Cloud CRM pioneer Salesforce.com -- which, incidentally, is doing pretty well financially -- introduced this week a Facebook-like corporate app called Chatter. Naturally, this got us to thinking of the old "Simpsons" episode in which Bart and Lisa have a hockey rivalry (here's a funny scene from it) and Apu tells a forlorn Milhouse to "keep up the chatter!" (True "Simpsons" nerds can find the reference buried somewhere here.)
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Posted by Lee Pender on 11/19/20090 comments
More than a little trouble, actually, as Microsoft's loss in an intellectual-property case there could have ramifications for Windows 7.
Posted by Lee Pender on 11/19/20091 comments
RCPU's thoughts and prayers are with the Microsoft co-founder and Pacific Northwest sports investor, who got some bad news this week. We've had enough of bad news and don't want to hear any more for a while after this, thank you.
Posted by Lee Pender on 11/18/20090 comments
Betas of HPC (high-performance computing, naturally) Server 2008 R2 and Excel 2010 are out for the fiddling pleasure of folks who like their computing performance high.
Posted by Lee Pender on 11/18/20090 comments
Already? It's been not quite a month since Microsoft finally let Windows 7 into the wild, and wouldn't you know that hunters are already taking shots at it.
Or, at least, they can see the targets on its back. This week, Microsoft offered advice on how to deal with a zero-day vulnerability that appears to be the new operating system's first post-release flaw.
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Posted by Lee Pender on 11/18/20092 comments
Remember the old Prudential Insurance ads that encouraged customers to "get a piece of the rock"? (Yes, we just spent about 20 minutes watching old '70s commercials. It's all in a day's work.) Well, the cloud is the new rock, and everybody wants a piece of it.
No stranger to the cloud, IBM enhanced its hosted offerings this week with the introduction of Smart Analytics Cloud, a business intelligence-heavy play that features technology acquired by Big Blue from former BI vendor Cognos.
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Posted by Lee Pender on 11/16/20090 comments
Microsoft has paid a fair amount of lip service over the years to opening up to open source, while at the same time making patent threats and generally mixing its messages. Well, evidently, Microsoft is more interested in open source than anybody at the company realized.
Apparently, a Windows 7 download utility contains code protected by the open source General Public License version 2, meaning Microsoft can modify the code -- which Redmond says came from a third-party -- but then has to release the modified code to the open source community. Amazingly, that's what Microsoft plans to do.
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Posted by Lee Pender on 11/16/20090 comments
After the Sidekick fiasco, beleaguered T-Mobile had to deal with another pack of angry users this week, although it does seem to have resolved a service outage that affected about 5 percent of its customers.
Posted by Lee Pender on 11/05/20092 comments