O'Reilly News & Commentary

Four short links: 9 November 2009 - Moth Mind Readers, Shiny UI Futures, Usable Newspapers, Hardware Testing

By Nat Torkington
November 9, 2009

New Microsoft Interface Technology -- videos from Craig Mundie (Chief Research and Strategy Officer) on the MS Campus Tour talking about the future of UI using a sexy glass prototype that features tablet PC, gesture, speech recognition, and even eye tracking. Lustable. This and more in today's Four Short Links.

Why Google and Bing's Twitter Announcement is Big News - Tweets will finally become first class web citizens

By James Turner
October 21, 2009

Lurking innocently on Google's blog this afternoon, like many of their big announcements, was the bombshell that they have reached an agreement with Twitter to make all tweets searchable. This followed an earlier announcement at the Web 2.0 conference by Microsoft that Bing has also arranged to make tweets searchable.

Windows 7 is Here! - Win free Ebooks.

By Laurel Ackerman
October 21, 2009

Windows 7 becomes widely available today, and O'Reilly has 2 new books to help you make the most of it.

Random Hacks of Kindness: Disaster Relief Codejam

By Brady Forrest
October 16, 2009

Random Hacks of Kindness is an initiative that brings together disaster relief experts and software engineers to work on identifying key challenges to disaster relief, and developing solutions to these critical issues. Google, Microsoft, Yahoo! and the World Bank are getting together to support disaster relief projects. The first Codejam will be Nov 12-14 i the Bay Area.

Four short links: 12 October 2009 - DSL for NLP Task, Insider Tradespotting, Outsource Fail, Cloud Fail

By Nat Torkington
October 12, 2009

Insider Trades -- A Yahoo! Hack Day app by a Canadian law student that turned out to be worth continuing. Scans SEC systems every 30 seconds and alerts you if the stock you track has been traded by an insider. This and more in today's Four Short Links.

Microsoft Press Enters Strategic Alliance with O'Reilly

By Tim O'Reilly
September 24, 2009

Today, Microsoft and O'Reilly Media announced an agreement to support and expand Microsoft Press. Under the terms of the strategic alliance, O'Reilly will be the exclusive distributor of Microsoft Press titles and co-publisher of all Microsoft Press titles, on Nov. 30, 2009. We'll be working with Microsoft to develop new books, as well as distributing both existing and new co-published books to bookstores, and, perhaps most importantly, to the emerging digital book channels that represent the future of book publishing.

Why is HTML Suddenly Interesting?

By Simon St. Laurent
August 27, 2009

After a decade of quiet, HTML is a hot topic once again. While there is pent-up demand for new features, the conversation reflects a more basic change in the Web's landscape.

Who's Winning the Smartphone Wars?

By Raven Zachary
August 25, 2009

The short answer - Microsoft and Nokia are slipping, RIM and Apple are gaining. It's too early to tell with Google. This shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. Last week, UK-based analyst firm Canalys, released its findings on smartphone market share based on Q2 2009 unit shipments (see "Smart phones defy slowdown"). Before sharing Canalys' findings, it's important to understand how an evaluation of market share and profits relate to the players involved.

Upcoming Webcasts: Git in One Hour - Meet Experts Online

By O'Reilly Media
August 14, 2009

In this webcast, Git evangelist Scott Chacon covers the basics of the Git source control system. He'll introduce the audience to Git basics: staging and committing snapshots, viewing the commit log, pushing to and pulling from servers, and creating, switching between, and merging branches. Finally, he'll quickly cover a few more advanced features - code annotation, advanced log options and possibly more, time permitting. Attendance is limited for this August 13th event, so register now! More Upcoming Webcasts - Meet Experts Online: Energy Literacy Entity Framework Tips & Tricks Nuclear Energy: Future Directions Check out our Webcast page for on-demand videos of past webcasts and more upcoming live events!

Upcoming Webcasts: 5 Ways to Enhance SharePoint Site Usability - Meet Experts Online

By O'Reilly Media
August 5, 2009

SharePoint is unlike existing technologies users are familiar with. In certain cases, out of the box SharePoint site interface and layout is not as intuitive to the greater user community. In this interactive presentation by Dux Raymond Sy, you will acquire the practical knowledge of improving SharePoint usability to increase user adoption in leveraging SharePoint for collaboration. Attendance is limited for this August 13th event, so register now! More Upcoming Webcasts - Meet Experts Online: Git in an Hour Check out our Webcast page for on-demand videos of past webcasts and more upcoming live events!

Velocity Preview - The Greatest Good for the Greatest Number at Microsoft

By James Turner
May 18, 2009

The psychology of engineering user experiences on the web can be difficult. How much rich content can you place up on a page before the load time drives away your visitors? Get the answer wrong, and you can end up with a ghost town; get it right and you're a star. Eric Schurman knows this well, since he is responsible for just those kind of trade-off decisions on some of Microsoft's highest traffic pages. He'll be speaking at O'Reilly's Velocity Conference in June, and he recently talked with us about how Microsoft tests different user experiences on small groups of visitors.

Dreaming of Rails as the Next Microsoft Access

By Simon St. Laurent
May 5, 2009

Rails? Microsoft Access? Aren't those from different planets? Well, they may have different origins, but their similarities give me hope.

The Varieties of Openness Worth Wanting in the Cloud

By George Reese
March 27, 2009

All of the vendors in the cloud space have paid lip service to the idea of Openness in the cloud; and most everyone believes that being "Open" is a "good thing". In an environment in which few people agree on the specifics of defining the term "cloud computing", what exactly does it mean to have an Open Cloud?

Silverlight Development for the Flex Developer

By Tom Lauck
March 26, 2009

The jets and sharks, Hatfields and McCoys, Philadelphia Eagles and New York Giants, Adobe and Microsoft. Now several years in the making, the Adobe - Microsoft rivalry is gearing up. Especially with the anticipated new release of Silverlight 3 and Flex 4. As any seasoned Flex veteran will tell you, Adobe is the defacto standard for Rich Internet Applications. When asked about interest in Silverlight, the response may vary, but usually ends in “I haven’t actually spent a lot of time [or tried] it.” A product of Microsoft, Silverlight is. But as professionals in the RIA industry it is a good thing to be open minded. After all, as hard as it is to admit, Flash isn’t always the best tool for the job.

O'Reilly Week in Review for March 16th, 2009

By James Turner
March 19, 2009

This week's roundup include discussion of the Sun/IBM rumors, the future of newspapers, Microsoft and Science Commons teaming up, and the weekly podcast quiz....

Microsoft and Science Commons Team Up To Add Semantic Content to Online Science

By James Turner
March 11, 2009

John Wilbanks, VP of Science for Creative Commons, gave O'Reilly Media an exclusive sneak preview of a joint announcement that they will be making with Microsoft later today at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. According to John, who talked to us shortly after getting off a plane from Brazil, Microsoft will be releasing, under an open source license, Word plugins that will allow scientists to mark up their papers with scientific entities directly.

Kodu: Visual Programming on the Xbox with P2P Level-sharing

By Brady Forrest
February 25, 2009

How do you make programming fun? How do you make it fun enough for kids to want to spend hours learning how to make loops and if/then statements? Simple you give them simple visual commands that let them control robots on the Xbox -- or at least this is the thesis of Microsoft Research's Kodu. Kodu (formerly Boku) made a splash at Techfest two years ago and gave a demo at Ignite Seattle. Since that time the levels and characters have gotten much sexier and the controls simpler, but more powerful.

O'Reilly Week in Review for February 16th, 2009

By James Turner
February 17, 2009

This week's podcast includes a roundtable discussion by the editors of Microsoft's new retail initiative, excerpts of an interview with Andrew "bunnie" Huang about product design in China, as well as the weekly podquiz, your chance to score a free O'Reilly Book.

Microsoft's Cloud Tax

By George Reese
December 25, 2008

The importance of the differences among web application platforms like .NET, JSP, PHP, etc. drops dramatically under the cloud computing paradigm. Which architecture you choose really comes down to one question: what kind of programming and support resources do you have? If the answer is "Microsoft technologies", however, you should be aware of the Microsoft cloud tax.

Why Microsoft's free AV won't matter

By John Viega
November 20, 2008

Microsoft spent the money, and in relatively short order had a product that was just as good as any of their competitors (not significantly better or revolutionary, just competitive). They built a large team. They spent a lot on marketing. But the people never came. What went wrong?

Daddy, Where's Your Phone?

By Tim O'Reilly
November 17, 2008

I met recently with Vic Gundotra, formerly Microsoft's head of platform evangelism, and now VP of Engineering at Google, responsible for all their mobile efforts outside of Android. We were talking about Google's mobile strategy and the insanely cool new voice-activated Google search in the Google Mobile Application for iPhone. But what I really want to share is Vic's story...

Why Jerry Seinfeld Probably Cost Microsoft a Lot More than $10 Million

By Nitesh Dhanjani
November 10, 2008

In this article, I want put forth a case study to demonstrate how capturing feelings on the social web can allow companies to measure the reputation of their brand.

Fake real-time blog from Document Interoperability Initiative 2 at Redmond

By Rick Jelliffe
October 29, 2008

Can Microsoft's idea of "document archetypes" and "interoperable templates" be ramped up to provide a fresh new approach to both better document interoperability and better descriptive markup?

Ballmer Says MS Will Release a New Version of Windows for the Cloud this Fall

By John Osborn
October 2, 2008

On Tuesday, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer reportedly gas said that the Company will release a new version of its Windows operating system as part of a new cloud computing platform in a matter of weeks. Call it "Windows Cloud" for now, but how seriously should we take his words?

Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server Coming to EC2 this Fall

By John Osborn
October 1, 2008

Late yesterday, Amazon announced that coming this fall, developers will be able to run Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server instances on its EC2 cloud services. The implications are many, especially given the anticipated rollout of Microsoft's own cloud computing...

The Ever-Dynamic John Lam on Iron Ruby, Open Source and Microsoft

By James Turner
September 29, 2008

John Lam, who heads the Iron Ruby effort at Microsoft, stopped by to tell O'Reilly News all the exciting work going on with dynamic languages at Redmond. John spent some time discussing what makes a language dynamic, what the benefits of dynamic languages are, and how Microsoft is trying to leverage the power of lanaguages such as Ruby inside their CLR framework.

Is Adobe Still Sleeping Well?

By Mike Hendrickson
September 29, 2008

Last May, Tim O'Reilly posted a piece on whether or not Adobe was worried about the new threat to their dominance in the RIA space by the introduction of Silverlight from Microsoft. In a nutshell, the answer was no. From a book sales perspective, that was true and remains true today. But there is more to that answer than what...

Microsoft Research offers a sampling in Cambridge, Massachusetts

By Andy Oram
September 23, 2008

The opening of Microsoft Research's latest facility was celebrated today with a free one-day symposium here in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I think the symposium succeeded in its goals of showing that the research facility is an independent entity that plays by the rules of open scientific debate and funds basic research of value to society.

David Chappell's Taxonomy of Cloud Platforms and Microsoft

By John Osborn
August 22, 2008

Microsoft's response to the emerging cloud computing platforms of Amazon, Google, and Yahoo has been spotty to say the least. Now a new white paper from distributed computing maven David Chappell proposes a taxonomy for classifying what's available today and offers a map of where Microsoft may be headed.

Harmony comes to JavaScript, but Not Everyone's Singing

By Kurt Cagle
August 19, 2008

A long and contentious struggle came to an end this week as ECMA Technical Committee 39, responsible for the development and maintenance of ECMAScript (known universally everywhere else as JavaScript), voted to establish ECMAScript 3.1 as the next "trunk" branch for the venerable web browser language, rather than the more ambitious (and contentious ECMAScript 4.0). While the breaking of the deadlock is a momentous achievement, not everyone is happy with it.

Microsoft Became an Apache Sponsor and is Contibuting a Patch to ADOdb

By Todd Ogasawara
July 26, 2008

Two big Microsoft/Open Source announcements today: 1. Microsoft has become a sponsor of the Apache Foundation. 2. They are contributing an ADOdb patch for a native driver for PHP built by the SQL Server team.

Todd Ogasawara on Microsoft Competing with F/OSS

By chromatic
June 25, 2008

On Port 25, Todd Ogasawara asks Does Microsoft Really Need to "Compete" With Open Source? According to Ray Ozzie, the competition has led directly to interoperability concerns -- and interoperability means cooperation, at least once you reach the point of...

Does Microsoft Really Need to "Compete" With Open Source?

By Todd Ogasawara
June 25, 2008

A few weeks ago Microsoft's Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie said Open source a more disruptive competitor than Google. But, he also said that competing with FOSS has made them stronger company. But, does it really need to be a "competition"?

GooHoo Makes Microsoft Go Boohoo

By Kurt Cagle
June 18, 2008

While the advertising deal between Google and Yahoo! does not announce a formal "merger" of the two companies, it nonetheless signals a profound shift in the online search world, and certainly increases the likelihood that the two companies will begin a more active partnership across a broad front of activities, to the significant detriment of the company that needed a partnership most desperately with Yahoo! ... Microsoft.

1 to 34 of 34