Codeweavers have released the first beta release of CrossOver Mac, yet another solution for running Windows applications on Intel-based Macintosh machines.
At the moment, there are a couple of solutions for people that want to run Windows applications on their Intel Mac.
Businesses don’t like upgrading software. Everyone knows that. Windows XP has been out for 5 years now, and a lot of businesses are only just, or have only recently, made the move to XP. There is even still a very large portion of businesses using Windows 2000 or even earlier systems.
But Microsoft Watch have voiced fresh concerns that businesses may not see the benefit of upgrading to Vista. Whereas home users will get Vista bundled with new machines, and slowly that way Vista will displace XP machines, business PCs don’t work like that.
Microsoft need to convince businesses there is a very good reason or a ‘killer feature’ that will save them money. Microsoft are pushing Vista’s ‘increased security’, but there doesn’t seem to be something that will really get businesses wanting to move. If Microsoft don’t do this, we will have a similar situation in a few years where businesses are only beginning to take up Vista.
Another issue is speed. In order to be worth an upgrade, Vista needs to run acceptably on current hardware. At the moment, entry-level specification hardware will struggle (or worse) to run Vista.
The Microsoft Watch article featured an extract from an instant messaging conversation with an anonymous enterprise user. The conversation is quite interesting.
MR. Biz: how are they going to make a business case for Vista?
MJF: that’s a good question…. I’m not really sure
MR. Biz: no matter how much tweaking MS does, it’s still not going to solve the resource requirements issue
…
MR. Biz: they can’t afford to put $2000+ desktops on each desk
MR. Biz: and buy all new copies of office to run on It
MR. Biz: what we’re talking about is a TCO of about $3000 per desktop
MR. Biz: maybe even more than that
MR. Biz: that’s before support costs
And he’s right. Even from the experiences of running Vista Beta 2 on my fairly mid-range hardware (P4 @ 3.0 GHz, 1 GB RAM, Geforce 6600 GT), it is a lot slower than Vista. I know Huw had trouble getting Vista B2 to run even at an acceptable level of speed on his entry level laptop.
If businesses can’t see a particular reason which makes Vista better, they’re very unlikely to upgrade. But if Vista won’t run acceptably on their current-gen hardware, they’re even less likely to upgrade.
NeoWin is reporting that Windows Vista’s launch prices were leaked thanks to Microsoft Canada. The leaked page has since been pulled, but not before some eagle-eyed people picked up the prices and spread them around the web.
The prices look set to be quite high for a lot of the ‘premium’ features Microsoft is pushing in the form of Windows Vista Home Premium Edition (‘premium’ is certainly right). Prices to follow (in Canadian dollars and then my conversion to USD and GBP). Note that these prices might differ depending on the market – for example, traditionally we Brits are charged more. Let’s hope that isn’t true for Vista.
Also, The Register has prices for a couple more editions:
Obviously, these are the retail prices and OEM versions bundled with new PCs will enjoy a significant saving – plus most PC buyers are blissfully unaware of the price they pay for Windows anyway.
Still, these prices to me seem very bloated, especially as some of the main features Microsoft are pushing are only available in Home Premium – which is a significant step up.
I track the RSS feed for the Windows Vista page, and recently Microsoft added two new items – a piece about how Vista “makes backup and recovery simple” and another about the Windows Vista Sidebar.
That’s funny. Apple recently previewed ‘Time Machine’, a feature of their upcoming OS X Leopard release at their Worldwide Developers’ Conference, that allows easy backup. And they have already got an implementation of widgets/gadgets in the form of Dashboard as well. A greeting from ‘the PC’ from Apple’s ads, who featured at the WWDC, said “Widgets, gadgets. Completely different…” and said “we could use some help [on Vista]“.
Am I meant to believe that this is a coincidence that the two features Apple are making a buzz about suddenly get pushed to the top of the feed for the Vista site (in their Windows implementations of course)?
Is Microsoft really feeling the pressure that Apple is putting on them by pushing out new features very quickly? We all know that the Mac OS X and Windows release schedules are vastly different. As Steve Jobs pointed out in his keynote, in the last five years Apple have got out 5 major releases of their flagship OS. He also said that in this time, Microsoft had done nothing.
Well, that’s not strictly true considering that in that time we’ve had things like the Windows XP Media Centre editions and things like the Tablet PC editions. Arguably not major upgrades, but certainly Microsoft have been doing more than nothing.
Vista will be big compared to XP. The feature list is quite big, but it’s underneath that’s taken a lot of the development time. The Tiger to Leopard upgrade will sport a few more features, but it won’t be anywhere near the transition from XP to Vista. Neither will there be as many architectural changes. (Contrary to Mr Jobs’ boastings, Tiger on Intel has been in the works for a lot longer than 210 days, with OS X’s predecessor NeXTSTEP having support for multiple architectures for a long time. Yes, OS X moving to Intel was a big step, but nowhere near as big as he made it out to be).
Apple like to release often with less features, and Microsoft haven’t done so recently; the history of releases like Windows Me may well have put them off rushing a big release, but it’s more likely that things just took longer than expected and Vista went from interim OS to major upgrade.
But coming back to my point – is this Microsoft showing that Apple is a serious competitor (apart from the odd disgruntled Windows user)? Apple certainly have lowered the barrier to going Mac, with low-cost machines like the Mac mini and support for Microsoft’s OS on the hardware, switching to a Mac is more enticing than ever. Plus, with Vista not scheduled to launch for the Christmas PC-buying season, are consumers becoming aware that they will end up with an out-of-date OS within a few months?
I guess only Microsoft’s internal strategy people know why these topics were bumped to the top of the feed. Of course, it could be a complete coincidence, but for me personally, this looks like an admission from Microsoft that Leopard really is a big contender to Vista. Now all we have to do is wait and see if hoardes of Wintel users suddenly become Mactel users instead. It’s unlikely, but more likely than it ever has been and looking ever more likely all the time.
Simon Phipps, Sun’s chief open source strategist, has posted on his blog saying that open sourcing Java is “an ongoing process”, but it appears it is one that has started and now is gaining momentum.
In an informal breakfast in London, Phipps said that Java would be released under an Open Source Initiative (OSI) approved licence, and hasn’t ruled out using the GPL. This could mean widespread bundling and usage in Linux and other free software operating systems, because using an OSI licence will hopefully ensure that the Java licence will be compatible with the operating system licences.
What I think would be interesting as well is whether Microsoft take the opportunity to reassess their stance on bundling Java.
In my quest to see if I can find a feed reader better suited for my needs, I’ve looked at the free and open source Java-based desktop RSSOwl. Currently I’m using Google’s Personalised Homepage (also known as IG from its URL) to track my umpteen feeds (a list which is expanding every day). My requirements for my feed reader are:
So the first solution I decided to try out was RSSOwl. RSSOwl is a free, open source, Java-based desktop feed aggregator. It’s cross-platform as it’s Java-based, but I’ve only tried it out on Linux for now. In theory, the Windows version should be identical in functionality. Read on for the review.
This is a fairly big story for the open source world – Intel have released driver source code for their Intel 965 Express range of graphics cards. Most of these cards are used for ‘integrated graphics’ – that is, they are built straight into the motherboard and aren’t designed for gaming/heavy 3D work. Intel actually are leaders in the graphics chip market, but that’s generally for these integrated graphics solutions where 3D processing horsepower isn’t required.
Nevertheless, Intel have released and open sourced both 2D and 3D drivers for these cards and Linux users with these cards should be able to set up 3D accelaration support very easily – due to the fact that Linux distributors are free to include the drivers in the distribution.
To get 3D accelaration support for other cards in Linux is not very easy at all at the moment. Both ATi and Nvidia offer 3D drivers for Linux, but they are not open source. This means the main distributions generally aren’t free to include the drivers on the disc, so the user has to download and manually install the drivers (which in most cases involves using the command line for a short while). Also, 3D drivers for Linux aren’t as fully tested and sometimes cause problems which aren’t easy for community members to help with.
Needless to say, this is a big and very brave move by Intel which will hopefully be mirrored by the other big graphics players.
However, I’m sceptical that Nvidia and ATi will follow suit. Driver software, by its nature, reveals a lot of information about how hardware works, so ATi and Nvidia won’t want to share potentially secret hardware specifications with each other. With Intel not having quite as much of a stake in the high-end graphics market, they apparently don’t see the big players as such a big threat.
You can download the driver source code from the site here (but if you want to use the driver it’s probably easier to wait for your distribution to package it for you).
Now we’re no stranger to Zoho’s online office suite products here at Gizbuzz, in fact, recently we interviewed Raju Vegesna, Chief Technical Architect of Zoho about their current products, for the first ever Gizbuzz Podcast.
Recently, the Zoho team have been working on integration between the Zoho Office products, and they’ve come up with a sample presentation in their presentation creation program, Zoho Show, demonstrating the new integration features. Essentially, it allows you to take some content from another Zoho application, such as a chart from Zoho Sheet and import it into another application, like Zoho Show.
At the moment the process of embedding other Zoho content is fairly simple, if a bit technical. It’s a case of ‘publishing’ your original content which gives you a small amount of HTML which you then place into your target document with the insert HTML snippet option.
The results are good – a chart embedded within a presentation, for example, works quite well inside the presentation. It’s not just limited to charts, though, forms created in Zoho Creator can also be embedded with similar success. The only concern I have is that occasionally the embedded content looks a bit ‘out of place’ – the sample presentation given to demo these features has a dark blue gradient background, but the charts and forms have a white background. Having said that, even desktop office solutions like Microsoft Office aren’t immune to this problem. Also the demoed charts do look a bit pixelated – but I don’t know whether that’s just my large screen resolution (1280×960) causing the charts to be scaled up a bit.
Still, there is enormous potential for a feature like this. Desktop suites like Microsoft Office boast this kind of interoperability between the components of the suite, and you’ll find a lot of times when you need to mix the features from the different products. Zoho are doing this in the Web 2.0 application space, and it’s certainly something I haven’t seen done on the web before. It’s an extremely useful feature, and with a bit more spit and polish it could become a major selling point for the Zoho suite.
What I would work on now if I was Zoho was to make this feature a specific option – users don’t like to deal with ugly-looking HTML. If they implemented a button on the toolbar which listed all the user’s other documents (in all the Zoho products) and offered to insert the content directly into a document when clicked, I would say that Zoho integration would be a killer feature. Whatever they do, it has to be at least as easy as it would be to copy and paste data from one application to another on the desktop.
If they do, will it be killer enough to win significant market share from Google’s online office suite, or even challenge the mighty Microsoft Office? Who knows.
Apparently, Sun Microsystems, the people behind Java, are planning some kind of open source ‘briefing’ on the 15th August in which they will allegedly announce that the Java platform will be open source.
This might not sound like a big deal – we’ve seen a lot of Sun products going open source recently, including their operating system Solaris, and the OpenOffice.org project (formerly Star Office), but this will make a big impact for Linux on the desktop.
Because of legal and licensing issues, the Java software can’t be distributed with most Linux distributions, as it’s not open source and Sun’s licence is too restrictive. The open sourcing of Java will in theory mean Java will come as standard on new versions of Linux distributions (and will be easy to install on current distributions) opening Linux on the desktop up to a lot of Java-based open source software. In fact, Aptana, which we have looked at here on Gizbuzz, runs on Java and although there is a Linux version, it requires a somewhat daunting Java installation to run.
This move should prevent that and ultimately make Linux a more attractive desktop platform. It makes business sense for Sun too – they’ve got a director of open source, Simon Phipps, who is pushing Sun’s open source initiative.
Following on from some bad publicity for AOL, the ISP giant have released Active Virus Shield, a free Windows anti-virus solution. The anti-virus engine is licensed from Kapersky, but the application is very much AOL branded.
This isn’t the first excursion into the free anti-virus product market we’ve seen. Smaller anti-virus firm AVG offers AVG Free, and there are also other products like avast Home Edition and the open source ClamWin.
What’s interesting about this venture by AOL is that it’s not ad supported and you don’t require to be using AOL as an ISP or even have an AOL screenname to use Active Virus Shield. The definition updates also appear to be available on a free basis – all AOL want from you is a valid email address in order to download the software.
The Register’s take on this move is that it will drive more traffic to AOL’s site and help it rival ‘web portals’ like Yahoo. It sounds like a plan on AOL’s part, and considering their recent track record (not including the bad publicity) of giving users 5 GB of storage and other services, this may be AOL’s strategy.
