Software News
Software RSS Feed
PDC 2009: What have we learned this week?
There was the freebie that no one will forget, the heebie-jeebies courtesy of Scott Guthrie, and a teensy bit clearer picture of how this cloud thingie should work.
Live report: Will Google Chrome OS change Linux?
The mysteries of just what Chrome OS is, and how much of an operating system it truly is, may be resolved today.
PDC 2009: Microsoft cares about Web browser performance
The effort to give users of the world's dominant Web browser the impression of quality, is a personal one for the man who leads that battle.
Nokia re-affirms its commitment to Symbian, sort of
Maemo won't necessarily be replacing Symbian in the Nokia N-Series, but that's definitely a place where it will be found.
E-book readers will be in short supply this holiday season
E-readers are hot this year, and a lot of compelling new products have been released, but are there enough electrophoretic displays to go around?
Sony looks to finally open a single storefront for downloads
Sony has had many different download portals for movies, music, e-books, and games, and now it's looking to make a single shop for all of it.
Tuning out the tablet: Time to give the endless speculation a rest
Wide Angle Zoom: Wishing and hoping and thinking and praying....won't put an iTablet on the market.
Five improvements for IT managers in 2010
If businesses are to improve their efficiency for next year, they need to stop and reassess the basic tenets of their job.
AOL's spinoff from Time Warner to shed 2,500 jobs
As AOL moves toward become an independent company again, it will cut nearly a third of its workforce.
Gartner: SMS-based money transfer will be bigger than mobile browsing, search
Gartner issues its predictions for the 10 things our phones will be doing in 2012.
Don't forget to upgrade to Firefox 3.6 beta 3 today
Mozilla has released the latest beta its Firefox 3.6 browser software, just over one week after beta 2.
PDC 2009: What have we learned this week?
By Scott M. Fulton, III on November 19, 2009, 8:17 PM
5 Comments
It ended up being a somewhat different PDC conference than we had anticipated, and even to a certain extent, than we were led to believe. Maybe this was due in part to a little intentional misdirection to help generate surprise, but in the end, the big stories here in Los Angeles this week were more evolutionary than revolutionary. That was actually quite all right with attendees I spoke with this week, most of whom are just fine with one less thing to turn their worlds upside down. It's tough enough for many of these good people to hold onto their jobs every week.
We'll start our conference wrap-up with a look at the flashpoints (remind me to call Score Productions for a jingle to go with that) we talked about at the beginning of the week, and we'll follow up with the topic that crept in under the radar when we weren't expecting.
Continue reading PDC 2009: What have we learned this week?...
Live report: Will Google Chrome OS change Linux?
By Tim Conneally on November 19, 2009, 12:02 PM
68 Comments
Google announced its open source Chrome OS last July and it has been a little more than a mystery to the wondering public since that time. Now, an official first look is mere hours away.
At 10:00 am PST (1:00 pm EST), Google will present a live webcast of Chrome OS, the search giant's attempt to "rethink what operating systems should be." Speakers this afternoon will include Sundar Pichai, Vice President of Product Management and Matthew Papakipos, Engineering Director for Google Chrome OS.
Continue reading Live report: Will Google Chrome OS change Linux?...
PDC 2009: Microsoft cares about Web browser performance
By Scott M. Fulton, III on November 19, 2009, 1:21 AM
19 Comments
I know when I've hurt a man's feelings. In a segment of the technology business that has recently become fiercely competitive, it's difficult to report bad news about a team that tries very hard to build a good Web browser. It was very apparent from our interview today at PDC 2009 in Los Angeles that Microsoft Internet Explorer General Manager Dean Hachamovitch has an emotional and personal investment in the product he's building.
"If I had a script engine that was twice as fast as the one before, the Web should be twice as fast," said Hatchamovitch today. "But if JavaScript is 10 percent of my site, at most, I'll shave 5 percent off; and if the site was 1.8 seconds, yea, I'm not going to be able to tell...Yes, we understand that there's a microscope on JavaScript performance. We've made progress on JavaScript performance -- we're all in the same neighborhood now."
Continue reading PDC 2009: Microsoft cares about Web browser performance...
Don't forget to upgrade to Firefox 3.6 beta 3 today
By Tim Conneally on November 18, 2009, 2:35 PM
16 Comments
Download Mozilla Firefox 3.6 Beta 3 for Windows from Fileforum now.
Here's what happens when our beloved Scott M. Fulton, III is away from his test machine while covering PDC 2009: you get a Firefox beta announcement with none of the scores, charts, or metrics you're accustomed to getting. Instead you just a plain old "Go download this!" message from yours truly.
Continue reading Don't forget to upgrade to Firefox 3.6 beta 3 today...
PDC 2009 Post-keynote Day 2: What are we learning today?
By Scott M. Fulton, III on November 18, 2009, 2:20 PM
2 Comments
The Day 2 keynote is actually still ongoing at the time I'm writing this -- it's run 20 minutes over schedule, and the SharePoint demos are still going on. But here's an assessment of the information we've received thus far today: First of all, the first news on Internet Explorer 9. If you weren't listening closely to Windows Division president Steven Sinofsky, you might have missed this little fact: The team is only three weeks into the project, having just started after the Windows 7 launch. Now, think about that for a bit: The implication here is that the development team cannot work on the operating system and the Web browser at the same time. This from the company that used to argue that the two components were inseparable.
Then there is the whole "three weeks in" news...It's difficult to believe that Microsoft hasn't really been working on a Web browser since last March, and I actually expect Dean Hachamovitch, who leads IE8 design, to contradict that bit of information. He and his team haven't been lying dormant.
Continue reading PDC 2009 Post-keynote Day 2: What are we learning today?...
PDC 2009: Live from the Day 2 keynote
By Scott M. Fulton, III on November 18, 2009, 11:33 AM
Add Comment
Microsoft's Windows division president Steven Sinofsky is the headliner for today's Day 2 keynote at PDC 2009, and Betanews has its usual front-row seat.
11:04am PT: Promise of discussion on Windows Mobile at MIX '10 next March 15-17 in Las Vegas -- notice once again that the number "7" is omitted from the reference to this product. Keynote ends 35 minutes over schedule.
Beta of Opera 10 for Windows Mobile available now
By Tim Conneally on November 18, 2009, 10:07 AM
13 Comments
Today, Opera Software has released the beta version of Opera Mobile 10 for Windows Phones, with support for touchscreen- and keypad-driven Windows Mobile 5 (PPC), 6.0, 6.1, and 6.5 devices.
The keywords with this release are: speed, simplicity, and compatibility.
Continue reading Beta of Opera 10 for Windows Mobile available now...
PDC 2009: Windows Server's plan to move customers back off the cloud
By Scott M. Fulton, III on November 18, 2009, 2:21 AM
3 Comments
Much of the value proposition for Windows Azure -- the star of the show Tuesday at PDC 2009 in Los Angeles -- has been its ability to open up new business avenues for customers who had not been able to envision hosting high-intensity data center operations before. Azure could give these customers a leg up, a new and more affordable way to get off the ground.
But once they're off the ground, the question becomes, why stay up in the air? What's to keep those customers grounded -- to mix metaphors like an old editor of mine -- in the cloud? The surprise answer to that question is coming from a senior product manager for Windows Server, not Azure. Scott Ottaway told Betanews today that provisions are being planned for customers to move their deployed applications back off the Azure cloud, onto on-premises data center servers.
Continue reading PDC 2009: Windows Server's plan to move customers back off the cloud...
PDC 2009 Day 1, post-keynote: What are we learning so far?
By Scott M. Fulton, III on November 17, 2009, 1:43 PM
Add Comment
What we're seeing evidence of today is a kind of Microsoft restructuring in progress -- a slow shift toward a future revenue model that actually began about two years ago. Rather than alert Dow Jones as to the need for major structural change, the company did what its MVPs have always suggested enterprises do for themselves: Don't panic, plan, and take things slowly.
But this means juggling a lot of balls in the air in mid-transition, the move to a more global network-centric and license-based revenue model. So individuals who were looking for the launch of a boxed product today, something with a jazz theme and a celebrity to accompany it, were probably disappointed -- but that's no evidence of the lack of a strategy. We're seeing a framework shift, and if you look at Microsoft using the old frame, you don't see the whole picture.
Continue reading PDC 2009 Day 1, post-keynote: What are we learning so far?...
Live from the PDC 2009 Day 1 keynote
By Scott M. Fulton, III on November 17, 2009, 11:30 AM
Add Comment
Chief Architect Ray Ozzie is scheduled to be the main presenter this morning at PDC 2009 in Los Angeles. We're in our usual location at the press box.
10:05am PT: New applications server called App Fabric goes into beta today, Muglia announced -- a "platform for building scale-out, high-tier services." Enabling developers to concentrate on core functionality, fielding out the failover part of the operation to Microsoft. Database cache is kept entirely in the cloud. Sounds at first glance like a more pre-packaged, buffet-table-based model for delivering cloud-based applications through Azure.
Adobe releases AIR 2 and Flash Player 10.1 betas
By Tim Conneally on November 17, 2009, 10:22 AM
12 Comments
Today, Adobe has made the betas of AIR 2 and Flash Player 10.1 available for download for Windows, Mac and Linux.
The big features in AIR 2 were shown off at Adobe MAX in October, and they include: Support for USB mass storage devices, support for multi-touch and gesture-based input, improved support for local peripherals and native application processes, improved performance, and peer to peer and UDP networking.
Continue reading Adobe releases AIR 2 and Flash Player 10.1 betas...
PDC 2009: Scuttling huge chunks of Vista architecture for a faster Windows 7
By Scott M. Fulton, III on November 17, 2009, 2:45 AM
7 Comments
The reason Windows Vista seemed slow, and somehow, strangely seemed even slower over time, is now abundantly clear to Microsoft's architects: The evolution of computer hardware, particularly the CPU, exceeded anyone's expectations at the time of Vista's premiere in early 2007. But the surge in virtualization, coupled with the rise of the multicore era, produced a new reality where suddenly Vista found itself managing systems with more than 64 total cores.
Architects had simply not anticipated that the operating system would be managing this many cores, this soon -- at least, that appears to be the underlying message we're receiving here at PDC 2009 in Los Angeles. As independent scientists were speculating about possible performance drop-offs after 8 cores, server administrators were already seeing it. There were design tradeoffs for Windows Vista -- tradeoffs in efficiencies that could have been obtained through complex methods, for simplicity.
Continue reading PDC 2009: Scuttling huge chunks of Vista architecture for a faster Windows 7...
Microsoft launches Office 2010 technical beta a few days early
By Scott M. Fulton, III on November 16, 2009, 5:39 PM
11 Comments
Participants in the first Technical Preview for Microsoft Office 2010 received invitations this morning to join the Office 2010 technical beta build 4536.1000. Not long afterward, the link to the technical beta went live on MSDN and TechNet.
Ironically, once again, attendees at Microsoft's own PDC 2009 conference were the last to know about it, unless they were checking their own e-mail. The first hint that something was up came up during an unrelated demo during Day 0 of the conference. At the bottom of a screen where taskbar demos were being shown, the new icons for the Office 2010 apps showed up. Now, it appears all Office apps will be represented by their initials, not just Word.
Continue reading Microsoft launches Office 2010 technical beta a few days early...
PDC 2009 Day 0: Vista is through
By Scott M. Fulton, III on November 16, 2009, 2:17 PM
8 Comments
The architects who redeveloped the thread scheduling system for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 realized that during the Vista era, they made some design decisions in favor of simplicity, especially for developers. But that simplicity came with a performance hit, especially from processes running in multicore processors -- the more the cores, the bigger the hit.
We all saw that with Vista. In overcoming these deficiencies, it's apparent from listening to the architects themselves, speaking on "Day 0" of PDC 2009 in Los Angeles (the day before the big keynotes), that they had come to loathe Vista's problems just as much as everyday users.
PDC 2009 Preview: The move to Office 2010 and Visual Studio 2010
By Scott M. Fulton, III on November 13, 2009, 1:25 PM
8 Comments
All next week, Betanews will be reporting from Los Angeles, at the scene of this year's Microsoft Professional Developers' Conference. Based on our experience with prior years' shows, here's the pattern we expect: Day 1 (officially next Tuesday) will center on self-congratulation for Windows 7, much of it deserved. Day 2 will likely bring out the bugle corps for the public introduction of Office 2010 Beta 1 -- not the Technical Preview that's currently being circulated, but a more feature-complete rendition that should have more Web- and cloud-related connectivity.
But our coverage will begin on Monday with an unusual twist to "Day 0," which is usually reserved for in-depth workshops that command extra attendance fees. This year, Microsoft is trying an unusual step by opening up its day-long "Windows 7 Developer Boot Camp," headlined by Technical Fellow and SysInternals engineer Mark Russinovich, not only to all PDC attendees but to the general public. Here, we'll see how much attention Windows 7 can get not just from developers, but from passers-by on the street corner.
Continue reading PDC 2009 Preview: The move to Office 2010 and Visual Studio 2010...
After the Intel + AMD armistice: Do we really want a level playing field?
By Scott M. Fulton, III on November 13, 2009, 11:37 AM
6 Comments
If there were a psychiatrist seated across the room from us, and we were to present to her our feelings about information technology as a force in our lives, her diagnosis would be simple and immediate: We have an obsession. Maybe having nothing to do with technology itself at all, we're obsessed with the notion of a nemesis with an unfair advantage influencing the decisions we make.
In every major arena of information technology over the past five years, the principal topic of discussion has been the need to level the playing field, to restore something called "fair competition," to ensure that the smaller player still has a chance. For the topic of PC operating systems, to this day, there's a frenzied Pavlovian response to the notion that Microsoft Windows stole its ideas from Apple Mac OS -- I moderated public, online discussions about that same topic 25 years ago. For Web applications, we're beta testing the idea of shifting the Darth Vader mask from Microsoft over to Google, the dominant player in nine out of ten of the world's queries; and we're reveling in the irony of AT&T proclaiming Google an evil empire. For smartphones, we're evaluating whether Apple fits the role of dominant player, whether that Halloween costume we used to fit on Bill Gates and that we're testing on Eric Schmidt can be swapped out with Steve Jobs.
Continue reading After the Intel + AMD armistice: Do we really want a level playing field?...
Microsoft damage control after marketer claims Win7 inspired by Mac
By Scott M. Fulton, III on November 12, 2009, 9:51 AM
90 Comments
It's not like this sort of thing has never happened to someone at Microsoft before: a moment of clarity and candidness which may actually be close to, if not exactly, the truth, but which is nevertheless "off message." During a recent reseller's conference, a Microsoft marketing manager named Simon Aldous representing the Worldwide Partner Group gave credit to Apple for creating an operating system that folks in a Microsoft study appreciated. But then, according to PCR Online, a publication for computer and software resellers, Aldous went one step further and said Microsoft took that inspiration and, then with Windows 7, "create a Mac look and feel in terms of graphics."
It was exactly the phraseology that blogs throughout the Internet were looking for, and Aldous' comment became the latest water cooler conversation topic...even though the publication was incorrect in one very important respect: Aldous was not a "Microsoft exec," and therefore was not speaking on behalf of the company. The fact that the publication got Aldous' position wrong created suspicion in at least one person residing on planet Earth that perhaps it had gotten the quote wrong as well. Nonetheless, the headline "Windows 7 was inspired by Apple OS" rocketed throughout the Web.
Continue reading Microsoft damage control after marketer claims Win7 inspired by Mac...
A real beta process at work: Mozilla fires up Firefox 3.6 Beta 2
By Scott M. Fulton, III on November 10, 2009, 5:45 PM
34 Comments
Download Mozilla Firefox 3.6 Beta 2 for Windows from Fileforum now.
After several weeks of delay for the release of Firefox 3.6 Beta 1, you might say the Mozilla team had some ground to make up. Flying squarely in the face of any commercial company that says it gets bogged down with so much user feedback, the organization accelerated the release of the public Beta 2, in response to 190 major issues with Beta 1 detected and reported by a multitude of users.
Continue reading A real beta process at work: Mozilla fires up Firefox 3.6 Beta 2...
Kindle for PC opens in beta, underwhelms
By Tim Conneally on November 10, 2009, 4:55 PM
4 Comments
Download Amazon Kindle for PC 1.0.25338.0 Beta for Windows from Fileforum now.
Amazon today opened the beta of Kindle for PC, a free application which can act as a PC-based companion to your Kindle e-reading device or as standalone e-reading software.
Continue reading Kindle for PC opens in beta, underwhelms...
Snow Leopard and Windows 7 still can't crack the netbook problem
By Tim Conneally on November 10, 2009, 12:39 PM
94 Comments
Yesterday evening, Apple rolled out the 10.6.2 update to its Snow Leopard operating system, which concentrated mostly on general bug fixes and stability issues as well as some issues in Mail, MobileMe and Safari. In all, there are more than a hundred improvements, and more than 40 security related fixes.
But the big talk today is that this update officially terminates support for Intel's Atom processor family. These low cost, low power processors have become the standard in many nettops, netbooks, MIDs, and ultraportables, and Apple has made a concerted effort to stay out of the way of most of these device categories.
Continue reading Snow Leopard and Windows 7 still can't crack the netbook problem...
Popular Stories on Betanews