Posts by EddieC

Microsoft has put the brakes on Windows XP Service Pack 3, which was supposed to be available yesterday through the Windows Update Website. A Tuesday post on its TechNet site said a “compatibility issue” between Microsoft’s Dynamics Retail Management System point-of-sale application and SP3 has caused the delay.

The same issue effects Vista SP1, but that update, released last week, has already been pushed out via Microsoft’s Automatic Updates.
The XP service pack had already been released to manufacturing but was not in wide distribution otherwise. XP SP3 continues to be available online at Tip and Trick for those willing to brave the installation on their own.

The company has not indicated when the buggy service packs will be repaired. But Microsoft is modifying its update site to prevent Dynamics users from downloading either service pack. "To help protect our customers, we plan to put filtering in place shortly to prevent Windows Update from offering both service packs to systems running Microsoft Dynamics RMS," said the post. "Once filtering is in place, we expect to release Windows XP SP3 to Windows Update and Download Center." No timeline was provided for when the filter would be in place.

XP’s latest service pack contains some useful capabilities, many of which are otherwise available only in Vista. My thinking was that Microsoft was trying to migrate XP users to Vista gradually, but an

High performance computing has long been a part of Intel’s dossier. But a deal announced on Monday with supercomputer maker Cray Inc. could paint Xeon in neon on Intel’s resume.

The multi-year pact puts Intel’s dual-core Xeon processors—found in most of the world’s most powerful HPCs—in Cray’s next-generation system, called Cascade. Scheduled for availability sometime after 2010, Cascade was originally set to use Opteron chips, and still might.

Intel also will help Cray develop technologies based on Intel’s QuickPath Interconnect, the high-speed, low-latency bus that replaces the front-side memory bus with two 25.6 Gbps channels per processor for accessing memory and joining processors or other motherboard components. QuickPath will be introduced later this year with Intel’s Nehalem processor, which initially will ship with four cores and later be available with in two- and eight-core models.

The deal also might help Intel get a leg up on arch rival AMD, whose processors have until now occupied most of Cray’s x86 purchase orders. Although AMD’s quad-core chips have been lauded for their fast memory access, the company has had trouble getting them out the door.

The loss of Cray’s business will surely add to the woes of the troubled AMD. The company on April 7 announced lay offs of 1680 employees, about 10 percent of its workforce. AMD also announced that sales for the most recent quarter we off by 15 percent, citing price wars with Intel and market uncertainty. The alliance with Intel might just be a …

I don’t know about you, but I’m glad the Microsoft bid to acquire Yahoo was a bust—and I hope it stays that way. I shudder to think of the consequences of a company like Microsoft acquiring Google-like power. Microsoft already has too much power and control over my life. I don’t want to be further beholden to yet another near-monopoly; utility companies, telecoms and big oil are enough for me, thank you.

Now that Microsoft’s self-imposed Saturday deadline for conclusion of negotiations has come and gone—with Yahoo still a free country—it remains to be seen if Redmond will press the issue with a hostile takeover bid. Does Microsoft really need to spread any more ill will? Does it still have the political capital to pull off such a move?

It seems unlikely, particularly in light of comments by CFO Chris Liddell in Microsoft’s earnings announcement last week. "Unless we make progress with Yahoo towards an agreement by this weekend, we will reconsider our alternatives," Liddell said. Such alternatives, he said, include “taking an offer to the Yahoo shareholders, or to withdraw our proposal and focus on other opportunities, both organic and inorganic,” whatever that means.

Meantime, Yahoo has been making moves of its own, many of which are of a culture that’s decidedly non-Microsoft. For example, Yahoo recently joined Google’s OpenSocial project, which "defines a common API for social applications across multiple Web sites," according to the site. More recently, Yahoo last week

Yahoo Inc., the apple of Microsoft’s eye in recent weeks, has unveiled improvements to the Yahoo Development Network, Web-service capabilities and advertiser opportunities. The moves could be seen as an attempt to show Yahoo’s value is greater than the US$40 billion acquisition bid of the Redmond giant.

Most recent was the announcement Thursday of the opening of Yahoo’s Web services to application developers, a move that echoes in some ways changes by MySpace and Facebook social networks to simplify access to their networks and offer developers more capabilities.

In his keynote speech at O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco last week, Yahoo CTO Ari Balogh spoke of the Yahoo Open Strategy, and how Yahoo is “rewiring the company from the inside out to create a development platform” that will open many of Yahoo’s assets to developers. It’s part of the 100-day plan kicked off by Yahoo CEO and co-founder Jerry Yang last in September, prior to Microsoft’s bid.

In a CNET News story further detailing the open strategy, Balogh was quoted as saying that the plan requires that the company “replumb Yahoo to use a single profile and create feeds, a way to consume feeds and Web services APIs and to layer those mechanisms into the platform.” The launch is set for sometime this year.

On Thursday, Yahoo made available a beta release of SearchMonkey, site tools intended to ease the job …

Kudos to you Ron-- DaniWeb writers are always ahead of the curve!

Having all your data wherever you go is useful beyond measure. A Web-based service and series of open APIs unveiled this week by Microsoft is intended to offer a solution to keeping all our devices in sync.

If I had a dollar for every time I accessed an Outlook contact, set a reminder with my desktop-synchronized Palm Treo (or heard Microsoft claim to know "the way"), I could solve world hunger.

With the official announcement on Wednesday of Live Mesh, Microsoft revealed its vision of an open Web service that would “connect and bring devices together,” according to Amit Mital, general manager of Live Mesh, who spoke at O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco this week. "The mesh" has been hinted about by Ray Ozzie and others for the last few weeks.

People (myself included) are skeptical about Microsoft’s willingness to offer a level playing field. In a BBC News report from the conference, several developers expressed concerns that Microsoft was just trying to “own the pie” and that the only thing available thus far is “demo ware and advertising.”

The platform will initially support XP and Vista, but later will accommodate Macs and mobile devices, Mital said, making no mention of Linux or Unix.

“Devices are how we interact in this new ‘web connected’ world, and we use a variety of them,” wrote Mital on Microsoft's Live Dev blog site earlier this week. He said those devices include PCs, …

The Fedora project team on Tuesday posted a preview edition of Fedora 9, its final stage of development during which users and contributors can provide feedback about bugs missed during beta testing. The latest Fedora distro is based on kernel 2.6.25; more on that later. General release is set for mid-May.

Fedora 9 went to beta (and feature freeze) last month, with stable integration of GNOME 2.22. This update to GNU’s desktop replaces GNOME VFS with the faster and more feature-rich GFVS and GIO. According to the beta release notes, GFVS vastly improves performance and can queue multiple file transfers. Security is improved via enhancements to Fedora-developed PolicyKit introduced with Fedora 8.

The new desktop also includes a new GNOME Display Manager, which can dynamically configure displays, control power management at login and works better with PolicyKit. GNOME now connects with Bluetooth-enabled Palm devices and can share files via Bluetooth right through the desktop, rather than through multiple discrete apps.

Developers will take note of a new multimedia API, called Phonon, a hardware integration framework named Solid and a rewritten Plasma desktop and panel. These updates are part of KDE Desktop 4.0.2, the default desktop, some of which has been ported to TrollTech’s Qt 4 cross-platform GUI libraries.

Also notable is the inclusion of compatibility packages “to ensure that applications not yet ported to KDE 4 will continue to work,” according to the release notes.

Improvements to NetworkManager include …

If you’re developing applications for MySpace or just thinking about it, the social networking company has made it easier to get the word out about and popularize your apps. An update to the fledgling MySpace Developer Platform released last week lets app builders add messaging and posting capabilities to their MySpace apps.

Implemented in a “Post To” function, the new feature “lets apps provide content to users—anything from text, to markup, to media—and allows them to post it in a bulletin or blog,” said a MySpace spokesperson in an e-mail to me on Monday. The content also can be saved to their own profile or sent to a friend as part of a MySpace message or comment, she said.

The Post To function is meant to give MySpace users more ways to connect with others and express themselves and give developers more ways to spread the word about the apps they create or use. “Not developers can let users brag about their high scores in a bulletin post or challenge a friend to beat that score in a message,” she said.

Post To also supports MySpace bulletins, which lets users broadcast a message about their apps, but only to one user at a time for now. The company is thinking about relaxing this restriction, but is understandably cautious of opening the flood gates on people’s inboxes.

MySpace also changed the default sort order to “most recent” on MySpace Apps, its …

With the lackluster adoption of Vista, perhaps Microsoft plans to migrate XP users by attrition—one service pack at a time. The company today released Windows XP SP3, which enables in XP a slew of features, many native to Vista.

Available now as a stand-alone installer pack, the update brings XP users to Peer Name Resolution Protocol 2.1, the version of Microsoft’s peer-to-peer technology used by Vista to learn of and communicate with other Vista apps and Web-connected systems by name. It also will allow XP apps to do the same with those on Vista. PNRP 2.0 was introduced in Vista and was made available for XP in SP2 in Aug., 2004.

Service Pack 3 also delivers Network Access Protection, Microsoft’s system of controlling access to servers based on the health of those servers. The technology is built into Vista and Windows Server 2008 and involves NAP clients, NAP Enforcement Points and Server 2008-based Health Registration Authorities.

Redmond in the past has acquiesced to the reality of slow Vista uptake by extending XP’s time on earth. The most recent example came last week when Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said “we will listen” to requests to make XP available beyond June 30.

Also included is support for WiFi Protected Access 2, Digital Identity Management Service, Microsoft Management Console 3, MSXML6 and Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) 2.5, needed by Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007 (and “snap-in” development framework) and Windows Live OneCare security service.

…

I'm amazed at how many people are fooled by this type of trickery. Being a techie myself, people are always asking me "what's the best virus protection to get?"

My answer is always the same: "The most effective protection from viruses, phishing and all types of malware is right between your ears."

I could have sworn that only Apple was making Apple-compatible computers. I remember well the era in which Apple famously granted—then revoked—licenses to Motorola and others to manufacture hardware that would run Mac OS.

As I read today that a company called Psystar Corp. (www.psystar.com) was selling “an alternative to pricey Apple hardware,” I thought the rules had changed while I wasn’t looking. Or did they?

Unfortunately, the whole thing appears to be a complete scam, and one that almost every media outlet that covered it fell for hook, line and sinker. Googling “psystar” returns about half a million hits, mostly of web-only news sites, bloggers and rumor mills, giddy with the prospect of a low-cost Mac. Most coverage ignored completely Psystar’s Linux, Windows and high-end models.

The company, which its Web site locates it in Doral, Fla., hosts an extremely convincing-looking Web site offering the Open Computer, an “OSx86 compatible hardware platform that is capable of running ‘vanilla’ OS X Leopard kernels,” for US$399.99. And for purchasers of OS X 10.5 for US$155 more, the company “will even preinstall Leopard for free.” Other operating system options according the site’s configurator include Ubuntu Linux 8.04 (no extra charge), Windows XP Pro and 32- and 64-bit Vista Home Premium (add $150).

Still not convinced it's a hoax? There’s more. The $400 base unit includes a 2 GB DDR2 RAM, a Intel Core2Duo 2.2 GHz processor, 250 GB SATA hard drive and an Intel …

Fair point on the price, sure, but less cost also means more weight! :)

Thanks for the comment.

Asustek Computer on Saturday unveiled the Eee PC 900, a beefier version of the ultra-mobile PC it introduced late last year. The new unit is available with Xandros Linux or Windows XP, and is scheduled to begin shipping on May 12 with a sticker price of US$549.

Last year’s model 701—which at the time was offered only with Linux—could reportedly be had for $199, but is offered everywhere I’ve seen it for $399 or more. Both models are built around a 900 MHz Intel Celeron M processor and include a 4GB solid-state disk, three USB 2.0 ports and a VGA port. Neither unit offers an optical or magnetic drive. The Linux version of the 900 adds a 16GB flash unit for a total of 20 GB non-volatile storage. The Windows version is outfitted with an 8GB flash unit (12GB total).

The 900 series doubles the DDR2 RAM (to 1GB) and has more pixels than its 700-series predecessor, both in its built-in Web-cam (1.3 MP vs. 0.3 MP) and its backlit LED. The 8.9-inch panel can display 1024 x 600 compared with 800 x 480 of the 7-inch model. Both weigh around two pounds (.92 kg). ASUS claims 3.5 hours of battery life for newer units and two for the older.

You might be thinking that its $549 price tag puts the 900 in league with a number of low-end laptop models (Acer and Dell come to mind). But aside from a smaller screen and lack …

If your application provides custom dialog-box features, menu items or other capabilities by making changes to the Windows Registry, you can deploy those capabilities to other computers simply by distributing an update or patch to the Registry.

Updating the Registry involves nothing more than exporting the capabilities from the Windows Registry Editor to a file and applying them on the target system(s). Carrying those changes is a plain text file with an .reg extension, and contains the key(s) or value(s) you've created. It's applied either by double-clicking its icon in Windows Explorer, importing via RegEdit or executing it from a command line.

Here's how to create the file:

1. In RegEdit, navigate to the branch or sub-branch that contains your functionality. It doesn't matter how deeply buried the key(s) are that contain your features; just that you select only your own changes. It might be necessary to analyze the registry before and after you make your changes to figure out which Registry keys are storing your functionality. If you're confident you can do that, skip to step 2.

How to Identify Your Registry Changes
1a. Reboot Windows, running as few apps and system tray utilities as possible.
1b. Open RegEdit and single-click the HKEY_CURRENT_USER branch. Select File>Export to export the branch. Repeat for the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE branch.
1c. Implement the changes necessary for your application.
1d. Repeat step 1b--be careful not to change anything else in Windows.
1e. Use your favorite diffing …

Well the farming example was a little contrived, I'll give you that. And the acting was really cheesy.

And I agree that the controller-contraption looked clunky as anything. But I'd venture to say that by the time this software is out, all those springs and servos will be inside a glove or some sort of wireless "candy-bar."

But you gotta love the 3D spacial storage thingie. That's just cool.

That is a fascinating concept. Jesse James Garrett (the father of Ajax) is a really smart guy. Thanks for sharing that.

what does this make you think?:
"this statement is a lie."

I like self-referential statements, especially when they are also self-contradictory or circular. I also like oxymorons like Jumbo Shrimp and Freezer Burn.

Another of my favorites statements is "Procrastinate Now."

Do you have any favorite words or statements?

Dogs??? Can't live without them...:D

Have you ever been to the Caribbean?

I've been to St. Croix several times -- I even lived there for a while working as a radio DJ.

Do you follow politics?

what does this make you think?:
"this statement is a lie."

i think the statement which you have posted is wrong and there is some points to prove your statement is correct

do you like nature?

Of course I do; it offers unlimited beauty.

Do you believe in God?