marypcbuk | Entries tagged with zdnet

I was fascinated and frustrated by Being Geek in almost equal measures. It was very interesting to check off the geek attitudes I have - and the ones I don't have. It was fascinating to see him deconstruct 'system thinking' (the world is a system with rules one can deduce and use to predict and understand situations) and frustrating to see him point out that it's a fallacy and then act as if it was true for much of the rest of the book. What's it about? Go read my review over on ZDNet...

I'm not best suited as a news writer. As well as telling you what the news is, I want to be giving my interpretation of what it means and why it's happening - really, it's much more like comment and analysis.

I got to do both for a change when I reported on what Mark Hurd had to say at FireGlobal; the first time I've heard him speak since leaving HP and joining Oracle.

Here's the news: Hurd Oracle's future strategy is integration
And here's two pieces discussing what the news means and filling in extra details that didn't fit in the news piece: Can vertical integration solve more enterprise problems than virtualisation and More from Mark Hurd apps matter, apps are hard work and cloud isn't magic.

There's a sense in which I think he's drunk the entire bottle of Kool-Aid; and there's a sense in which a company wants a new president to be aligned with its culture and direction, so it may not be fair to criticise what sounds rather like trash-talking the value of the direction he took his old company in. Hurd's departure from HP, Larry Ellison's criticism of the HP board and hiring of Hurd, the bitter lawsuit between Oracle and SAP (whose business Oracle is obviously gunning for with the vertical integration plans) and the fallout from Oracle's decisions over the technology it bought from Sun - that all comes under my definition of 'debacle' and it's tempting to read some of Hurd's comments as barbed. But there's some cogent criticism in there too, even if I doubt very much if anyone really wants to go back to the days of the single supplier with no incentive to innovate.

PDF is phenomenally useful, and phenomenally irritating when you need to do more than read it. I wasn't at all surprised when Adobe told me they had user research saying people spent more time looking for features than using them in Acrobat 9; I either have to leave the Tyepwriter toolbar for filling in forms that aren't coded as real forms (so, every PDF I have to fill in) up on screen all the time, or I hide it to get more space to see the document I'm filling in and then spend ages trying to remember what the Typewriter is called and where it's hidden. I spend hours every month making and reviewing comments on large PDFs for IT Expert, wondering why my cursor sometimes is allowed to insert text and sometimes isn't. To be fair, any tool that's powerful is going to be complex. Let's say it's just not a fluid, intuitive experience - and I'm looking forward to Acrobat X next month.

The beta was announced this week: here's what I thought of it.
Acrobat X: a first look
Adobe's Acrobat X offers a cleaner interface and a welcome selection of feature improvements, some of them long overdue

Acrobat X: gallery
Check out Acrobat X's streamlined interface, guided Actions, enhanced Portfolios and other improvements

I like Nvidia's Optimus technology: a full GPU when you need it, running through the PCI bus for speed, the battery-saving Intel integrated graphics when you don't. But with IE9 and Chrome 9 and all those other tools for doing GPU acceleration, you're going to need a decent GPU more often than that. And while the GPU AMD is packing into its Bobcat CPUs won't be state of the art by the time it arrives, it will be considerably ahead of what you get in a Core i5. When AMD showed us the Zacate chip recently, it smoked the Core i5 system running next to it - delivering the same result on the IE9 Psychedelic browsing test as the ATI graphics card in Simon's desktop. Detailed tech specs and prices in the link...

Inside the PlayBook will be both consumer apps and important enterprise data: here's how RIM is going to make them play happily together
I like the BlackBerry Torch for combining keyboard and touchscreen in one slender package; but is that good enough?

Third-party tools finally take advantage of Intel’s chip-level security and management options

Embedded features that Intel has been offering in vPro for several years are getting more useful as more software developers offer tools to take advantage of the features in the latest Core vPro models.

OpenOffice 3.3 gets a new look and some new features.

There's been a lot of controversy about the Renaissance project to develop a new user interface for OpenOffice.org, with some users thinking it will be too similar to Microsoft's ribbon interface (which has caused plenty of knee-jerk responses and a few just-jerk reactions too). Leaving aside copyright questions and discussions about the popularity or otherwise of ribbon interfaces, the apps in the OOo 3.3 beta have the traditional menus and toolbar interface rather than something radically different. However, icons have been redesigned and the menu and toolbars have a shaded, 3D look that's much more attractive than the old-fashioned look of previous versions.

OpenOffice 3.3 beta in pictures

first take: FastHosts online storage service
Online storage makes a lot of sense. Somebody else does the hard work of installing and managing the disks, taking the backups and providing the remote access for you, so your data is safe and accessible from anywhere you can get online. There are plenty of backup and sync-oriented services like Mozy and Dropbox that offer some free storage and the options of paying for more space, but they tend to be designed for consumers. Fasthosts' new Online Storage Service is different.

first take: HulloMail 1.2
Twitter and Facebook haven't quite taken over from phone calls and when you get phone calls, you miss phone calls. The iPhone's visual voicemail means you don't have to sit through all your messages just to get the one you're waiting for; HulloMail gives you similar tools for BlackBerry, Android , iPhone, Symbian and other push-enabled smartphones.

first take: La Cie mosKeyto
USB keys are getting smaller, and larger. Four gigabytes is common and 8GB and 16GB sticks are no longer unfeasibly expensive, or big and bulky. In fact some of the smallest USB sticks on the market, SanDisk's Cruzer Blade and PNY's micro Attache, are both available as 16GB drives. LaCie's rather absurdly-named new mosKeyto comes in 4GB and 8GB sizes for now (a 16GB version will follow), but it's a midget...

There are some seminal computer history books; Fire in the Valley, Revenge of The Nerds, Soul of a New Machine, The Cuckoo's Egg - and Hackers. Nothing to do with the film, although it does have a passing connection with War Games, Hackers is an anecdotal view of the way people who care more about the experience of computing than the goals have shaped what computers we have and how we use them. 25 years ago the first edition explained where abortive and successful personal computers had come from and what they owed to model railroads, cereal box gifts and chinese food; 25 years on there's still questions about the ethics, the business models and the ethos of computing; read my review over on ZDNet to see if I think the new edition answers them.

Thanks to my bronchitis, I spent two days reading this and two more thinking about what you can say about a personal history like this; for me the details are fascinating but the most thought-provoking thing wasn't anything the book said but what I realised when I compared the ideas and principles and attitudes to where computing has gone since. Good books make you think....

10Gbps plus power down a tiny, extra-long cable

USB 3.0, with headline throughput of 5Gbps, has only just hit the market, but it could be obsolete as soon as next year, when Intel's 10Gbps Light Peak optical cables arrive. In time, a whole new protocol will deliver up to 100Gbps, but initially Light Peak will plug into familiar ports to deliver faster transfers over longer cables.
Read my in-depth tech guide on ZDNet UK

Why do we give Facebook less hassle for proxy sharing in Place than we gave Google for Buzz?

I was furious about Buzz on a personal level; it did the initial turn-itself-on thing on a Gmail account I don't want to have share anything with anyone and I had the emotional response to having the system interfere in my personal life. With Facebook Places, in which you can label your friends as being in a certain place at a certain time without their permission, I laughed at Ed Bott's tweet saying he was setting up a weekly Outlook reminder to check his Facebook privacy settings, then I thought 'I should check my Facebook privacy settings' and I found the new Places proxy checkin option marked to tell me I should look at it, promptly disabled it and all I thought was 'oh look, Facebook got privacy wrong again'.

Why the difference?

I prefer Hotmail to Gmail; I like the new features and I like not having my mails mined for advertising. When I linked to pieces I did about Hotmail and the Windows Live Essentials Wave 4 beta, the discussion in the comments brought up a phrase in the Microsoft opt-out policy for personalised ads: "(b) the pages you view and links you click when using Microsoft’s and its advertising partners’ Web sites and services, and (c) the search terms you enter when using Microsoft’s Internet search services, such as Bing, and (d) information about the users you most frequently interact with through Microsoft’s communications or social networking services". I asked Microsoft's PR, Microsoft's PR asked two or three different teams inside Microsoft and we got an answer. I've written it up in full over on our 500 words blog but in short if someone in your Windows Live graph buys something, you might see an advert for something similar - but you won't know who, what (or probably why). The big question for me is, what are the lines that need to be drawn for ad personalisation and the ad-funded free online services?

Why did Steve Jobs use the passive to talk about the patent threat to Ogg and what does that ahve to do with HTML 5 and Flash?

Anyone who's worked on any title with me knows that I exchew the passive voice; the passive voice is to be avoided. Over on our ZD blog I enjoy dissecting an superb example of why it's not as clear as the active voice and when that can be an advantage.

HP Labs Singapore is the company's first new lab since Prith Banerjee, worldwide director of HP Labs, took control of its research in 2007 and set out a five-year strategic plan that made cloud computing one of the eight pillars of its research focus.

We asked Banerjee what the new lab will concentrate its research on, how the facility fits in with Open Cirrus and HP's other labs, and how it will feed into the company's cloud services for enterprises. he said it's about security and Singapore ("if we can make a services datacentre cost effective here, then we can do it anywhere"). Read the rest over at ZDNet

One of the problems with carrying a laptop around with you is that it looks like a valuable laptop, and a laptop bag or sleeve doesn't disguise it much. The Undercover laptop sleeve gives your notebook a place to hide; it looks like a padded mailing envelope complete with label, stamp, postmark, return address, delivery instructions, creases and all.

It claims to be splashproof and tearproof - and you can even scribble notes on it for added authenticity (ballpoint works better than gel or fountain pens). But can't you just use a real mailing envelope? Find out what happened when I turned on the tap over at ZDNet

Given that I've gone from a Windows Mobile fan to something of a Windows Mobile diehard in my phone use (I've been disappointed with the glacial development and short term solutions of the last two Windows Mobile releases even as I've enjoyed new features and the best mobile browser anywhere - Skyfire not Mobile IE, of course), I'm still undecided about how much I like Windows Phone 7. I've been chewing it over at our blog on ZDNet...

#WP7
Microsoft has finally made the official announcement about the next version of Windows Mobile – Windows Phone 7 Series – but there’s a long list of questions that Microsoft says it won’t answer until the MIX conference in March. In the meantime, here’s what we do know about the phones that will be on sale for ‘the holiday season’ (which to US companies starts in October or November).
Read the answers I got and the questions I still have on ZDNet - with some images I haven't see anywhere else!

It's hard to tell Toshiba's new Tecra and Satellite Pro models apart; that's actually quite deliberate. But it's the Reel Time document history you get on the notebooks that could be the most interesting feature. Find out why in my first take over on ZDNet UK...

Simon and I are now writing more for ZDNet UK, including a new blog (called '500 words into the future' - thanks to everyone who helped us decide between various titles); after three interesting discussions in a row today about cloud, SaaS and digital Britain, it seemed appropriate to kick off by talking about the big cloud picture and the niggling little cloud details. Tell us what you think!
Pipes, clouds and scarcity

Profile

marypcbuk

March 2022

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
		1	2	3	4	5
6	7	8	9	10	11	12
13	14	15	16	17	18	19
20	21	22	23	24	25	26
27	28	29	30	31

Syndicate

Page Summary

I resemble this book
Oracle is the new IBM
Acrobat X; now I can use it in less anger
AMD: I'm looking forward to Zacate
ZDNet: BlackBerry is still good for business
Intel vPro matures
I don't only do Microsoft; OpenOffice 3.3
A few fast first takes
25 years of Hackers, 50 years of hacker ethics
Everything I know about LightPeak
Over-sharing on social networks; do we care more about it when it's Google?
On ZDNet: What Windows Live knows about your friends
Who have you been talking to at Microsoft recently, Mary?
On ZDNet: Video codecs, IP and the passive aggressive voice
HP gets Cirious about cloud research
I spent the morning running an old laptop under the tap
Windows Phone: more smart, less phone?
ZDNet First Take: Windows Phone 7 Series - some answers but still questions
ZDNet UK: Toshiba's new business notebooks, with Reel Time documents
500 words into the future

Style Credit

Style: Classic for Refried Tablet by zvi and Aaron B. Russell

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Page generated Jul. 12th, 2025 03:08 am