current form.
The European Commission responded by saying that it would not draw up or submit any more versions of the original proposal.
Hotshot hi-tech firms insisted that the directive was essential to protect their investment in research and development, but opponents were having none of it, saying that the bill would have a detrimental effect on small firms and open source developers.
Today’s vote was on the 100+ amendments made to the original bill which was designed to give EU-wide patent protection for computerised inventions (like CAT scanners and ABS car-brake systems) as well as software when it was used to realise inventions.
The bill was supposed to get rid of individual EU nations’ patent dispute systems and replace it with a common EU procedure. Instead, the old system of patents being handled by national patent offices will continue, without any judiciary control by the European Court of Justice.
Opponents of the bill aren’t exactly whooping in the streets, with a poster on the urban75 bulletin boards astutely observing, “Don’t think that the fight is over; this was only rejected because both sides voted against it:
The anti-patent lobby just think the whole idea is ridiculous…and the pro-patent lobby feared that the amendments added to the bill would take away their power to patent everything, and thus also voted against the bill.”
With the European Parliament voting so decisively against it, small European software companies have a better chance of competing on a level playing field for now, but with big corporate interests at heart we don’t think we’ve heard the last of software patents.
It’s also worth noting that there’s now nothing to stop individual countries legislating software patents on their own.
Software patent bill thrown out [BBC]
Computer Implemented Inventions Directive
6 July, 2005
China Opens Clinic For Internet Addicts
China has opened its first officially licensed clinic for Internet addiction as State media reports growing cases of obsessed Internet gamers whose addiction has caused them to quit school, commit suicide or even murder fellow gamers.
Dr. Tao Ran, the clinic’s director reports that his patients suffer from a series of maladies including depression, nervousness, fear, panic, agitation and an unwillingness to interact with others (to be honest, that sounds like a lot of normal teenagers we know).
Their Internet addiction also manifests itself in sleep disorders, the shakes and numbness in their hands from a surfeit of fragging, clicking and scrolling.
The government-owned clinic opened for business in March this year, and is situated within the Beijing Military Region Central Hospital, with the patients – mainly aged between 14 to 24 – looked after by a team of a dozen nurses and 11 doctors.
Most report losing sleep, weight and friends after spending countless grimly hours glued to their PCs, with one 12-year-old reported to have spent four days in an Internet cafe, barely eating or sleeping.
The Web addicts claim that their online obsession helped them to escape everyday stress, with many older kids becoming fixated by online chats with the opposite sex.
Tao estimates that up to 2.5 million Chinese suffer from Internet addiction, although Kuang Wenbo, a professor of mass media at Beijing’s Renmin University, thinks the problem is being overstated:
“As the number of the Netizens grows, the number of the addicted people will grow as well, but we should not worry about the issue too much. The young men at the age of growing up have their own problems. Even if there was no Internet they will get addicted to other things.”
Patients diagnosed as Internet-addicted by Tao’s diagnostic test are presented with a combination of therapy sessions, medication, acupuncture and sports exercise, with the courses lasting around 10 to 15 days.
Treatment is not cheap, with the daily US$48 (~£27 ~€40) charge working out at more than double the average city dweller’s weekly income in China.
Some of Tao’s treatment sounds a bit medieval with one session involving a machine that stimulates nerve impulses by delivering 30-volt charges to pressure points.
Another treatment is reported to involve a clear fluid delivered via an intravenous drip to “adjust the unbalanced status of brain secretions.” Eek!
Although Tao claims that the long-term effects of treatment are generally successful, not all patients are available to resist the temptation to log on.
Internet addicts treated at clinic in Beijing [AP]
4 July, 2005
HowTo: Play Films on PSP
Sony’s PlayStation Portable is a media hub, but unfortunately, apart from games there isn’t really any content available for it (not forgetting unlucky UK citizens who can’t even officially buy one until September).
It’s possible to put MP3’s on to your memory stick (Duo Pro) and listen to them through your PSP, but an iPod is probably a better system for just audio.
What makes the PSP special is its screen, very bright, lots of colours and wide. When Sony release movies on UMD they’ll sell thousands and you’ll get the public transport commuter zombies staring at their PSPs, earphones stuffed in their ears watching the latest blockbuster trying their hardest to escape from the real world.
Become a Zombie now
Though it’s not possible to get UMD movies yet, the PSP will play MPEG4 movies off the memory stick. A 1GB memory stick costs about £100 (~US$177, ~€148) which will hold about 2 full length movies (more, if quality is compromised).
Making movies used to be complicated, but luckily there are programs out there that considerably simplify the process and make it easy.
Using an Apple Mac has many advantages and ripping DVDs is one of them. Look for an application MacTheRipper, it does exactly what is says on the tin, and takes the MPEG2 information from a DVD while removing region coding, macrovision and other DVD annoyances and stores the resulting files on the hard disk.
In order to make it PSP friendly, just extract the main title.
Now find a nice utility PSPWARE, which links the Mac with the PSP. It backs-up saved programs from the PSP, but from the Mac to PSP it does a whole lot more, like syncing photo albums, playlists from iTunes but more importantly movies.
PSPWARE just takes the movie directory (produced from MacTheRipper) and magically out pops some MPEG4 files. They take a while to convert, but when the PSP is plugged in, they zap across and just work.
They really do look good and are very watchable.
Windows users don’t despair
PSPWARE has just been released for Windows with the same functionality as the Mac version. Unfortunately though there are DVD rippers out there they can be difficult to use.
DVDdecrypter was one of the best (very similar to MacTheRipper) and it’s still available from various sites, but the author has stopped supporting it as he was “put under pressure” from a major corporation.
PSPWARE is available from NullRiver it costs about £8 (~US$14~€11) for a perpetual license (free upgrades).
MacTheRipper is availble from RipDifferent and is freeware.
Windows users will have to do a bit of digging for DVDdecrypter – but it’s out there and free.
NOTE: Incredible as it may seem, making digital copies of films may be illegal in your country, even if for personal use.
1 July, 2005
Handango Announces the Champion Award Winners for 2005
Mobile download site Handango has announced the winners of their Champion Awards at the fifth annual Handango Partner Summit.
Judged by a panel of industry boffins, experts and media, the Handango Champion Awards were dished out for applications written for BlackBerry, Palm OS, UIQ, Series 60 and Windows Mobile-based Pocket PC and Smartphone platforms.
The categories were Best Application for Work, Best Application for Play, Best Application for Life, Best New Application and Best Industry Application.
For the Palm platform, the winners included Snapper Mail Deluxe in the ‘work application’ category, with Pocket Tunes Deluxe scooping up the ‘Play’ category.
SplashData’s SplashBlog – a nifty application that lets mobile users easily create and update a mobile photo blog – grabbed the coveted “Best New Application” award.
Winners in the Windows Mobile Pocket PC included high-powered organiser software Pocket Informant 2005 (“Work”) and the ultra-configurable Today plug-in, SPB Pocket Plus. Expect reviews on these products in the near future.
The comprehensive MobiLearn Talking Phrasebook, a talking multi-language phrasebook for the Pocket PC with “pure native voices”, snagged the “Best Industry Application” award.
Other winners included Mobimate’s WorldMate and Mail2Fax on the BlackBerry platform, Papyrus and NewsBreak on the Windows Mobile and Quick Office Premiere and IM+ Instant Messenger on the Series 60 platform.
In the Developers of the Year category, hearty back-slapping plaudits went out to Develope One (Pocket PC), Chapura (Palm), Ilium Software (Windows Smartphone), Terratial Software (BlackBerry), Mobile Digital Media (Series 60) and Epocware (Series 60).
Full list of the winners here
29 June, 2005
IE7 Adds Spyware Protection As Firefox Grows
Smarting daily from the soaring popularity of its upstart rival Firefox, Microsoft is hoping to stem the exodus by bolting on new security features to their next version of Internet Explorer browser.
According to Rob Franco, lead program manager for IE security at Microsoft, Internet Explorer 7 for Longhorn will contain a feature called “low rights IE”, designed to resist hijacking attempts by spyware and other malicious software.
The new feature effectively removes administrator rights, ensuring that unknown applications – like dodgy software, iffy code and lurking spyware – can’t be installed without express permission from the user.
“When users run programs with limited user privileges, they are safer from attack than when they run with administrator privileges, because Windows can restrict the malicious code from taking damaging actions”, wrote Franco in his personal blog.
“Any programs that the user downloads and runs will be limited by User Account Protection, unless the user explicitly gives the program administrator privileges”, he added.
The idea is that by restricting administrator rights for Web surfers, they’ll be protected even if they visit a bad bwoy website that tries to exploit vulnerabilities in their browser.
Without enough privileges to copy files to start-up folder, install software, hijack the browser’s homepage or search provider, the surfer should be protected.
Although IE7 will be made available for Windows XP SP2, the low rights browsing feature will be available only on the next version of Windows, known as Longhorn.
With Internet Explorer losing friends fast because of its unsavoury reputation as a honeypot for homepage hijackers and skulking spyware, these new security features can’t come too soon for Microsoft.
A new study by NetApplications revealed that Microsoft, the market leader, is fast losing ground to Firefox, with the open source browser now accounting for 8% of the global market; up from 7.38% in April.
The browser has eroded Microsoft’s market share by nearly one percentage, down to 87.23%, following month-on-month advances from Firefox.
Dan Shapero, the company’s chief operating officer commented that although Microsoft’s 87% share “may seem like market dominance,” the browser is suffering an average of 0.5 to 1% loss of users each and every month.
Shapero feels that Firefox is now appealing to a mainstream audience rather than early adopters and tech-savvy surfers: “FireFox is gaining traction with early adopters and its popularity and adoption rate are starting to tap into mass-market acceptance as buzz continues to build.”
“The message for Web masters is clear: Make sure your Web site is compatible with Firefox, because more and more of your visitors are using it to go to your Web site,” Shapero finger-wagged.
The only other browser to record significant gains is Apple’s Safari which extended its share by a tenth of a percentage.
Once Microsoft’s fiercest rival, Netscape is now humbled with a lamentable 1.64% market share, followed by Safari at 1.91% and Mozilla with 0.58%.
Microsoft Longhorn
NetApplications
14 June, 2005
Resco Photo Viewer For Pocket PC Review
These days, a smartphone/PDA isn’t worth sniffing at unless it comes with a built in camera and a shedload of internal/external memory for storing mobile snaps on.
With many devices now sporting expansion card slots capable of storing hundreds of pics, Resco is hoping that their Photo Viewer application will prove an invaluable organisational and editing tool for keen mobile snappers.
The program – available in various flavours on the Windows Mobile, Windows Smartphone, Windows CE, Palm and Symbian operating systems – offers an easy way to browse, edit and organise photographs, set up user-defined albums, watch MPEG1 movies and slide shows and view received faxes.
For super-sleek execs out to score swotty points, it’s even possible to run a business presentation from a Pocket PC by connecting a VGA card to a projector and running a PowerPoint presentation directly from Resco Photo Viewer.
Installing the program on an i-mate JAM Pocket PC 2003 phone was simplicity itself, with a double click on the downloaded .exe file transferring the software to the handheld via ActiveSync.
When you install the Pocket PC program, there’s also an option to install the Resco Album Generator on your desktop PC – this program lets you create photo albums ON your desktop and then have the pictures and the album information transferred to your handheld device on the next sync.
Before firing up the program, Photo Viewer asks which file formats it should open by default, with tick boxes offering an impressive selection of formats: MPEG1, JPEG, PNG, TIFF, MS PowerPoint (converted by Desktop Album Generator), BMP, CFX, PCX, GIF, RAB, RAW, PGM, PPM and even PSD, Photoshop’s native format.
Once up and running, the program’s ‘home page’ presents users with the choice to open a photo album, browse a folder, browse a memory card, open the last viewed image, pull up the help files or have a rummage around the options on offer.
When it comes to options, Resco certainly haven’t short-changed their customers, with a multitude of tabs, tick boxes and drop down menus letting users set up the application the way they like it.
Once I’d tweaked, twiddled and fiddled the app to my heart’s desire, I was happy to find that browsing photos with the Photo Viewer was a pleasingly nippy experience, with a selection of thumbnail display options popping up on-screen in double quick time.
Clicking on a thumbnail bought up a large preview image, while clicking again resulted in a full screen picture, automatically orientated for the screen, Very fast and very smooth. Nice.
In full screen mode, the keypad can be used to scroll through picture collections manually, or users with tired fingers can set up a slide show and choose from a selection of transition fades and effects.
It’s also possible to add sound (WAV, MP3) and text annotations to each image or set background music to a slide show.
Usefully, the program also offers basic image editing tools, with users able to tweak brightness, contrast and gamma RGB values and resize and crop images to specified pixel sizes – great for mobile bloggers wanting to trim images down for uploading.
For snap-happy camera-phone photographers, bloggers or folks who just like to carry around lots of photos on their mobile device, Resco Photo Viewer is an ideal product, offering fast browsing and viewing tools in a straightforward interface.
With a comprehensive feature set wrapped up in an attractive interface, Resco Photo Viewer represents excellent value at just US$25 (~£13.70~€20.50). We like it. Highly recommended.
(5/5)
Resco Photo Viewer
13 June, 2005
Sidekick II Released By T-Mobile Germany
The mobile Internet handset – developed by Danger and manufactured by Sharp Corporation – will be made available on service contract for £68.70 (~€100, ~US$125).
For just £10.30 (~€15, ~$18.84 USD) a month, users can enjoy unlimited data use when combined with any of T-Mobile’s voice plans, with the monthly data charge being waived for the first month for new T-Mobile Sidekick II customers.
The feature-stuffed handset includes a mobile phone, push email, instant messaging, HTML Web browser, text-messaging, calendar, address book, an integrated digital camera and the option to download applications and content.
Users will also get access to a Web-based, online account to manage their data from the desktop.
“The T-Mobile Sidekick II’s ease-of-use and complete set of voice and data applications have made it the featured product in our ‘Internet in your pocket’ initiative,” said Michael Schuld, Vice President Terminal Management T-Mobile Germany.
Beating at the heart of the T-Mobile Sidekick II is Danger’s “hiptop” software and services infrastructure.
Claimed to deliver a “superior mobile Internet experience to end users”, the thin client/server system takes care of the secure transmission of data between the network and the device, accelerates Web-page downloads and automatically opens files sent via email.
“Danger’s popular mobile Internet experience, combined with T-Mobile Germany’s excellent network, customer care and marketing might is an ideal match,” PR-ed Hank Nothhaft, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Danger.
Also known as the Hiptop 2, the 130 x 66 x 22 mm (5.1″ x 2.6″ x 0.9″) handset features a flip Transflective TFT 240×160 pixel screen and an integrated VGA (640 x 480 pixel) camera.
The tri-band (900/1800/1900 MHz GSM/GPRS unit comes with 32 MB RAM and 16 MB Flash, with a built in speakerphone and Lilliputian QWERTY keyboard.
T-Mobile are also releasing a “trendy” version of the Sidekick, resplendent in distinctly un-macho pink sparkly bits.
But that’s not for us. Oh no.
Hiptop 2
T-Mobile Germany
2 June, 2005
IBM, Oracle Battle For Database Market: Gartner
The insatiable appetite of hungry surfers desperate for more information, analysis and intelligence has fuelled a database market growth of 10.3 percent in 2004, according to research released by the Gartner Group.
On an oily mat somewhere in Business Land, IBM and Oracle are manfully wrestling with each other to control the lucrative relational database market.
Although IBM still holds the crown – hanging on to their slim market lead of 34.1 percent of the overall market – Oracle are laying in some mean moves, maintaining 33.7 percent and enjoying a sizeable boost from Linux.
“Oracle saw strong growth of nearly 15 per cent, much of it coming from its performance on the Linux platform,” Gartner said.
“The difference between the giants in terms of revenue was only US$30m (~£16.5), making it too tight to declare a clear winner.”
Lagging a fair way behind is Microsoft, with 20 percent of the market, followed by NCR Teradata at 2.9 percent, Sybase at 2.3 percent and all the others collectively totaling 6.6 percent.
It’s a lucrative market, growing from just under US$7.1 billion in 2003 to nearly US$7.8 billion in terms of new licence sales, although the continuing wobbliness of the US dollar may have artificially inflated market growth by some 3 to 4 percent of overall growth.
“[Overall market growth] was probably somewhere between 6 and 7 percent,” observed Gartner Inc.’s Colleen Graham, who authored the report, noting that sales outside of the United States, when converted to US dollars, added more to vendor revenue because of currency conversion, and weren’t necessarily reflecting increased demand.
In terms of overall growth, Microsoft and Teradata both led the field with 18 percent and 17 percent, respectively.
Despite being a still a relatively small part of the overall RDBMS market, the Linux segment is as hot as an extra spicy vindaloo, registering 118 percent growth in 2004, more than doubling from US$300 million in 2003 to over US$650 million in 2004.
Gartner found that Oracle is putting some distance between its rival IBM in this subsection of the market, with a growth of 155 percent.
Oracle now controls 80.5 percent of the Linux RDBMS market, up from 69 percent a year ago, while IBM slumped to 16.5 percent of the market share, compared 28.4 percent the previous year.
Linux RDBMS new license revenue grew 118.4 per cent to US$654.8m, with Oracle taking up for 80.5 per cent of that business.
In terms of growth of sales, Linux performed better in RDBMS than Windows. The platform grew 10 per cent to US$3.1bn in 2004, although Microsoft hogs a hefty 50.9 per cent of business, up from 47.4 percent in 2003.
Microsoft’s Tom Rizzo, director of product management for SQL Server, made funny faces while deriding the growth of the Linux database, chortling: “Look at it: It’s a small market. You’d expect some growth there, from such a small base.”
With chest set to ‘maximum puff’, Rizzo reminded anyone within earshot of healthy growth in the Windows database market, citing the figures as evidence that Windows is “eating away at the Linux camp” rather than the other way around.
The RDBMS market on the Windows server platform grew 10 percent in 2004. Microsoft’s market share grew 18 percent in this segment.
IBM, Oracle Race for Database Market Dominance
26 May, 2005
A Teenage Take On Digital-Lifestyles
We all sit around postulating about what changes the digitisation of media will bring and how that will affect us. We thought it would be a good idea to ask the generation that have grown up with digital media (CD’s) what their view of the news was.
15 year old Lawrence Dudley has a strong knowledge of technology and digital media, so he’s well placed to reflect on the weeks news.
Games:
So, it’s come to that time again: The whole “my console’s better than yours” and subsequent scramble for market share between Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo. Although I personally really dislike Microsoft, I have to admit that their console is looking the most tempting so far: It’s the only one that has properly been launched and its feature set is looking more than promising.
This leaves Sony and Nintendo: Personally, I tend to dismiss most of Nintendo’s offerings out of hand, as I don’t believe that their gear really appeals to me. It’s all so… gimmicky and childish. I mean, who would you rather have? That hot-looking chick from Dead or Alive Extreme Beach Volleyball, or The Mario Bros.? Answers itself really…
I don’t currently own an Xbox, but I have been quite a fan of Sony’s Playstation for a while: I had two of the original Playstations, PS1 and PS2 for various reasons. You might’ve thought that I would’ve been looking forward to the The Worst Foods To Eat Over A Keyboard
This article brought a big smile to my face: There’s nothing better than watching various Linux zealots argue over which food they ate over their keyboards. Nothing too serious, but you know … gotta have something to do while you’re, erm, doing your homework or something like that =) So which do you think it would be? Pizza? Coke?
That’s it from me, enjoy!
19 May, 2005