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BetaNews.Com (5 non lus)

Microsoft releases Office for Mac SP2, offers free trial of full package

Publié: juillet 20, 2009, 11:45pm CEST par Angela Gunn

By Angela Gunn, Betanews

Fourteen months after the previous service pack (and six months after giving the world a peek at Macworld), Microsoft on Monday rolled out Office 2008 for Mac SP2. There's still no sign of the promised Entourage upgrade to Exchange Web Services (EWS), but fans of Office Live Workspace and SharePoint ought to be pleased.
Document Connection, which improves users' ability to work with documents on both of those collaboration platforms, is perhaps the biggest addition in SP2. It engendered not only a major effort to bring Microsoft's current vision of Web-based collaboration into the Mac world, but a push to get Office right with Safari 4. Those improvements are also part of SP2.
PowerPoint users made progress on issues both arcane (users can now author custom path animations) and mundane (at last, one can choose one's own default theme rather than dodging around Office's each time). The annoying PowerPoint 2008 default behavior of mirroring displays when the user jumped from Slide Show to another application can be shut off now. And -- at last -- one can double-click anywhere on a slide and simply add text.
Microsoft also claims some nice performance improvements in this edition. Writing for Mac Mojo, the Office for Mac team blog, Blair Neumann said Monday, "We took a bite out of start up and scroll speed in Word -- for example in Word's Outline View scrolling is now up to 10 times faster! We also improved calculation performance in Excel with an increased speed of up to 24%."
For Mac users not currently running Office but willing to try, Microsoft also has a 30-day trial offer going. The download is free, though users of narrower bandwidths should be advised that it's a 600 MB file.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
Qwest begins rollout of its faster VDSL2 networks

Publié: juillet 20, 2009, 11:21pm CEST par Tim Conneally

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Major US telecommunications company Qwest Communications today launched its highest speed DSL Internet service, based on the VDSL2 standard and promising maximum downstream speeds up to 40 Mbps and upstream speeds of 20 Mbps.
The service is available today in Denver, Tucson, Salt Lake City, and The Twin Cities, and the company says it will continue to roll out the VDSL2 technology in 23 more markets in such states as New Mexico, Oregon, and Washington.
Qwest's new service packages are offered to customers with a qualifying home phone line and cost $99 a month for 40 Mbps/5 Mbps, and $109.99 for 40 Mbps/20 Mbps. Customers who already have a 7, 12, or 20 Mbps connection can upgrade to the lower tier for five additional dollars a month.
VDSL2 is the newest of the DSL standards, and was approved by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) almost four years ago. At the time of its approval the group said, "VDSL2 is seen by many operators as the ideal accompaniment to a fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) rollout, where fiber optic lines are used to link large premises like office or apartment blocks to the PSTN, and ordinary copper cables used within the building to connect tenants or residents to high-speed services."
It lets operators offer triple-play services such as HDTV over IP and VoIP over the existing copper plant. While it is a relatively inexpensive upgrade for the provider, they still must build a distributed network with smaller nodes that sit typically less than 2000 meters away from end users. This is because VDSL2 degrades quickly as it moves away from the fiber pipeline. Someone close to the source could have a much higher theoretical speed than someone 5,000 feet away. Swedish Telecommunications company Ericsson notes that one of the most important aspect of VDSL2 is that it uses Ethernet as multiplexing technology in the first mile, eliminating ATM in the first mile and simplifying the access architecture into an end-to-end Ethernet access architecture that uses virtual local area networks (VLAN) as the service-delivery mechanism across the entire access network.
The standard is DSL's response to Cable's DOCSIS 3.0, though it is considered much cheaper to deploy and generally slower. Qwest and AT&T are the only two major telecommunications companies to align with it, but AT&T has delayed its VDSL2 trials since 2007. Time Warner, Comcast, and Cox all have planned DOCSIS 3.0 deployments.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
Could Popfly's pop out be game over for Microsoft?

Publié: juillet 20, 2009, 10:35pm CEST par Joe Wilcox
By Joe Wilcox, Betanews

There's a strange foreshadowing in Microsoft naming its social mashup service Popfly. In baseball, pop fly is a ball hit straight up that comes straight down, usually into the catcher's mitt and to an out. Popfly is out, with Microsoft's decision to close down the service on August 24th.
I'm really bugged about the shutdown, because of what it represents:
- The Bill Gates era really is over. In the year since the cofounder's full-time departure, Microsoft has shuttered many of its best incubation projects or consumer products.
- The closure is yet another sign that Microsoft doesn't really get social media, in part by taking design approaches too closely tied to its stuff and not extensible enough to other Web services.
- Microsoft is more aggressively trying to protect and to extend its existing Office-Windows-Windows Server applications stack. There is ever increased emphasis on enterprise computing.
I believe that in 2009 Microsoft has turned a direction that is scarier than movie "Quarantine." Without a course correction, Microsoft in the 2010s will be very much like IBM was in the 1990s.
It's a Top-Down Problem
I like Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. He's a heart-on-the-sleeve kind of guy who speaks his mind whenever the PR minions don't interfere. But Steve Ballmer's strength also is his weakness. As I explained last week, the chief executive is too focused on giving customers what they want instead of innovating what they need. Everything about his leadership -- and how Microsoft now develops products -- is about preserving the status quo, whether the company's existing products or enterprises' entrenched business processes.
By comparison, Bill Gates is more visionary. He may talk and walk like a geek, but he's prescient. For example, he rightly recognized, if somewhat belatedly, what the Web would mean for Microsoft, which he aptly expressed in the May 1995 "Internet Tidal Wave" letter.
Bill Gates' post-2000 impact on Microsoft really started manifesting about four years ago, after the company brought on Ray Ozzie with the acquisition of Groove Networks. Perhaps the two men are like minds about software development. After all, they shared the chief software architect title. The number of incubation projects (run by guerrilla groups acting more like internal startups) soared since early 2006.
But after summer 2008, when Microsoft's cofounder shifted primary focus to philanthropy, incubation projects started a priority decline. Since the September 2008 US financial meltdown, Microsoft has had two rounds of layoffs, pulled popular consumer software titles or services and curbed or closed most incubation projects.
In June, TechFlash's Todd Bishop chronicled the demise of many consumer products, including the Encarta encyclopedia and Microsoft Money. But the incubation groups, like Live Labs, or services, like Popfly, are more indicative of a directional shift. It's a direction I don't like seeing Microsoft go.
Microsoft's Short, Golden Age of Incubation
What a difference two years makes. In October 2007, over at Microsoft Watch, I blogged about Microsoft's state of reinvention. The company had numerous guerilla groups working on many cool and exciting incubation projects. Some of the most notable -- for example, Photosynth and Worldwide Telescope -- have brought accolades and new partnerships, with NASA being among them.
Microsoft is a middle-aging company, in an industry dominated by young upstarts. Many younger managers -- that's in Microsoft years, not necessarily physical age -- brought new ideas with these incubation projects. Younger managers and outsiders had been turning some Microsoft product groups into networks of loose startups.
I first perceived that Microsoft had entered incubation pullback mode, after the near closure of Live Labs in April 2009. Gary Flake, who founded Live Labs, describes its incubation approach in the Live Labs Manifesto: "We will deliberately not do many things that are already well-established within Microsoft. Instead we will seek to connect complementary efforts or to fill existing voids, so as to maximize impact for effort."
It's this kind of approach that could shake Microsoft's dependence on Office and Windows and open up new revenue streams along the emerging mobile device and Web applications stack.
But Bill Gates is no longer there to protect incubation project managers. Steve Ballmer has different priorities, as evidenced by recent Microsoft cutbacks and closures. Microsoft is now in state of retreat, as it grapples with the econolypse. Recent cutbacks and internal refocusing point to Microsoft making its core business market the top investment priority -- at the expense of anything else.
Retreat Before the Econolypse
On Thursday, the company will announce fiscal 2009 fourth quarter and yearly results. Wall Street consensus is for earnings per share to fall 21.7 percent year over year for the quarter and 9.1 percent for fiscal 2009. Microsoft's shortlist of problems:
- PC sales are down (although not as bad as analysts' forecasts three months ago).
- Most IT organizations have cut back technology spending.
- Most enterprises already have Microsoft software (e.g., reselling to them rather than generating new sales).
Microsoft's consumer product and incubation project cutbacks are Action A. Increased integration along the existing applications stack and refocused sales on enterprises is Action B. My contention: Microsoft is too focused on seeking to preserve existing revenue streams when creating newer ones should be a greater priority. Microsoft's self-preservation approach will compel its developers to bind new technologies to Office or Windows.
IBM followed a similar path in the 1980s, seeking to preserve its applications stack around the mainframe. While Big Blue released a PC, the company made protecting its legacy business priority. IBM and its mainframe business didn't go away, but its relevance diminished before a new applications stack. Microsoft faces similar challenge before the mobile-to-cloud applications stack.
Popfly is just the latest casualty of a status quo-preserving strategy that primes Microsoft to become the IBM of the 2010s -- unless there is a dramatic course correction.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
We won't get 'mooned' again, or, why space still matters

Publié: juillet 20, 2009, 10:32pm CEST par Carmi Levy

By Carmi Levy, Betanews

I'll fess up now and admit I'm a space head.
I always have been and, much to my wife's chagrin, probably always will be. I've been heading into my backyard over the last few nights to catch a glimpse of the combined International Space Station/Space Shuttle Endeavour complex as it flies overhead at five miles a second. There isn't a whole lot to see, frankly. Just a white dot that moves through the sky for a couple of minutes before winking out unceremoniously somewhere near my neighbor's maple tree. The kids occasionally come along, if only to make sure I don't get lost in the thorny bushes in the corner of our yard.
All of which begs a number of questions: Why do I stare at a fast-moving dot in the sky while my puzzled neighbors look out their windows and wonder if I've lost it? Why does the thought of humans circling the planet in the world's most expensive vehicle jazz me so? What does any of this have to do with my regular existence as a technology analyst and journalist? Why is this relevant to you, my readers?
First off, I enjoy making people wonder about me. It's like sport without the risk of injury. Second, what they do up there inspires me to raise the level of my game down here. Third, space travel -- and leadership in this sector -- has everything to do with American technological leadership. By extension, that leadership sets the tone for innovation in the broader technology sector -- for regular folks like us. Lose sight of the big orbital picture and we may as well hand over our position as a world leader in tech to another country -- Russia, China, India, take your pick -- that wants it more than we do. Would an iPhone be just as sweet if a company halfway around the world built it before Apple did? Would a Chinese-owned search powerhouse be in our best interest? If we fail to stick to the space vision that made us a powerhouse a generation ago, we may yet find out.
Blind vision
And losing our vision is what we've been doing since the early 1970s, when President Nixon prematurely cancelled Apollo, gutted the follow-on shuttle program, and turned NASA from national hero to national has-been. The agency's been wandering through the woods ever since, and the longer it flails, the more likely it becomes that the next Microsoft, Google, or Apple won't be headquartered on US soil.
Although it may not be immediately obvious, there's a direct connection between our investments in space and our achievements as a leading technological nation. The space race in the 1960s not only challenged hundreds of thousands of space industry workers to push the limits of what was possible to beat the Soviet Union to the moon. It also inspired a generation of kids who would never so much as touch a rocket, let alone build one for NASA, to push their own limits in science and engineering. The space program was a halo for anyone who aspired to grow up and wear a pocket protector, who questioned the status quo and set out to make the impossible possible.
It's no wonder that the PC revolution, the commercialized Internet, broadband and wireless networking and countless other technological revolutions of our time hit critical mass in the wake of the US moon missions. That's because to a person, every Silicon Valley geek who slaved away in a garage building the Next Big Thing was probably a space geek at some point, too. Would the fires of innovation have been lit if they hadn't had a massive almost-40-storey rocket to inspire them? Doubtful.
As I write this, two of my fellow Canadians are among 13 astronauts -- the largest group ever -- on board the ISS. It's a veritable United Nations of spacefarers up there with American, Russian, Canadian, Japanese, and German representation. What they've learned in keeping a 330-ton multi-noded vehicle fully functional as it flies through space at 17,500 miles per hour is rewriting the book on how teams can successfully cross political, cultural and language barriers to accomplish common goals. The ISS is helping establish new benchmarks in project management as well as the obvious science and engineering -- all lessons that government-funded NASA is only too happy to share with the world at-large.
Spacely starvation
Yet as the shuttle program winds down to its 2010 retirement and the follow-on Constellation hardware remains mired in bureaucratic gridlock and budgetary starvation, the US will once again find itself unable to launch its own astronauts into space. As it currently stands, the gap will be five years. But increasingly, it looks like it could only widen, which makes original plans to return to the moon by 2020 look laughable indeed. Forty years after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to set foot on another orbital body, we live in a world where politicians dicker over budgets for NASA, debating for months over dollar figures that would barely cover a week's worth of military operations in Iraq. We cancel or scale back missions to other planets -- savings, perhaps, hundreds of millions of dollars -- while signing trillion dollar checks for golden parachute-protected financial sector leaders who wilfully ran their companies into the ground.
While this travesty of national priorities continues to play out and American's space interests starve, competing nations like China are pedal-to-the-metal on their own plans to accelerate their space programs. And as they inspire their own generations of tomorrow to pursue their technological dreams, American industry, lacking the celebrity of a globally leading space program, will continue to wrestle with falling numbers of science and engineering grads and an inability to fuel tomorrow's tech business growth.
Forty years ago, we won the moon. That we failed to capitalize on what could have been will reverberate through the technology industry for well over another 40 years. Whether we're even globally relevant by then depends on whether we're willing to finally get serious about turning past investments in space exploration into sustainable business opportunities for tomorrow.
Carmi Levy is a Canadian-based independent technology analyst and journalist still trying to live down his past life leading help desks and managing projects for large financial services organizations. He comments extensively in a wide range of media, and works closely with clients to help them leverage technology and social media tools and processes to drive their business.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
RIAA spokesperson denies proclaiming DRM 'dead'

Publié: juillet 20, 2009, 9:37pm CEST par Scott M. Fulton, III

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

The principal spokesperson for the Recording Industry Association of America -- whose name, for all who are interested, is correctly spelled Jonathan Lamy, not "Larry" -- denied telling an SC Magazine reporter, even off the cuff, that "DRM is dead," calling it a "blatantly inaccurate quote."
Lamy provided Betanews with an excerpt of his actual e-mail with the reporter, Deb Radcliff. As part of a discussion about consumers' continued willingness to bypass digital rights management schemes for digital music, for a story Radcliff was writing for SC, Lamy said, "There is virtually no DRM on music anymore, at least on download services, including iTunes." He went on to state that MP3s today tend to be sold without any DRM included anyway, with the interest of consumers being able to play tracks on any device.
But that's in the music business, which he represents. It's TV networks and movie studios that continue to use DRM for videos that are distributed through services including iTunes -- so for them, DRM is not dead.
According to Lamy, Radcliff sent a protest e-mail to Ernesto, the TorrentFreak writer who originated the misquote, demanding a retraction. "When the most vocal forefighters of DRM say so, it must be for real," Ernesto wrote yesterday.
Naturally, the misquote was repeated by multiple sources this afternoon, none of whom sought Lamy's verification.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009