Gladys Rama, who has been the editor, producer and overall guru of RCPU for several years now, is abandoning us here at 1105 Media to pursue her dream of traveling the world. Seriously, doesn't that sound fantastic? Applause to you for that, Gladys.
If you've ever wondered why I use the first-person plural in this newsletter, it's because RCPU is about a whole lot more than just me. Gladys has been the lynchpin of this operation, keeping RCPU running smoothly and mostly keeping me sane over the last few years. Not only is she one of the finest editors I've ever worked with, she has also put up with every lousy pun, every ridiculous YouTube link and every obscure pop culture reference I've dropped into this space over the years. For that, she deserves a combat medal of some sort.
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Posted by Lee Pender on 03/18/20101 comments
VirnetX is in the money--or it should be soon enough given its
big win over Microsoft
in a patent case this week . Those ol' Tyler Roses were in bloom for a patent plaintiff again, as a Texas jury awarded VirnetX almost $106 million and said that Microsoft had infringed on patents related to VPN technology. We can hear the open source crowd laughing (again) from here--you live by the patent and die by the patent, eh, Microsoft? Well, die is a very strong word--Microsoft can produce $106 million the way we at RCPU can produce pocket lint. But know this: If you're sued for patent infringement in Tyler, Texas, just settle or something because you are going to lose.
Posted by Lee Pender on 03/18/20101 comments
It's not a Hyper-V problem, but the researchers at Core Security say that the
Virtual PC hypervisor has a hole in it
so big that your editor could fit through it even after spending a couple of hours at a free breakfast buffet.
Posted by Lee Pender on 03/18/20100 comments
If there's one company that moves more glacially than Microsoft, it's SAP. And if there's one company that moves more glacially than SAP, it's IBM. After talking up public cloud platforms for quite a while, IBM finally has one. We like the name: IBM Cloud. Tasteful and easy to say. Whether it'll compete with Azure, Amazon, Google and the rest is less clear, but it's rarely a good idea to bet against IBM.
Jeff Schwartz has the details
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Posted by Lee Pender on 03/18/20100 comments
Maybe this gives us a hint as to why Microsoft is trying so hard to get its mobile platform into working order. The market for mobile applications is about to take off like a rocket, one study says.
OK. So, the sponsor of the study is...an application store. Still, if they're anywhere close to accurate, the numbers here are pretty staggering. Check out some of these figures from the BBC story linked above, guv'na:
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Posted by Lee Pender on 03/18/20100 comments
Stop us if you've heard this one before:
SAP is talking about hosted and on-demand applications
. Sound familiar? It should. SAP blew smoke about hosted apps for years and then introduced its Business ByDesign offering, which, aside from being grammatically ambiguous, was a bit of a catastrophe. In fact, RCPU has heard that the company pretty much scrapped the whole project (and its staff), although there's still a
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Posted by Lee Pender on 03/17/20101 comments
So, about that upgrade to Windows 7...you might be doing it sooner than you'd planned if you're interested in Microsoft's next browser release.
Reports coming out of this week's big MIX10 developer conference suggest that IE9 is going to be super-cool and might actually out-perform Firefox (your editor's choice) and Google Chrome. Microsoft is, as it seems to be with everything these days, "all in" for IE 9 and the emerging HTML5 standard, which it'll use in development of the browser. Cool, right?
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Posted by Lee Pender on 03/17/20106 comments
With Google looking to possibly pull out of China, would Microsoft be the beneficiary of the vacuum that Google's absence would leave? Maybe, some
experts are saying
...
Posted by Lee Pender on 03/17/20100 comments
Oh, the jokes we could make about Skittles and Mountain Dew, but we're going to give developers a break this week as they attend the Microsoft MIX10 conference in Las Vegas.
After all, there is a bunch of stuff going on at MIX, and some of it might even interest partners. Let's start with Silverlight, which is taking analytics to a new level, as Kathleen Richards explains at RCPmag.com. Going beyond simple Web analytics, Silverlight's new Analytics Framework tracks what users do with Silverlight both in a browser and outside of one. It's all part of Silverlight 4, which Microsoft will likely make available this week.
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Posted by Lee Pender on 03/15/20100 comments
Fascinating story
here
(to us, anyway) about the first company to register a .com Internet domain. Some firm called Symbolics, one of those old Route 128 companies that made Greater Boston the hub of the technology industry until somebody wisely decided to move to the sunshine of California, tacked a .com onto the end of its name on March 15, 1985, and started a revolution. Of course, not many people noticed back in 1985, but that's history for you. As for Microsoft, the article says that it didn't register Microsoft.com until 1991 -- when there still weren't that many people online.
Posted by Lee Pender on 03/15/20100 comments
Seriously, folks, just get IE8. Or Firefox, or something. If you do insist, though, on running older versions of the browser, rest assured that Microsoft is
hard at work tackling a flaw
that affects both versions 6 and 7.
Posted by Lee Pender on 03/15/20100 comments