A close friend of mine has informed me of Microsoft’s acquisition of Mozilla Firefox. Personally, I was disappointed with this because our favorite browser is now part of the software giant.
But on a bright side, it would benefit consumers in the long run because
MS’s own Internet Explorer has been the worse internet browser and acquiring the best browser available is the best move.
My quote for this: “If can’t beat ’em, buy ’em.”
After a trickle of updates and “betas” bearing Windows Live moniker, Microsoft Corp. is ready to start promoting its official package of free desktop programs for e-mail, instant messaging, blogging and sharing photos.
The program are “essentially a free upgrade for Windows,” said Brian Hall, general manager of Windows Live at Microsoft.
The Microsoft Expression Suite of professional design tools and innovative technologies will take your creative possibilities to a new level. Whether you are designing standards-based Web sites, rich user experiences on the desktop, or managing digital assets and content, Microsoft Expression applications will help. Microsoft Expression Studio includes the following products: Expression Web, Expression Blend, Expression Design, and Expression Media.
by Peter Rojas
So, you wanna make your ugly Windows XP interface look like Mac OS X, huh? It’s really not all that difficult to do, and with a little luck, you’ll be able to convince all but the most die-hard Mac users that you run an Apple computer. First, here’s a list of the programs you’ll need:
- StyleXP or WindowBlinds (skins the Graphical User Interface of your operating system)
- ObjectBar (the white Finder bar on the top of Macs; has File, Edit, View, etc. on it.)
- ObjectDock, YzDock (discontinued), or MobyDock (The dock on the bottom of a Mac that contains icons and shortcuts to programs)
- Trillian (chat program that can be skinned to resemble iChat)
- YzToolbar (skins the toolbar icons in your Windows windows)
- YzShadow (puts a lovely drop shadow under your windows á la Mac OS X)
- Rainlendar (popular skinable desktop calendar)
- Rainmeter (skinnable desktop system statistics)
- Samurize (like Konfabulator for the Mac; can display just about anything, such as clocks, uptime, and the weather)
- iTunes for Windows (self-explanatory)
- Icons (The pretty little pictures on your desktop that point you somewhere. There are millions out there, but try the link provided for over a 1,000 lifted from Mac OS X 10.3 aka Panther)
By Peter Galli
from: PCMAG.com
SAN FRANCISCO—Windows Vista has probably created the single biggest opportunity for the Linux desktop to take market share, Cole Crawford, an IT strategist at Dell, said in an address titled, “The Linux Desktop—Fact, FUD or Fantasy?” at the annual LinuxWorld Conference & Expo here.
For example, a number of companies have moved back to Windows XP after deploying Vista, Crawford said, before quoting Scott Granneman, an author, entrepreneur and adjunct professor at Washington University in St. Louis, as saying, “To mess up a Linux box, you need to work at it; to mess up your Windows box, you just have to work on it.”
Microsoft has also owned the desktop for more than 15 years, Crawford said, “and so the only way for them to go is down. But Linux can only go up, and its growth potential is enormous. While Linux only has 1 percent of share on the desktop versus Microsoft’s more than 90 percent, that is changing, and the Linux desktop is expected to gain some share over the next two years,” he said.
The number of developers targeting Windows decreased by 12 percent in the last year, while their targeting of Linux has increased by 34 percent over the same period, recently released information from Evans Data shows, Crawford said.
The interoperability agreements that Microsoft has signed with Linux vendors, from Novell to Xandros and Linspire, have also had largely positive results so far, he said, adding that another plus was the fact that Linux development has shifted to a model in which a significant portion of the kernel is being developed by corporate entities.
On the downside, Crawford said, was the fact that no one actually owns the kernel and this makes SLAs (service-level agreements) more challenging.
Read the rest of this eWEEK story: Vista Aiding Linux Desktop, Strategist Says
Based from the Article By Rob Hof for Businessweek.com The latest challenger to Explorer and Firefox aims to beat the big guys by emphasizing blogging, networking, and online communities. Web browsers don’t look much different than they did a decade ago, when Netscape Communications’s initial stock offering catapulted software for navigating the Web into the public eye. You click on a site, look around, watch or listen to something, click somewhere else — all by your lonesome self. Now, an upstart called Flock aims to change all that. Read the rest of this entry »
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