Media slowly becomes redundant
while network-based services take over

HE interesting item come from the Financial Times and discusses Microsoft’s wishful (and thus far unsuccessful) strategic move to providing on-line services, e.g. MSN and so-called Live Software.

For long-time Microsoft watchers, there was a strong sense of déjà vu about Bill Gates’s description this week of a new vision for the future of software.

The future, he declared, lay lies (I had to fix this typo that hurt my eyes) in delivering services over the internet, not selling shrink-wrapped CDs containing code that customers could load on their own machines…

[...]

But the internet’s impact on the software business continues to spread, and the idea of software-as-a-service is back in fashion in Microsoft’s Redmond HQ — this time under the new rubric of ‘Live Software’.

Microsoft’s CEO therefore admits that Microsoft’s weakest point is in fact where future IT is headed. Can the Internet become safe haven for the troubled and perplexed Windows code? Will Microsoft’s Singularity (a new O/S) become a reliable replacement/successor instead? It it all as realistic as edible manour?

RedHat Linux

previously mentioned the $100 laptop initiative and repeatedly referred to cheap computers in general. An article in the Wall Street Journal now claims that the $100 laptop is nearing reality. It will supposedly run Red Hat Linux on AMD processors.

A novel plan to develop a $100 laptop computer for distribution to millions of schoolchildren in developing countries has caught the interest of governments and the attention of computer-industry heavyweights.

Steve Jobs, Apple Computer Inc.’s chief executive, offered to provide free copies of the company’s operating system, OS X, for the machine, according to Seymour Papert, a professor emeritus at MIT who is one of the initiative’s founders. “We declined because it’s not open source,” says Dr. Papert, noting the designers want an operating system that can be tinkered with. An Apple spokesman declined to comment.

Older items on inexpensive hardware:

• How Cheap Can Computers Become?
• Cost-effective Computers
• Dirt-Cheap Computers
• Expensive Developers, Cheap Hardware

ODULARITY or compartmentalisation, at least in the context of programming, are important and fundamental concepts. They accommodate for easy extension or change of any piece of software. In the context of Web design, elements to be dealt with apart are layout and content, as the former virtually ‘wraps’ the latter.

Design for the Web and typesetting must be treated just like programming. Almost no exceptions. Why rule out WYSIWYG paradigms and interfaces? Because Abstraction is lossy. Since even bloated application can never faithfully read one’s mind, they result in mistaken outcomes which make assumptions that should not be made. The issues are also ambiguity-driven. Below lie a few examples:

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS): What is the motivation? The idea of maintaining one single file to rule them all — a magic wand to manipulation of files, which facilitates consistent change of layout in a variety of pages. Separate content from presentation is the core rationale. This accommodates for flexibility that is inherent in themes. Styles adhere to a given standardised mechanism/syntax, much like API‘s in the programmatic domain.

If you develop a software product, you can have someone else extend your code, add themes or utilise your services, e.g. Google Maps API, which are now trailed by Yahoo equivalents. Also worth noting are the number of Firefox and Thunderbird themes and extensions (plug-ins). WordPress provides a genrous number of plug-in ‘hooks’ as well, which encourages outside contribution. All extensions are attributed to good support to foreign involvement and modularity which separates the trunk of an application from its add-ons.

L^AT_EX: TeX styles are a similar scenario where consistent styling is easily achieved. Change can be applied to entire document where semantic structure has been embedded by the author. This, in fact, is why many books and eclectic conference proceedings are assembled using L^AT_EX.

Fortunately, more and more people begin the comprehend the value of this approach and the mantra which is not only inter-operability-motivated. It is also guided by the emerging importance of structural composition of documents, which must not differ. In the absence of serapate styles, many files need to be changed consistently, which can become a labour-intensive task. Such operatings are possible, e.g. using recursive search and replace, yet they should be considered nothing but a fallback option.

man was found to have cured himself of HIV, perhaps owing to his immune system. There appears to be no official confirmation, but doctors and researchers want the man for further tests. Understandably, the man declined the offers. The photo embedded in the BBC article rules out anonymity as a factor in his decision.

Doctors say they want to investigate the case of a British man with HIV who apparently became clear of the virus.

Andrew Stimpson, 25, was diagnosed HIV-positive in 2002 but was found to be negative in October 2003 by Chelsea and Westminster Healthcare NHS Trust.

This came just a couple of days after I had watched Constant Gardener, which is a strong and emotional film involving AIDS in Africa. The film can be rather cold and depressing, so it is most-suited for the faint-hearted. My negative reaction is amplified by the fact that I watched drama/comedy types at the cinema one week beforehand, namely Thumbsucker and Broken Flowers .

The new Dell XPS 600

ELL are trying to lure more customers using superficiality of looks. Dell have recently seen a sharp drop in earnings, particularly due to hardware repairs.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Dell Inc. is trying to spice up its image — and turn around lagging sales growth — by shaking Apple Computer Inc.’s hold on hipness, but it may be tough to match its smaller rival’s flair.

OR several years I have retained one spreadsheet on my Palm handheld. This was, in fact, a crude timesheet which was needed for work. Several months ago I decided to migrate everything to OpenOffice and access that spreadsheet using SSH from virtually any connected Linux box. This sounded reasonable at first, but frequent updates made this rather impractical and cumbersome.

Later on, I decided to export all data from OpenOffice as plain HTML tables and then repeatedly modify the HTML files on my Web server. This was rather time-consuming, so I sought alternatives which I knew existed.

I wound up using a Web-based spreadsheet application that is very light and retains all data as comma-separated values (thus no database needed). That powerful tool was Open Source, as always.

phpWebSheet has powerful and advanced (from a Web-based point-of-view) features such as tabular copy-and-paste, Wiki-styled formatting, and support for formulas/functions. In my perception, it is yet another winning application for PHP. There are many similar free applications at freshmeat.net, but I only investigated two which appeared better-suited for the purpose and rather mature too.

Spreadsheets are of course password-protected, but can still be accessed rapidly from everywhere at any time. All in all, the transition was a rewarding one. I sometimes wonder if I should have just stuck to the Palm PDA rather than make a progressive 3-step transition (as outlined above).

Spreadsheets have been on my Palm for years, virtually seconds away at pocket’s distance. Nonetheless, Being a Web technologies fanatic, I am always enthusiastic about ‘Webward’ transitions. On that same batch of installations, I set up phpshell which enables me to obtain shell access to my shared Web server. I can even see what the administrators are up to. This does not require a cron job hack as I once described.

Access to so many free packages (roughly a dozen of them on my domain already) is why I love Linux and the GNU ideaology.

I stumbled upon free OpenOffice training videos in a variety of news sources this morning. Although the videos demonstrate the recently-released OpenOffice 2 in a Windows environment, these are just as relevant to Linux users.

As a public service for Commonwealth of Massachusetts employees (and everyone else), NewsForge is presenting — absolutely free of charge — 11 OpenOffice.org training videos as part of this article.