Month: April 2012

“What’s beyond silicon? There have been a number of proposals: protein computers, DNA computers, optical computers, quantum computers, molecular computers. Dr. Michio Kaku says ‘if I were to put money on the table I would say that in the next ten years as Moore’s Law slows down, we will tweak it.'”

In the recent quarterly Codeweavers customer newsletter, they announced work that has begun on a new Wine-based, Active-X supporting, web browser!

“In addition, we are working on creating a new Wine-enabled Web browser that will be able to take the place of Internet Explorer. By mating Wine support for ActiveX controls with a new browser, users will be able to navigate to pages that were previously only accessible using IE. This browser is currently in early alpha development (translation: it’s ‘really’ ugly right at the moment) but is available for limited customer testing, (for those with a masochistic bent…)

Thanks For Your Support!

We appreciate the ongoing support our customers give us: you make everything we do with
Wine possible.”

Sounds good for folks that want to use Linux in a corporate environemnt, but might have web based applications that use Active-X! I look forward to testing it (when it is beyond Alpha testing!) ;-)

Will Google Drive be the death of M$ Office? The author of this article seems to think so! I use LibreOffice anyway, so I save hundreds of dollors every time there is a big M$ Office upgrade by just passing it by! Rock on!

How Google’s Drive helps kill Microsoft’s Office

“Google’s hard drive in the sky, Google Drive, is a big threat to other cloud storage products like Dropbox and Box. But it’s also a stab straight at the heart of Microsoft’s mainstream business software, Microsoft Office.

While Google’s productivity application suites, Docs (now incorporated into Drive) and Apps (for businesses), have been making some headway into Microsoft Office’s territory, the important battlefield is not the application. It’s the data. If Google can move the battlefield to a place where it has the bigger army and better weapons, the whole game changes. Google Drive might make that happen.

Let’s look at the world from behind Google-colored glasses. Every time a user performs a search in the Google search engine, or clicks a link in Chrome, or +1s an item in Plus, Google adds an atom of data to its knowledge of what people like and what they do. This information helps Google index the Web and rank its results when people are searching for something.

Moreover, every action that generates user data that doesn’t touch down in a Google product or service deprives Google of information that it could otherwise use to index and understand the Web of human knowledge and preference. Microsoft Word documents stored on PCs? In the most uncharitable view, every one is money being stolen from Google.

All closed, siloed apps, for that matter, remove opportunity from Google. Co-founder Sergey Brin has recently spoken out against apps and companies that wall off data from the open Internet. There is indeed a danger, but it’s not just about openness, it’s about Google’s own ability to index the data.

Back to Google Drive: By acting as the substrate for user data — in other words, the file system — Google gets exposed to many times more information. Google doesn’t need, and in fact has no reason, to make this data public, but having it available to index and cross-reference does make the company’s core service, targeted advertising, more valuable.

The more data Google has, the more valuable its product becomes. And that product, in case it’s not already clear, is you. Your attention, which is sold to advertisers.

Microsoft’s main product, meanwhile, is software, not data. (And its customers aren’t advertisers, but people who buy software.) So why can’t Microsoft’s model and Google’s live in harmony? Because Microsoft’s software suite consists of application software and an operating system, and the operating system stores user data, and the data is what Google wants. So Google is undermining that function with Google Drive, and not just by offering a synchronized file system (which, by the way, Microsoft also offers). Once users put their data in Google Drive, they will also find out how easy it is to open these files in non-Microsoft apps. This is one of the reasons Google is launching Google Drive with an API for developers and a suite of partner products that shave off Microsoft customers a bit at a time.

One of the most important features that third-party developers are using with Google Drive is the ‘Open with’ feature. If you upload a Microsoft Project file to Drive, for example, you can open it with the Web app SmartSheet, directly on the Web. Similarly, Web apps like SlideRocket can open PowerPoint files. Google’s own productivity apps can also open Microsoft files.

The more people realize that they don’t need Office to access their archives of files from the pre-Google Drive era, the more likely they are to look to Google Drive (or perhaps competing products, if they have similar partners) as primary storage. And Google wins, while Microsoft loses.”

(Cross-posted from the Hand Held Hack)
Wow! I love my Fire! And, apparently, so do you!

comScore: Amazon Kindle Fire is 54.4% of US Android tablets

“Amazon’s Kindle Fire now makes up the absolute majority of the Android tablet platform in the US, comScore found in a fresh study. The e-reader and tablet crossover represented 54.4 percent of all Android tablets sold in the country. At second place, the entire Samsung Galaxy Tab lineup comprised just 15.4 percent of Android slates.

No other manufacturer got above 10 percent, with Google’s reference tablet, the Motorola Xoom, stopping at seven percent. Despite its size as a company, Sony only netted 0.7 percent for the Tablet S.

The share was a virtual doubling of the Kindle Fire’s stake from December and had seen every other manufacturer’s share shrink as a result. Researchers didn’t attempt to explain the shift, but the increasing bias suggested that the $199 price was again the determining factor and that devices trying to compete more directly in the iPad’s price and category sold in low numbers.

For Google, the findings pose extra problems as it moves towards the low end. Although publicly content to let the Kindle Fire succeed, Google now faces a situation where the most popular Android tablet goes without not just Google’s official interface but the Google Play Store and other services the company depends on to make money from Android. A rumored ‘Nexus’ tablet may be priced at the same level to undermine Amazon.

Alongside Android tablet share, comScore discovered that those with small tablets were much more likely to use the web. Where someone with a seven-inch tablet like the Kindle Fire or a five-inch crossover like the Dell Streak or Samsung Galaxy Note typically looked at no more than 90 pages, those with a larger design like the 9.4-inch Tablet S or the 9.7-inch iPad looked at 116 or more. The gap suggested that the willingness to see content, including beyond the web, was directly linked to screen size.”

It is TIME! Upgrade to the Precise Pangolin (12.04 LTS) of Ubuntu Linux! I did! Awesomeness! By the way, unlike what the linked article says, it is no longer Beta, it is fully production!

Howto: Upgrade to Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin from 10.04, 11.04, 11.10 | Desktop & Server

For a Desktop Upgrade:

“So to upgrade from Ubuntu 11.04 or older on a desktop system, press Alt+F2 and type in update-manager -d into the command box. Update Manager should open up and tell you: New distribution release ’12.04 LTS‘ is available.

Before to upgrade remember that is important to update your system first then click Upgrade and follow the on-screen instructions:

1- Press Alt+F2 and type in update-manager -d

For a Server Upgrade:

To upgrade from Ubuntu 11.10 on a server system to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS:

1- install the update-manager-core package if it is not already installed:

sudo apt-get install update-manager-core

2- Edit /etc/update-manager/release-upgrades and set Prompt=normal;

3- Launch the upgrade tool with the command

sudo do-release-upgrade -d

and follow the on-screen instructions.”

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Ubuntu Precise Pangolin (12.04 LTS)

“The developers behind the Ubuntu project have announced the availability of Ubuntu 12.04, codenamed Precise Pangolin. The new version of the popular Linux distribution brings updated software, several major user interface improvements, and a number of changes to the platform’s default application lineup.

Ubuntu is released every six months on a time-based schedule. The version number is based on the year and month of the release. Version 12.04 is the sixteenth release since the original launch of Ubuntu in 2004. Ubuntu’s audience grew at a rapid pace and quickly elevated it to the status of the most popular Linux distribution for the desktop. The distribution has since been expanded to support servers and mobile and embedded systems.

Ubuntu 12.04 is a long-term support (LTS) release, which means that it will receive security and stability updates for an extended duration. LTS releases, which are issued every two years, have historically offered three years of support on the desktop and five years on the server. Regular Ubuntu releases, by comparison, are only supported with updates for 18 months.

Ubuntu 12.04 is the first LTS release that will receive a uniform five years of support in both environments. The support guarantee is backed by Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu. LTS releases are significant because the extended support period makes them more suitable than regular releases for deployment by hardware manufacturers and enterprise Ubuntu adopters.

Canonical’s official release announcement touts 12.04 as a release for the enterprise desktop, highlighting things like OEM certification and the availability of enterprise-centric software from partners VMware and Citrix.

Due to the longer lifespan and nature of the intended users, the focus of LTS releases tends to be on stability and robustness rather than new features and major technical changes.”

Pretty interesting details!

Introducing Google Drive… yes, really

“Just like the Loch Ness Monster, you may have heard the rumors about Google Drive. It turns out, one of the two actually does exist.

Today, we’re introducing Google Drive – a place where you can create, share, collaborate, and keep all of your stuff. Whether you’re working with a friend on a joint research project, planning a wedding with your fiancé or tracking a budget with roommates, you can do it in Drive. You can upload and access all of your files, including videos, photos, Google Docs, PDFs and beyond.

With Google Drive, you can:

Create and collaborate. Google Docs is built right into Google Drive, so you can work with others in real time on documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Once you choose to share content with others, you can add and reply to comments on anything (PDF, image, video file, etc.) and receive notifications when other people comment on shared items.

Store everything safely and access it anywhere (especially while on the go). All your stuff is just… there. You can access your stuff from anywhere—on the web, in your home, at the office, while running errands and from all of your devices. You can install Drive on your Mac or PC and can download the Drive app to your Android phone or tablet. We’re also working hard on a Drive app for your iOS devices. And regardless of platform, blind users can access Drive with a screen reader.

Search everything. Search by keyword and filter by file type, owner and more. Drive can even recognize text in scanned documents using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology. Let’s say you upload a scanned image of an old newspaper clipping. You can search for a word from the text of the actual article. We also use image recognition so that if you drag and drop photos from your Grand Canyon trip into Drive, you can later search for [grand canyon] and photos of its gorges should pop up. This technology is still in its early stages, and we expect it to get better over time.

You can get started with 5GB of storage for free – that’s enough to store the high-res photos of your trip to the Mt. Everest, scanned copies of your grandparents’ love letters or a career’s worth of business proposals, and still have space for the novel you’re working on. You can choose to upgrade to 25GB for $2.49/month, 100GB for $4.99/month or even 1TB for $49.99/month. When you upgrade to a paid account, your Gmail account storage will also expand to 25GB.”