OK. I am back! After having to pass my first Oracle certification. Anyway, back to the topic today. It’s Vista time again.
Windows Vista has less than 1% of the market share according to a market research report released on Thursday. Aliso Viejo-based Net Applications Inc, the company tracking the operating system market share, gives the figures below for each OS in the market for the month of February.
- Windows XP: 84.33%
- Windows 2000: 4.75%
- Mac OS X - PowerPC: 4.29%
- Mac OS X - Intel: 2.09%
- Windows 98: 1.50%
- Windows Vista: 0.93%
- Linux: 0.42%
Windows Vista 0.93% market share is a vast improvement over January’s 0.18%. Despite Microsoft’s intention to spend half a billion dollars marketing Vista, conversions from XP won’t be the norm until 2009. The primary reason to stay in Windows XP is the lack of needs. Most killer applications reside on the Internet these days.
Continue reading ‘Reality Check: How Is Windows Vista Doing?’
An operating system (OS) is a computer program that manages the hardware and software resources of a computer. The definition has evolved over the years to become a platform for all kinds of computing activities. This is what Second Life, the virtual community claims to be in the future.
We all know that the claim of “New Kind of OS” is not going to be in the same form as the OS we use today. It is more about managing Internet users’ activities than controlling hardware resources. It is a platform for human interaction rather than for software collaboration. In other words, it is one level higher than what we currently see as operating system.
Second Life has been around for three and a half years. It has more than 3 million users who create avatars of themselves and move about the virtual world, chatting with others, buying land, building homes and businesses. Recently, Sweden announced to set up virtual embassy in Second Life to spread information about the Scandinavian country and attract more young visitors.
Are these enough to justify businesses to have a presence in Second Life?
With the release of Firefox 2.0 (which should be official on the afternoon of Tuesday, 24th October 2006), the web browser war is once again heat up. The rush of RC3 to final after just a week of release again signifies the worries of Firefox community about IE7’s challenge.
Apart from the user interface differences, lest we forget the differences at the core, which is called the layout engine or rendering engine. It takes web content (such as HTML, XML, image files, etc.) and formatting information (such as CSS, XSL, etc.) and displays the formatted content on the screen. It “paints” on the content area of a window, which is displayed on a monitor or a printer.
The layout engine exists not only in web browsers but also email clients, media players with mini-browser and any applications that can display web contents.
There are 4 major rendering engines on the market.
Schools Interoperability Framework (SIF) Overview
0 Comments Published September 29th, 2006 in Infrastructure.
The Schools Interoperability Framework Association (SIFA) is a non-profit membership organization whose members include over 300 software vendors, school districts, state departments of education and other organizations active in primary and secondary (pK-12) markets. These organizations have come together to create a set of rules and definitions which enable software programs from different companies to share information. This set of platform-independent, vendor-neutral rules and definitions is called the SIF Implementation Specification. The SIF Specification makes it possible for programs within a school or district to share data without any additional programming and without requiring each vendor to learn and support the intricacies of other vendors’ applications.
The Implementation Specification defines the software implementation guidelines for SIF; it does not make any assumption of what hardware and software products need to be used to develop SIF-certified applications. Instead, it defines the requirements of architecture, communication, software components, and interfaces between them.
Continue reading ‘Schools Interoperability Framework (SIF) Overview’