So Microsoft says it's going to natively support the OpenDocument Format (ODF)
XML-based file formats in the upcoming version of Microsoft Office 2007.
As Dave
Nagel reports, Service Pack 2 (SP2) of Office 2007 will add support for
ODF v1.1. The move will eliminate the need to install discreet code or translators
to read and write ODF documents within Office, according to a statement.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 05/27/20082 comments
It's been three months, 22 days and about 1 million breathless news stories
since Microsoft
first
announced on Feb. 1
that it intended to buy online services giant Yahoo!
for $44.6 billion.
And from that moment on, the takeover effort has played out like a bad episode
of "Three's Company."
If you remember the late-'70s sitcom (and I pity you if you do), you know that
it starred the late John Ritter and a newly discovered Suzanne Somers, who would
go on to become a late-night infomercial legend with the ThighMaster franchise.
But what set "Three's Company" apart wasn't the uproarious sexual
innuendo, or the gratuitous physical comedy, or even the inspired casting of
Don Knotts as a dimwitted landlord. It was that every plot line -- Every. Single.
One. -- revolved around a shockingly obvious, artificial, almost infantile misunderstanding.
The show was...relentless.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 05/22/20080 comments
As industry association names go, I have to say that Digistan is among the
worst. Yes, the name is a clever compression of Digital Standards Organization
and provides for a short-and-sweet URL (
digistan.org
).
But that doesn't excuse the group from having to respect the Iron Law of Naming
Stuff.
To wit: If your organization sounds like an old breakaway Soviet republic,
it probably needs a new name.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 05/20/20080 comments
Conventional wisdom says you never want to follow a legend. For every Steve
Young following Joe Montana, there are countless examples of people who struggled
in the shadow of their famed predecessors. Think John Sculley at Apple, or the
parade of interim execs who followed Philippe Kahn at Borland.
So pity Ray Ozzie, who two years ago was named Chief Software Architect of
Microsoft. The facile intellect behind Groove Networks seemed just the man to
shepherd Microsoft forward in the era of open source software and Internet-borne
services. And yet, here we are, waiting still for Ozzie to strike his course.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 05/15/20080 comments
I've been telecommuting in one form or another since 1995. I had broadband
back when broadband meant wrestling with the phone company and its legions of
under-trained installers to get a working ISDN line (and wiring, oh yes, the
wiring) in my second-floor San Francisco flat.
In fact, telecommuting allowed me to move in 1997 from San Francisco to Burlington,
Vt., where I quickly learned to appreciate how good the digital life was in
the Bay area. I recall being given a stark choice between paying an arm and
a leg for DirecTV satellite digital download service (the upstream was an analog
dial-up line) or paying two arms and two legs for a dedicated 56K frame relay
link from the telco to my home office. Cable services wouldn't arrive for another
two years. DSL? A six-year wait.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 05/13/20081 comments
Redmond Developer News
was just getting started, launching its inaugural
November 2006 issue, when Borland Software Corp. announced it would spin out
its Developer Tools Group (DTG) as an independent subsidiary called CodeGear.
The timing, in a sense, was fitting. RDN arrived as a newcomer to the
dev space, covering the new generation of tools and functionality built around
.NET Framework 3.0 and Web development. And here was one of the old guard, Borland's
tool unit (you know, the one that gave us the modern IDE via Anders Hejlsberg's
Turbo Pascal), getting a new lease on life after languishing on the sales block
for over six months.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 05/08/20082 comments
When Microsoft launched its
Popfly
mashup creation site and tooling, it was seen as
an
early effort to get Silverlight
out in front of the non-coding public and
to help blunt the momentum of innovative mashup tools like Yahoo Pipes. Since
the May 2007 launch, Popfly has managed to do just that, emerging as a popular
mashup tool for non-programmers.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 05/06/20080 comments
Two weeks ago, I
blogged
about Jeff Atwood's Coding Horror site and the contest he was holding to recognize
outstanding open source development.
We talked a bit after that initial blog post and I ended up asking Jeff about
his leaving Vertigo Software to launch stackoverflow.com.
What should be interesting for dev managers is that the site Jeff is launching
now aims to put accurate, topical and specific technical insight at the fingertips
of .NET developers.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 05/01/20082 comments
On Tuesday,
I wrote
about BMC's new Application Problem Resolution System 7.0 tooling, which provides
"black box" monitoring and analysis of application behavior to help
improve troubleshooting.
In talking to BMC Director Ran Gishri, I ran across some interesting perspectives
that he was able to offer on the enterprise development space. Among them, the
fact that large orgs seem to be moving away from J2EE and toward a mix of .NET
and sundry lightweight frameworks.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 05/01/20080 comments
The job of testing and troubleshooting applications is tougher than it has
ever been. At least, that's what Ran Gishri, director of global marketing at
BMC Software
, will tell you.
As the man in charge of BMC's AppSight product line -- recently renamed BMC
Application Problem Resolution System (APRS) -- Gishri often sees large development
shops struggle with increasingly complex and changeable business and technology
environments.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 04/29/200818 comments
In the world of theoretical physics, the
Theory
of Everything
is a long-sought, hypothetical model that would elegantly
explain and link all known physical phenomena, from the minute and unpredictable
world of quantum mechanics to the vast energies and scale that define the still-evolving
study of cosmology. It would finally bind gravity into the same system as the
strong nuclear, weak nuclear and electro-magnetic forces. Our whites would be
whiter and our brights would be brighter.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 04/24/20081 comments
Howard A. Schmidt has forgotten more about network and systems security than
I will probably ever know. A pioneer in the area of computer forensics, he served
for more than 30 years as an information security advisor to the FBI, the U.S.
Air Force and the Bush administration after Sept. 11, 2001.
Recruited by Microsoft in the mid-'90s, Schmidt served as the company's
first chief security officer and, in April 2001, helped launch the company's
Trustworthy Computing initiative before leaving to become CSO of eBay in 2003.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 04/22/20080 comments