There are rumours that Microsoft plan to release a small tablet computer kind of device. The project is currently codenamed ‘Origami’ and there are only very sketchy details available.
You can visit the official Origami site here, but it won’t tell you much until this Thursday.
It will be interesting to follow this story as it develops, but there’s not much official information available at the moment.
One of the things that makes (in my opinion) Windows Server a less capable server solution than Linux and FreeBSD etc. is the lack of a decent shell scripting language. The whole DOS batch script thing isn’t powerful enough to do really neat things within a shell script, unlike a shell like bash, so this has been an area where Linux has beaten Windows Server.
So when I read this article about MSH (Microsoft Command Shell, previously known as MONAD) it made me realise that this advantage for the open source (and the commercial Unix flavours like Solaris) may not be there for much longer.
It appears Microsoft realise this weakness in their server platform’s architecture and are bringing out their version. It appears it will be syntax a bit like C (that makes it a bit different from bash), from this code example I have seen:
$var = “This is MSH”.Split(” “) foreach($str in $var) { if($str.Equals(”MSH”)) { “Monad” } else { $str }}
What is funny, however is how the author of the article says:
From performing administration on a remote box to searching files using LS piped to Grep, BASH has its many uses.
Considering that bash is Unix-based, capitalisation matters, so LS is not the same as ls and BASH is not the same as bash, Grep is not the same as grep…
I have now been using Newsvine for a little while. Essentially, it is a complicated version of Digg, the Web 2.0 social bookmarking service for news. Newsvine remains in a private beta, but I do have some invites if anyone is interested. Some extracts from the company info page:
Seattle-based Newsvine, Inc. was founded in 2005 by a small team of like-minded colleagues with one purpose: to build a perfectly different, perfectly efficient way to read, write, and interact with the news.
Why shouldn’t you, as a reader, be able to comment on every single article you read? After all, you may have information the original author did not have. How about chat? If 20 people are reading an article at the same time, why shouldn’t they be able to discuss it amongst themselves afterwards?
Aside from being the friendliest place to read your news, Newsvine is also a great place to write. Want to write about a popular subject like the NFL, The Supreme Court, or mobile phones? Go ahead. How about a lesser known subject like your kid’s little league team? Not a problem. As long as you “tag” your articles correctly, they will automatically show up in the appropriate section on Newsvine.
You don’t even need to be a writer to make good use of your column on Newsvine. Perhaps you just want to point to other news around the web. Save the “Seed Newsvine” button to your browser bar and you can publish a link to any article you’ve just enjoyed with one click.
So why participate by writing articles or “seeding The Vine”? Other than the warm-fuzzy feeling you’ll get from seeing an article you brought into Newsvine reach the top, we want to reward you for your contributions by giving you all of the earnings generated by the content you create and recommend. Thats right, Newsvine users are financially rewarded in direct proportion to the value they add to the community by way of creating and submitting articles.
As you can read, there are some crucial differences with Digg.
1. Automatic submission of stories from Associated Press, as well as user-submitted stories. I think that this is probably a strength, as it provides a constant stream of good quality articles for the users’ perusal. They are subject to the usual voting system, which means that just because they are well written, they are not given unfair priority, a fact which I think is important to maintain the fairness of the user-review system.
2. Wider subject area. The vast majority of Digg stories fit somewhere on the spectrum of Tech news. Newsvine is much more diverse, covering all the topics one would expect on any news website.
3. Financial incentives for popular seeds. Interesting idea, but I’m not sure it’s entirely sustainable. As more members join Newsvine and it becomes more popular, the financial rewards will either have to get much larger to cover the increased number of stories and votes, or they will become insignificant, the budget having been spread around too much.
4. Use of tags. Newsvine uses tags to categorize stories, rather than just topic areas. An interesting and useful implementation of this is if I type in, for example, newsvine.com/google, I am presented with all stories tagged ‘google’. This feature works with all tags, and tags can be any word or phrase.
5. More focus on people. Although Digg has ‘friends’ functionality and you can see what individual users have dugg, Newsvine goes further by providing an individual column at username.newsvine.com, where the user can post their opinion on stories or completely new stories. A good idea, but as yet the comments left by a user around Newsvine are not automatically added to the column, although I am assured by Newsvine that comment history will be coming soon, presumably in the form of something fairly similar to Digg’s system.
I think that list just about covers Newsvine’s biggest differences from Digg. The million dollar question - will it beat Digg. The answer is somewhat uncertain. Yes, I believe it could do, for some of the reasons above and others, but only if it adds a plethora of new features, such as automatic publishing to external blogs, and cleans up its user interface, a key advantage which Digg has over it at the moment.
As I mentioned at the beginning of the article, I have invites and am very happy to give them out to anyone who wants them, and I really would recommend having a look at it.
Well, maybe that’s a bit unfair, but Jeeves is now no longer the mascot of the search engine ask.com. Ask.com has relaunched, now drawing particular attention to it’s pre-existing extra services, such as MyStuff and it’s recently acquired Bloglines online feed aggregator. From ask.com:
Ask Jeeves has re-launched as Ask.com. We hope you’ll like our new and improved search engine.
We’re no longer a site where you just have to ask questions; Ask.com gives you improved search technology and handy tools, together in a new look site. So you get whatever you are looking for faster.
• Related Search - Get to exactly what you want. Narrow your search. Or expand it. It’s the quickest way to get what you’re after.
• Binoculars - Save time by previewing sites before you get there – no clicking required
• Smart Answers - Skip the links and get right to the result for all sorts of topics like sports, movies, and the weather
• MyStuff - An easy way to save your search results and images all in one place Ask.com - Get to what you’re looking for faster.
This page is all about what Jeeves might be doing in his retirement, including activities as outlandish as going on a space odyssey. I didn’t think he had it in him!
On a serious note, it is interesting that Ask.com has decided that it is necessary to move away from the Jeeves brand. I suspect that a major reason behind the decision is a desire to remove the perception that Ask.com still works by you typing in a question and then Jeeves suggesting questions which you might like the answer to. This has not been the case for many years now, and it may be that this brand restructuring is intended to underline that fact, and to start to be seen as serious competition for the likes of Google and MSN.
Apparently, in the next version of Mandriva Linux will include access to a commercial music download service called Mindawn. It will offer downloads in both the Ogg Vorbis and non-lossy FLAC audio codecs, which presumably means there will be no DRM involved, as these formats do not support DRM.
This service won’t be tied to Linux machines, however, as many download services are tied to a single platform. The service will be available to Windows, Mac OS X and Linux users.
In my opinion, this is a real step forward for Linux as a desktop platform, and I am very happy with Mindawn for being bothered to be truly cross-platform. One minor issue is that there appears to be limited support for popular artists, as they probably don’t like the lack of DRM.
You can see the original story here (warning: irritating advertisement and automatic video play alert).
I was looking around on the Live.com site (microsoft’s online services division, slowly replacing MSN) and found the Microsoft Office Live beta. Given the recent introduction of Google Pages, I thought I would compare and contrast the two. Some features of Office Live Basics (the free option) are:
This looks a much more robust product, even including a free domain name, and the features of Google Pages cannot compare. The design of the UI also looks good, as you can see in the flash promo clip. Looks like Google Pages is doomed, unless they add some features pretty quickly and market it extremely efficiently (like on the Google.com/.co.uk).
Google has released a webpage creation and hosting service, known as Pages. From the FAQ:
We’re testing a new product that makes creating your own web pages as easy as creating a document in a word processor. Google Page Creator is a free tool that lets you create web pages right in your browser and publish them to the web with one click. There’s no software to download and no web designer to hire. The pages you create are hosted on Google servers and are available at http://yourgmailusername.googlepages.com for the world to see.
I have to say that this does not seem to be a very exciting product, or a new vision. There are literally hundreds if not thousands of services on the web that promise to do exactly the same thing, and have been for many years. I should say that I have not been able to get an account yet (the signups were only open for about 9 hours).
It is clear that Google envisages Pages as a static Blogger - ‘push-button publishing’ for anyone. The power of the Google brand alone means that if they market it right, the take up of Pages will be OK. However, for it to become truly popular they will have to add features, such as the ability to use it to host whole sites rather than just individual pages, as well as some extra ‘google magic’ ideas that no-one else has thought of yet.
The other oddity of Pages is that Google already has a simple web publishing system available, aside from Blogger, in the form of Google Base. Between the two products, it is hard to see where Pages fits in - if people want to put a recipe online, they can use Base. If they want to put photos of their holiday or pet, they can use Blogger. It is hard to see why someone would use Pages.
It will be interesting to have a look at the user interface. I can’t comment on it at the moment as I don’t have an account and I haven’t seen any screenshots, but it is an area which Google is often strong in (Gmail etc) and I expect AJAX utilised as far as possible and there to be the traditional minimalist style.
PS: AJAX stands for Asynchrous Javascript And XML. Basically, it is a way of updating the data on the webpage without having to reload the whole webpage. When used well it can be extremely powerful, and is being increasingly used in services such as Webmail (eg Gmail and Windows Live Mail beta) with much success.
Windows Vista build 5308 has been released to MSDN and Microsoft TechNet subscribers. There are lots of screenshots of the new build located here. The stuff featured in this build includes the Windows Sidebar with a few gadgets, a new looking logon screen, the Welcome Centre for just after setting up Vista, Windows Easy Transfer (Files & Settings Transfer Wizard reborn), Windows Vista Ultimate Extras and Why Windows Starts Slowly.
Oh I wish I had a subscription…
It has been reported that the Windows Server family of products has overtaken Unix (that’s commercial Unix, not Linux and other free OSs like FreeBSD) in usage. Now I don’t like this statistic, probably because I’m a bit of a Linux person and I don’t particularly want Microsoft to gain yet another monopoly. Microsoft already have a monopoly on the desktop, and I don’t think it’s beneficial to the world for Microsoft to rule over every server too. This is something I get quite heated about, not because I don’t like companies from developing proprietary software, but I don’t want one single software company to control the whole market share.
Interestingly enough, Linux actually is in third place, so it will be quite interesting for us Linux geeks to see if that market share grows, especially considering that Linux can be very cheap to implement in an enterprise situation.
New material means ‘xray specs’ no longer required
I found this on Digg and it looks really cool. Basically, scientists at Imperial College London and a Swiss university have managed to make solids become transparant by disrupting the movement of the electrons by shining light at them. Something like that anyway! At the moment, it only works on a new material under lab conditions, but they hope that eventually it could be used in medical imagery and even network security. Definitely something to watch.
