98 posts tagged “atul abraham”

Microsoft will ship Windows 7 sometime in or near Jan. 2010, according to a letter company senior vice president Bill Veghte sent to Microsoft customers Tuesday.

The letter, sent to enterprise and business customers, will eventually be publicly posted on Microsoft's Web site.
In the letter sent to "Windows Customers" and titled "An Update on the Windows Roadmap," Veghte said "our plan is to deliver Windows 7 approximately three years after the January 2007 general availability launch date of Windows Vista."
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Veghte wrote, "You have told us you want a more regular, predictable Windows release schedule" and he said that was the impetus for setting the 2010 the ship date.

Vista has been slowly gaining steam, but is still drawing fire from critics who say it has not lived up to promises.
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Veghte went further in addressing customer concerns over application compatibility, which had been a problem shortly after Vista's release.

"You've also let us know you don't want to face the kinds of incompatibility challenges with the next version of Windows you might have experienced early with Windows Vista. As a result, our approach with Windows 7 is to build off the same core architecture as Windows Vista so the investments you and our partners have made in Windows Vista will continue to pay off with Windows 7. Our goal is to ensure the migration process from Windows Vista to Windows 7 is straightforward."

Veghte's discussion of Windows 7 was part of an effort to clarify the June 30 XP deadline that will see the operating system removed from retail shelves and OEM hardware, and to tout the virtues of Windows Vista. Veghte also thanked customers for their loyalty and support.

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Yahoo Ads: Partnership With Havas Digital; Video And Display On Walmart.com

New online service redefines customer relationship management with on-demand CRM that is fast, flexible, familiar and affordable.

Check it out, 'cause you're looking at what must be the world's smallest QWERTY device capable of running Windows Vista Home Premium SP1. At least it will be when it makes its debut in Japan come June. Measuring just 188 x 84 x 25.9mm and 470grams, all that power / battery conservation / smallness of the Willcom D4 (aka, Sharp-built WS016SH) comes courtesy of a 1.3-GHz Atom processor pumping away beneath that sliding / tilting 5-inch, 262k color, LED-backlit 1,024 x 600 touchscreen hiding a 64-key QWERTY keyboard. Inside you'll find 1GB of memory, a 1.8-inch 40GB disk, 2 megapixel camera, Bluetooth 2.0+EDR, microSD slot, HD audio codec with mono-speaker, and Opera browser riding atop Japanese PHS (W-SIM) or 802.11b/g WiFi. Hitting Japan for ¥128,600 (about $1,254) -- a lot less with 2 year contract. And with Willcom experimenting with Android, don't be surprised to find this released in an alternate form later in the year or early '09. Engadget Japanese is at the launch event with plenty of hands-on images in the gallery below.

Update: Whoa, weird. Our Japanese colleagues are telling us that there's an optional Bluetooth, companion handset for making calls over W-SIM. Gallery updated with new pics.

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Sridhar  April 9, 2008 06: 03 pm    

As cloud-computing matures, we can see the emergence of various layers of web services, operating at different levels of abstraction, serving different market needs. Take the category of web application creation/hosting, for example.

Consider the EC2 service from AWS: it provides what may be called “virtualized hardware” as a web service. The fundamental virtualized hardware unit is an industry standard x86 server (with specified CPU/RAM/Disk capacity), capable of hosting a Linux binary image. The Linux image can include any kind of program, written in any language available on Linux. The “any kind of program” part is important, as you will see shortly. This provides the most flexibility for a professional programmer, but if your program goes into an infinite loop and occupies 100% of its virtual CPU, AWS will simply let it burn up the CPU-hours - after all, there is no way for them, even in theory, to know if your infinite loop is intentionally coded or a bug.

The second type of service is what Google App Engine announced yesterday. It provides what may be called a “hosted middleware framework”, with the middleware stack having only Python language bindings today, with other language bindings to follow in future. Even when multiple languages are eventually supported, this type of service is quite different from Amazon EC2, because the middleware framework imposes specific constraints on the kind of program that can run on the service. Specifically, Google App Engine service is limited to running what may be called “provably halting programs” (or it will simply be forcibly halted the environment!) - short-running web applications that support the “page oriented computing” model - i.e service a HTTP request with a response and stop. Stand alone programs using multiple threads, such as a web crawler, are not supported. The flexibility lost by the developer comes with a huge benefit. Because of the constraints imposed by the middleware framework, Google can make much stronger guarantees of your application availability than Amazon can - Amazon can guarantee the availability of their virtual CPU, but cannot guarantee your application availability. The service abstraction of App Engine still needs a skilled programmer to create applications, but the effort required is less than what Amazon would need, with the trade-off of a more restrictive programming model.

Finally, Zoho Creator. This provides a service which lets users develop database driven web applications, with the service being accessible to regular users, as opposed to only trained programmers. It starts with a easy-to-use form/view builder interface, and then for more complicated logic, eases the user into the Deluge scripting environment. This scripting environment is intentionally kept very simple, so as to make the system accessible to a large number of users. Much like Google App Engine, Zoho Creator sits on a specific middleware stack, along with its constrained programming model, and its associated benefits/constraints for the application. But rather than exposing the middleware stack as an API only, Zoho Creator provides a higher level of abstraction through a development environment that is accessible to the casual non-programmer - so creating complex views, plugging in validation logic etc. are much simpler.  As an aside, I want to mention that, in principle, it would be possible to layer Zoho Creator on top of Google App Engine  on top of Amazon EC2.

I hope this post has demonstrated how the cloud-services market is increasingly becoming sophisticated with various kinds of tiered services serving different needs. Each type of service brings with it a different abstraction, a different programming model, and of course, its benefits and constraints.

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Posted Apr 2nd 2008 9:00PM by Brad Linder
Filed under: Internet, Utilities, Windows, Mozilla, Beta

Those folks at PortableApps are getting faster and faster. Just a few hours after Firefox 3 beta 5 was released, the portable version was available for download. Actually, it might have been available immediately, but we didn't think to look for it until a few hours had passed.

What exactly is a portable app? Well, in Windows, it basically means a version of an application that doesn't need to be installed to a particular folder, doesn't need to write entries to the Windows registry, and typically doesn't show up in the Add/Remove dialog. So you can install portable applications to a USB flash drive and take them with you to use on any computer.

But you can also install a portable application like Firefox 3 beta 5 portable edition to any folder on your hard drive. Why would you want to do that? Because then you can try out the latest test version of Firefox without overwriting any of your Firefox 2 settings. The down side is that Firefox portable edition will not import any of your Firefox 2 settings automatically. But you can use programs like the Firefox Environment Backup Extension to copy some of your settings.

Tags: firefox, firefox-3-beta-5, firefox-portable, portable-edition, portableapps

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