http://www.daniweb.com/blogs/featured-timestamp.html Tech support, programming, web development, and internet marketing community. Forums to get free computer help and support. http://www.daniweb.com/forums/dani-images/misc/dani/logo.gif http://www.daniweb.com http://www.daniweb.com/blogs/entry2429.html Well there’s nothing to lose And there’s nothing to prove I’ll be dancing with myself ~Billy Idol, Dancing with Myself. Microsoft is 30-something and that’s an elder statesman in personal computing terms, and maybe it’s feeling a bit old. The desktop is so yesterday. The future is on the web, so like many folks in their 30s Microsoft went looking for a partner, a company that could fill in the missing pieces of a successful, but increasingly dull corporate life. Microsoft took a look around and Yahoo! looked kind of cute and surely it would find a company like Microsoft to be a... IT Water Cooler Thu, 08 May 2008 09:56:45 CDT Techwriter10 http://www.daniweb.com/blogs/entry2429.html http://www.daniweb.com/blogs/entry2427.html It has emerged that Belgium is the latest country to feel the force of the Chinese cyber-super-power, with Belgian ministers claiming that state sponsored hackers have been targeting Federal Government computers. The Justice Minister in Belgium, Jo Vandeurzen, has claimed that the spate of hacking attacks also reported to parliament by Foreign Affairs Minister Karel De Gucht, definitely originated in China and are likely to have been at the direct bequest of the Beijing Government. Of course, Belgium has no need to feel lonely in the face of this apparent Chinese cyberspy attention. As... Tech Talk Thu, 08 May 2008 07:36:46 CDT happygeek http://www.daniweb.com/blogs/entry2427.html http://www.daniweb.com/blogs/entry2423.html Of course. That's the answer. Easy. Japan has sorted it all out. They're planning to put a tax on MP3 players. This will be an interesting move not because a single country is planning such a tax - let's be honest, I'm in the UK, the chances are most readers are going to be in America and Japan can't hit either of us with any sort of levy. However... Moves are certainly afoot in the UK to introduce some sort of tax because the music industry is tired of its efforts being distributed without payment. I have no information on whether there's anything similar in the offing Stateside, but it... IT Water Cooler Wed, 07 May 2008 14:58:30 CDT GuyClapperton http://www.daniweb.com/blogs/entry2423.html http://www.daniweb.com/blogs/entry2422.html ASUS announced that their new EEE 900 PC sporting Windows XP (Vista won't run on it) will cost $50 AUD less than its Linux counterpart. I am no economist but I can figure out quickly that a computer that comes with Windows XP Home and Microsoft Works pre-installed is going to be more expensive than a computer with a free operating system. The Linux EEE does come with a larger hard drive (20GB) than the Windows XP version (12GB) but does that offer an explanation of the higher price? If you figure that the larger drive boosts the cost $50 for the Linux PC and the OS boosts it $100 for the... IT Water Cooler Wed, 07 May 2008 13:12:05 CDT khess http://www.daniweb.com/blogs/entry2422.html http://www.daniweb.com/blogs/entry2421.html It was the belle of the ball stumbling as she made her grand entrance. Sun Microsystems on Tuesday, hoping to make a big splash at JavaOne with the launch of its shiny new platform for rich internet application development, saw demos of JavaFX repeatedly crash. Like blaming it on the red carpet, Sun’s senior VP of software Rich Green said it was “the size of the pipes in the Moscone Center” that were the culprits of the embarrassing brain-freeze. He was trying to drag a JavaFX app from a browser to the desktop; a pretty neat trick, when you think about it. I wasn’t there to see it,... Web Development Wed, 07 May 2008 10:45:47 CDT EddieC http://www.daniweb.com/blogs/entry2421.html http://www.daniweb.com/blogs/entry2420.html An employee of the Northern Trust Bank in Naples, California apparently stole a number of bank owned computers which he then either sold to his co-workers, pawned or auctioned off on eBay. The 34 year old man pleaded to a felony fraud charge and sentencing has been deferred until it is determined how much of the $40,000 worth of theft is reimbursed to his now former employers as part of a good faith bargain. He could face less than 36 months imprisonment thanks to the plea, which is not bad considering that the charge actually carried up to 30 years if he had taken his chances with a... Coffee House Wed, 07 May 2008 08:52:28 CDT newsguy http://www.daniweb.com/blogs/entry2420.html http://www.daniweb.com/blogs/entry2419.html Microsoft has launched a new add-in, designed specifically to simplify the process of creating content that is accessible for visually impaired and what it refers to as 'print disabled' individuals. The new Save as DAISY XML add-in is open source, being developed in conjunction with the Digital Accessible Information System (DAISY) Consortium, and will convert Open XML based files into DAISY.XML which is part of the globally recognized DAISY standard for reading and publishing navigable multimedia content. With groups like the World health Organization and the World Blind Union telling us... Software Development Wed, 07 May 2008 07:31:30 CDT happygeek http://www.daniweb.com/blogs/entry2419.html http://www.daniweb.com/blogs/entry2415.html Yesterday Sun Microsystems officially released OpenSolaris and suggested that it's going to go head-to-head with Linux as a Desktop Operating System. Solarisx86 is nothing new and has been around about as long as Linux but it is historically proprietary and closed source. It was also very hardware-finicky and performance was slothlike. OpenSolaris is a new way of thinking for Sun who've just purchased MySQL and VirtualBox--two of my favorite pieces of software--being sucked-up by perhaps my least favorite tech company next to Microsoft. Although Sun, unlike Microsoft, sees the writing on... IT Water Cooler Tue, 06 May 2008 17:22:05 CDT khess http://www.daniweb.com/blogs/entry2415.html http://www.daniweb.com/blogs/entry2417.html The Opera client used to be universally recognized as the alternative browser to Internet Explorer, and then along came Firefox and stole all the alternative browser thunder - and how. But the fat lady is still singing, and to prove it has released the Opera Dragonfly to debug web pages, widgets and web applications on any device. Available in Opera 9.5 beta 2 to start with, the alpha release of Dragonfly includes a JavaScript Debugger, DOM and CSS Inspectors, Error Console and Command Line. The full list of Dragonfly features is as follows: Debug pages whether they are on your computer... Web Development Tue, 06 May 2008 20:00:15 CDT newsguy http://www.daniweb.com/blogs/entry2417.html http://www.daniweb.com/blogs/entry2414.html Is the Yahoo deal done yet? The stock market thinks so, slicing Yahoo’s financial value by 15% in the last two trading sessions. If the deal were still alive, then the stock would be moving the other way around. Yahoo’s chief Jerry Yang says the $37-per-share demand wasn’t etched in stone but he’s sporting a good dose of Wall Stree’s most lethal cologne – desperation - for anyone to take him too seriously today. Still, I think he wants Steve Ballmer to come back to the table and do the deal. But Ballmer and Microsoft seem to want to move on. Traders are still buzzing about how... IT Water Cooler Tue, 06 May 2008 15:48:22 CDT Brian.oco http://www.daniweb.com/blogs/entry2414.html http://www.daniweb.com/blogs/entry2416.html Sun Microsystems on Monday was giving away packaged copies of OpenSolaris in an effort to seed the development community with a Linux alternative and boost the number of available applications for the platform. The news came at CommunityOne, Sun’s free developer conference collocated with JavaOne this week at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. “Sun's goal is to get the technology into as many developer hands as possible,” said Ian Murdock, head of Sun’s operating system platform strategy in his keynote speech at the conference. Murdock—founder of Debian Linux and former CTO of... Site Management Tue, 06 May 2008 18:11:11 CDT EddieC http://www.daniweb.com/blogs/entry2416.html http://www.daniweb.com/blogs/entry2413.html It’s good to be king and have your own way Get a feeling of peace at the end of the day ~Tom Petty, It’s Good to be King. It’s often been said that marijuana is the gateway drug, but an article in this week’s BusinessWeek, The Mac in the Gray Flannel Suit, suggests that perhaps the iPod is a gateway gadget to more expensive hardware. That’s right, employees who love their iPods (and iPhones) are beginning to demand Mac hardware at work. Imagine that. I keep having this image of Steve Jobs sitting on the steps of a large corporation in a trench coat. As an employee approaches, he... IT Water Cooler Tue, 06 May 2008 13:21:18 CDT Techwriter10 http://www.daniweb.com/blogs/entry2413.html http://www.daniweb.com/blogs/entry2411.html Walking around the Digital Summer event in London last week a number of things became obvious. First, everyone wants the sound to come off their iPod and into the world of speakers. Second, people are starting to focus on how to get sounds that aren't prerecorded onto an iPod in the first place. This led inevitably to a selection of devices that allow you to record voice while on the move. This is nothing new. As a jobbing journalist I've been using a very nice Olympus WS-320M (now obsolete but goodness knows why, it's smaller than most recorders and the sound quality beats many) since it... IT Water Cooler Tue, 06 May 2008 06:19:09 CDT GuyClapperton http://www.daniweb.com/blogs/entry2411.html http://www.daniweb.com/blogs/entry2410.html There’s a better-than-even chance that you’re using Microsoft Outlook for e-mail. And if you’re like me, you’re not too happy about it. But there’s a free plug-in available today that brings some much needed relief from some of what ails the world’s most popular e-mail client. I tried it today and it’s great. The New York Times reported today that a company called Xobni (pronounced ZOB-nee) had begun beta-testing a like-named plug-in that was supposed to solve one of the main problems I’ve been complaining about for years: slow performance. I downloaded and installed the... Tech Talk Mon, 05 May 2008 19:47:30 CDT EddieC http://www.daniweb.com/blogs/entry2410.html http://www.daniweb.com/blogs/entry2409.html The trouble with being a mobile kind of guy is that the proliferation of mobile gadgets that I tend to carry around with me demand a small suitcase to bring the power supplies along if I am to be away from home for longer than a day or so. Sure, battery longevity is improving all the time, and convergence means that I can carry multiple technologies with me in a single gadget these days, but the power supply problem remains. If I want to travel light and leave the laptop at home, that means I don’t want to fill a laptop sized bag up with plugs, PSUs and cables to be honest. Which is where... Tech Talk Mon, 05 May 2008 18:41:48 CDT happygeek http://www.daniweb.com/blogs/entry2409.html