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Gary Edwards

Is productivity in the workplace possible with Surface 2 or iPad? | ZDNet - 0 views

www.zdnet.com/h-surface-2-or-ipad-7000022220

Cloud-Computing Cloud-Productivity-Platform mobile-computing business-productivity

shared by Gary Edwards on 22 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 22 Oct 13
     
    Not surprisingly, Microsoft is going to pound on "productivity" as the key differential between their desktop-cloud-mobile computing products, and those of mobile-productivity platform challengers, Apple and Google. There are three platform contenders, and this article points out that it is Google Apps that is keeping Apple in the business productivity game. Very interesting insight. Especially since a recent Forrester Report has the Apple platform capturing 65% of all mobile business application development. And Microsoft with only 1%. Google weighs in with 13%. This is a stunning setback for Microsoft. The MS monopolist empire is built on business productivity, with 98% of clinet/server marketshare. excerpt: "Over time, Microsoft has tried to tilt the marketing message to position Surface as a "productivity tablet". Now that Surface 2 is out, the "productivity tablet" message is coming across loud and clear. But can what people use tablets at work for actually be described as "productive"? Surface might be new, but the idea of using tablets in business is not. Although Microsoft would like us to believe that a tablet that doesn't run Office and doesn't have a good solution for a keyboard can't be used in business, the iPad has been used in business since its release in April 2010. Mobile device management (MDM) allows enterprises to control which apps are available on both on BYOD and enterprise-supplied tablets. Some MDM vendors publish reports and surveys on what their customers' allow and disallow. This information can provide some insight into what apps people are typically using. Back in June, my ZDNet colleague Adrian Kingsley-Hughes reported on a report put out by one such vendor. Fiberlink gave this list of iOS apps that are commonly whitelisted: iBooks Adobe Reader Google Citrix Receiver Numbers Dropbox Pages iTunes U Keynote WebEx Along with those apps, you also need to add that apps that come with the device - namely web browsing, email,
Gary Edwards

Official Google Blog: New ways to experience better collaboration with Google Apps - 0 views

googleblog.blogspot.com/...ways-to-experience-better.html

Google-Cloud-Connect MSOffice cloud-computing cloud-DMS

shared by Gary Edwards on 24 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 24 Feb 11
     
    If this doesn't make Florian weep, nothing can! Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office is now available worldwide. This plugin for Microsoft Office is available to anyone with a Google Account, and brings multi-person collaboration to the Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint applications that you may still need from time to time. The plugin syncs your work through Google's cloud, so everyone can contribute to the same version of a file at the same time. Learning the benefits of web-powered collaboration will help more people make a faster transition to 100% web collaboration tools.
Gary Edwards

Father of CSS plans for Web publishing future | Deep Tech - CNET News - 1 views

news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20019705-264.html

CSS3 layout

shared by Gary Edwards on 15 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • "You paint a layout with ASCII art," a sort of visual design made out of text directly in the CSS code, Lie said, "then fill content into that. It's an experimental specification, but one I think has that compactness and terseness and minimalism that's part of CSS but still allows you to do quite advanced layouts."
    • Gary Edwards
      Gary Edwards on 15 Oct 10
       
      What???  Why not use SVG!
  • Gary Edwards on 15 Oct 10
     
    After years of relative obscurity, the Web formatting standard called CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets has come into its own, taking a starring role as the mechanism for building a new generation of interactive, elaborate Web pages. CSS is growing in new directions now, and the technology's original creator believes its next direction for improvement will be dealing with more complicated Web page layout chores. "There is important work left to be done for layout," Håkon Wium Lie, who is also Opera's chief technology officer, said in an interview here. The new CSS3 under development now can handle multi-column text arrangements, "but you couldn't replicate a printed newspaper in CSS."
Paul Merrell

Microsoft launches Office Web Apps preview - 0 views

www.computerworld.com/...unches_Office_Web_Apps_preview

Microsoft cloud web apps

shared by Paul Merrell on 18 Sep 09 - No Cached
  • Microsoft today launched a limited beta test of its Office Web Apps, the company's first public unveiling of its rival for Google's Web applications. Dubbed a "technical preview" by Microsoft to denote that it's by invitation only, Office Web Apps will be available on the company's Windows Live site via a special "Documents" tab, a company spokeswoman said. "Tens of thousands have been invited to participate in the Technical Preview," said the spokeswoman in a reply to questions.
Gary Edwards

Gray Matter : Open XML and the SharePoint Conference - 0 views

blogs.technet.com/...the-sharepoint-conference.aspx

Open-Web MSOffice ge

shared by Gary Edwards on 17 Oct 09 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 17 Oct 09
     
    excerpt: The trend in Office development is the migration of solutions away from in-application scripted processing toward more data-centric development. Of course this is a primary purpose of Open XML, and it is great to see the amount of activity in this area. We've seen customers scripting Word in a server environment to batch process / print documents or for other automation tasks. In reality Word isn't built to do that on a large scale, it is better to work directly against the document rather than via the application whenever possible. The Open XML SDK unlocks a "whole nuther" environment for document processing, and gets you out of the business of scripting client apps on servers to do the work of a true server application (not to mention the licensing problems created by installing Office on a server). comment:  Gray makes a very important point here.  The dominance of the desktop based MSOffice Productivity Environment was largely based the embedded logic driving "in-process" documents that was application and platform (Win32 API) specific.  Tear open any of these workgroup-workflow oriented compound documents and you find application specific scripts, macros, OLE, data bindings, security settings and other application specific settings.  These internal components are certain to break whenever these highly interactive and "live" compound documents are converted to another format, or application use.  This is how MSOffice documents and the business processes they represent become "bound" to the MSOffice Productivity Environment. What Gray is pointing to here is that Microsoft is moving the legacy Productivity Environment to an MSWeb based center where OpenXML, Silverlight, CAML, XAML and a number of other .NET-WPF technologies become the workgroup drivers.  The key applications for the MS WebStack are Exchange/SharePoint/SQL Server.  To make this move, documents had to be separated from the legacy desktop Productivity Environment settings. Note th
Paul Merrell

ExposeFacts - For Whistleblowers, Journalism and Democracy - 0 views

exposefacts.org

transparency whistle-blowers resources Wikileaks Tail

shared by Paul Merrell on 06 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • Launched by the Institute for Public Accuracy in June 2014, ExposeFacts.org represents a new approach for encouraging whistleblowers to disclose information that citizens need to make truly informed decisions in a democracy. From the outset, our message is clear: “Whistleblowers Welcome at ExposeFacts.org.” ExposeFacts aims to shed light on concealed activities that are relevant to human rights, corporate malfeasance, the environment, civil liberties and war. At a time when key provisions of the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments are under assault, we are standing up for a free press, privacy, transparency and due process as we seek to reveal official information—whether governmental or corporate—that the public has a right to know. While no software can provide an ironclad guarantee of confidentiality, ExposeFacts—assisted by the Freedom of the Press Foundation and its “SecureDrop” whistleblower submission system—is utilizing the latest technology on behalf of anonymity for anyone submitting materials via the ExposeFacts.org website. As journalists we are committed to the goal of protecting the identity of every source who wishes to remain anonymous.
  • The seasoned editorial board of ExposeFacts will be assessing all the submitted material and, when deemed appropriate, will arrange for journalistic release of information. In exercising its judgment, the editorial board is able to call on the expertise of the ExposeFacts advisory board, which includes more than 40 journalists, whistleblowers, former U.S. government officials and others with wide-ranging expertise. We are proud that Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg was the first person to become a member of the ExposeFacts advisory board. The icon below links to a SecureDrop implementation for ExposeFacts overseen by the Freedom of the Press Foundation and is only accessible using the Tor browser. As the Freedom of the Press Foundation notes, no one can guarantee 100 percent security, but this provides a “significantly more secure environment for sources to get information than exists through normal digital channels, but there are always risks.” ExposeFacts follows all guidelines as recommended by Freedom of the Press Foundation, and whistleblowers should too; the SecureDrop onion URL should only be accessed with the Tor browser — and, for added security, be running the Tails operating system. Whistleblowers should not log-in to SecureDrop from a home or office Internet connection, but rather from public wifi, preferably one you do not frequent. Whistleblowers should keep to a minimum interacting with whistleblowing-related websites unless they are using such secure software.
  • Paul Merrell on 06 Jun 14
     
    A new resource site for whistle-blowers. somewhat in the tradition of Wikileaks, but designed for encrypted communications between whistleblowers and journalists.  This one has an impressive board of advisors that includes several names I know and tend to trust, among them former whistle-blowers Daniel Ellsberg, Ray McGovern, Thomas Drake, William Binney, and Ann Wright. Leaked records can only be dropped from a web browser running the Tor anonymizer software and uses the SecureDrop system originally developed by Aaron Schwartz. They strongly recommend using the Tails secure operating system that can be installed to a thumb drive and leaves no tracks on the host machine. https://tails.boum.org/index.en.html Curious, I downloaded Tails and installed it to a virtual machine. It's a heavily customized version of Debian. It has a very nice Gnome desktop and blocks any attempt to connect to an external network by means other than installed software that demands encrypted communications. For example, web sites can only be viewed via the Tor anonymizing proxy network. It does take longer for web pages to load because they are moving over a chain of proxies, but even so it's faster than pages loaded in the dial-up modem days, even for web pages that are loaded with graphics, javascript, and other cruft. E.g., about 2 seconds for New York Times pages. All cookies are treated by default as session cookies so disappear when you close the page or the browser. I love my Linux Mint desktop, but I am thinking hard about switching that box to Tails. I've been looking for methods to send a lot more encrypted stuff down the pipe for NSA to store. Tails looks to make that not only easy, but unavoidable. From what I've gathered so far, if you want to install more software on Tails, it takes about an hour to create a customized version and then update your Tails installation from a new ISO file. Tails has a wonderful odor of having been designed for secure computing. Current
Gary Edwards

Forrester Reports on the Next Wave of Office Productivity - 0 views

www.cmswire.com/...office-productivity-008381.php

productivity office-productivity msoffice stats sursen

shared by Gary Edwards on 08 Sep 10 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 08 Sep 10
     
    According to a new Forrester report, though Microsoft Office continues to be a mainstay both in the enterprise and at home, developing concerns about productivity as they relate to mobile, cloud, and collaboration may bring a shift in enterprise behaviors.
Paul Merrell

Most Agencies Falling Short on Mandate for Online Records - 0 views

www2.gwu.edu/...NSAEBB505

eFOIA FOIA audit National-Security-Archives agency-compliance

shared by Paul Merrell on 14 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Nearly 20 years after Congress passed the Electronic Freedom of Information Act Amendments (E-FOIA), only 40 percent of agencies have followed the law's instruction for systematic posting of records released through FOIA in their electronic reading rooms, according to a new FOIA Audit released today by the National Security Archive at www.nsarchive.org to mark Sunshine Week. The Archive team audited all federal agencies with Chief FOIA Officers as well as agency components that handle more than 500 FOIA requests a year — 165 federal offices in all — and found only 67 with online libraries populated with significant numbers of released FOIA documents and regularly updated.
  • Congress called on agencies to embrace disclosure and the digital era nearly two decades ago, with the passage of the 1996 "E-FOIA" amendments. The law mandated that agencies post key sets of records online, provide citizens with detailed guidance on making FOIA requests, and use new information technology to post online proactively records of significant public interest, including those already processed in response to FOIA requests and "likely to become the subject of subsequent requests." Congress believed then, and openness advocates know now, that this kind of proactive disclosure, publishing online the results of FOIA requests as well as agency records that might be requested in the future, is the only tenable solution to FOIA backlogs and delays. Thus the National Security Archive chose to focus on the e-reading rooms of agencies in its latest audit. Even though the majority of federal agencies have not yet embraced proactive disclosure of their FOIA releases, the Archive E-FOIA Audit did find that some real "E-Stars" exist within the federal government, serving as examples to lagging agencies that technology can be harnessed to create state-of-the art FOIA platforms. Unfortunately, our audit also found "E-Delinquents" whose abysmal web performance recalls the teletype era.
  • E-Delinquents include the Office of Science and Technology Policy at the White House, which, despite being mandated to advise the President on technology policy, does not embrace 21st century practices by posting any frequently requested records online. Another E-Delinquent, the Drug Enforcement Administration, insults its website's viewers by claiming that it "does not maintain records appropriate for FOIA Library at this time."
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • "The presumption of openness requires the presumption of posting," said Archive director Tom Blanton. "For the new generation, if it's not online, it does not exist." The National Security Archive has conducted fourteen FOIA Audits since 2002. Modeled after the California Sunshine Survey and subsequent state "FOI Audits," the Archive's FOIA Audits use open-government laws to test whether or not agencies are obeying those same laws. Recommendations from previous Archive FOIA Audits have led directly to laws and executive orders which have: set explicit customer service guidelines, mandated FOIA backlog reduction, assigned individualized FOIA tracking numbers, forced agencies to report the average number of days needed to process requests, and revealed the (often embarrassing) ages of the oldest pending FOIA requests. The surveys include:
  • The federal government has made some progress moving into the digital era. The National Security Archive's last E-FOIA Audit in 2007, " File Not Found," reported that only one in five federal agencies had put online all of the specific requirements mentioned in the E-FOIA amendments, such as guidance on making requests, contact information, and processing regulations. The new E-FOIA Audit finds the number of agencies that have checked those boxes is now much higher — 100 out of 165 — though many (66 in 165) have posted just the bare minimum, especially when posting FOIA responses. An additional 33 agencies even now do not post these types of records at all, clearly thwarting the law's intent.
  • The FOIAonline Members (Department of Commerce, Environmental Protection Agency, Federal Labor Relations Authority, Merit Systems Protection Board, National Archives and Records Administration, Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, Department of the Navy, General Services Administration, Small Business Administration, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and Federal Communications Commission) won their "E-Star" by making past requests and releases searchable via FOIAonline. FOIAonline also allows users to submit their FOIA requests digitally.
  • Disabilities Compliance. Despite the E-FOIA Act, many government agencies do not embrace the idea of posting their FOIA responses online. The most common reason agencies give is that it is difficult to post documents in a format that complies with the Americans with Disabilities Act, also referred to as being "508 compliant," and the 1998 Amendments to the Rehabilitation Act that require federal agencies "to make their electronic and information technology (EIT) accessible to people with disabilities." E-Star agencies, however, have proven that 508 compliance is no barrier when the agency has a will to post. All documents posted on FOIAonline are 508 compliant, as are the documents posted by the Department of Defense and the Department of State. In fact, every document created electronically by the US government after 1998 should already be 508 compliant. Even old paper records that are scanned to be processed through FOIA can be made 508 compliant with just a few clicks in Adobe Acrobat, according to this Department of Homeland Security guide (essentially OCRing the text, and including information about where non-textual fields appear). Even if agencies are insistent it is too difficult to OCR older documents that were scanned from paper, they cannot use that excuse with digital records.
  • Key Findings
  • Excuses Agencies Give for Poor E-Performance
  • Justice Department guidance undermines the statute. Currently, the FOIA stipulates that documents "likely to become the subject of subsequent requests" must be posted by agencies somewhere in their electronic reading rooms. The Department of Justice's Office of Information Policy defines these records as "frequently requested records… or those which have been released three or more times to FOIA requesters." Of course, it is time-consuming for agencies to develop a system that keeps track of how often a record has been released, which is in part why agencies rarely do so and are often in breach of the law. Troublingly, both the current House and Senate FOIA bills include language that codifies the instructions from the Department of Justice. The National Security Archive believes the addition of this "three or more times" language actually harms the intent of the Freedom of Information Act as it will give agencies an easy excuse ("not requested three times yet!") not to proactively post documents that agency FOIA offices have already spent time, money, and energy processing. We have formally suggested alternate language requiring that agencies generally post "all records, regardless of form or format that have been released in response to a FOIA request."
  • THE E-DELINQUENTS: WORST OVERALL AGENCIES In alphabetical order
  • Privacy. Another commonly articulated concern about posting FOIA releases online is that doing so could inadvertently disclose private information from "first person" FOIA requests. This is a valid concern, and this subset of FOIA requests should not be posted online. (The Justice Department identified "first party" requester rights in 1989. Essentially agencies cannot use the b(6) privacy exemption to redact information if a person requests it for him or herself. An example of a "first person" FOIA would be a person's request for his own immigration file.) Cost and Waste of Resources. There is also a belief that there is little public interest in the majority of FOIA requests processed, and hence it is a waste of resources to post them. This thinking runs counter to the governing principle of the Freedom of Information Act: that government information belongs to US citizens, not US agencies. As such, the reason that a person requests information is immaterial as the agency processes the request; the "interest factor" of a document should also be immaterial when an agency is required to post it online. Some think that posting FOIA releases online is not cost effective. In fact, the opposite is true. It's not cost effective to spend tens (or hundreds) of person hours to search for, review, and redact FOIA requests only to mail it to the requester and have them slip it into their desk drawer and forget about it. That is a waste of resources. The released document should be posted online for any interested party to utilize. This will only become easier as FOIA processing systems evolve to automatically post the documents they track. The State Department earned its "E-Star" status demonstrating this very principle, and spent no new funds and did not hire contractors to build its Electronic Reading Room, instead it built a self-sustaining platform that will save the agency time and money going forward.
Gary Edwards

Feds use keylogger to thwart PGP, Hushmail | News Blogs - CNET News - 0 views

news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9741357-7.html

Keystroke-Loggers Big-Government Police-State keylogger

shared by Gary Edwards on 12 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 12 Apr 12
     
    The more i learn about the Governments illegal and un-Constitutional surveillance activities, the worse it gets.  As i read this article i couldn't help but wonder why the Government would want to disclose the warrantless activities as evidence in court?  Clearly the Government wants to have their violations of carefully enumerated Constitutional protections of individual rights validated by the nations courts.  Scary stuff. excerpt: A recent court case provides a rare glimpse into how some federal agents deal with encryption: by breaking into a suspect's home or office, implanting keystroke-logging software, and spying on what happens from afar. An agent with the Drug Enforcement Administration persuaded a federal judge to authorize him to sneak into an Escondido, Calif., office believed to be a front for manufacturing the drug MDMA, or Ecstasy. The DEA received permission to copy the hard drives' contents and inject a keystroke logger into the computers. That was necessary, according to DEA Agent Greg Coffey, because the suspects were using PGP and the encrypted Web e-mail service Hushmail.com. Coffey asserted that the DEA needed "real-time and meaningful access" to "monitor the keystrokes" for PGP and Hushmail passphrases. The aggressive surveillance techniques employed by the DEA were part of a case that resulted in a ruling on Friday (PDF) by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which primarily dealt with Internet surveillance through a wiretap conducted on a PacBell (now AT&T) business DSL line used by the defendants.
Gary Edwards

Memeo Connect's Take on the GDrive - 0 views

technologizer.com/...memeo-connect

memeo-connect trellis OTXML gDrive gDocs gApps syncing document-conversion box.net SugarSync

shared by Gary Edwards on 17 Jun 10 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 17 Jun 10
     
    Memeo Connect, which my colleague David Worthington tried and liked a few weeks ago, is an app that lets Google Apps users sync their documents and other files to a PC or Mac so they can get access to them even when they're offline. And as of today, it's available in a beta of version 2.0, which lets you get at synced files not only in Memeo's app but in Windows Explorer or the OS X finder, as well as in file open/save dialog boxes. The sync is two-way, so anything you drag or save into this repository gets moved back to Google Apps' storage once you're back online. And as before, Connect can handle files of all sorts and do conversions between Google Docs files and PDF and Microsoft Office formats. This virtual drive shows up in Explorer or Finder labeled as "GDrive"-a playful reference to a Google product that people have been expecting to arrive any day now for at least half a decade. (Don't tell anyone, but I've seen something called Google Web Drive in use at Google's offices; I assume it's undergoing internal testing and will get rolled out to the rest of us someday.) All in all, the new Connect competes more closely with Box.net (which launched its own syncing feature recently) and sync-focused services such as SugarSync. Memeo Connect 2.0′s other major feature is full-text search of the files in your Google Docs collection: Previous versions could only search file names. The Memeo Connect 2.0 beta is free, but the final version will cost $9 per user per year. It requires a $50/year Google Apps Premier account. (I think plenty of users of Google Apps' free version would pay for it, but Google only lets third-party apps and services that access the Apps API work with the paid edition.)
Gary Edwards

Constructing A SharePoint History: Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog - 0 views

blogs.msdn.com/...sharepoint-history.aspx

sharepoint msoffice moss msoffice-2010

shared by Gary Edwards on 08 Oct 09 - Cached
Rechal Morin liked it
  • it was clear customers wanted a more integrated and comprehensive solution from us. As just one example, they told us like they liked the WYSWIG HTML editing of SharePoint Team Services and the Web Part declarative and reusable editing of SharePoint Portal but wanted to use both models on the same site?
  • On the application side, we were hearing customers wanted Office to go beyond personal productivity to organizational productivity and we had to decide whether Microsoft would invest in content management, portals, unified communications, business intelligence and many other new scenarios.
  • we made sure SharePoint was an open platform and worked with vendors across the industry on a variety of integration approaches including published APIs and protocols.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • to enable customers to build business process integration and business intelligence portals, we added Excel Services and InfoPath Forms Services. Besides being exciting features, we gained invaluable learning for the team how to have an architecture that worked in the rich Office client and on the server with web access with high fidelity, round tripping, etc.
  • Gary Edwards on 08 Oct 09
     
    Wow.  Why fight over the editing of Wikiword when you can make up your own history?  The Microsoft Office - SharePoint Blog team is busy trying to reshape history from the inside out.   This bookmark is going to require a ton of highlights and comments.
Paul Merrell

Microsoft offers Office 2010 file format 'ballot' to stop EU antitrust probe - 0 views

www.computerworld.com/...lot_to_stop_EU_antitrust_probe

Microsoft European Commission antitrust office productivity undertaking

shared by Paul Merrell on 07 Aug 09 - No Cached
  • Paul Merrell on 07 Aug 09
     
    Microsoft's proposed undertaking for resolving the ECIS complaint to the European Commission regarding its office productivity software can be downloaded from this linked web page. I've given it a quick skim. Didn't see anything in it for anyone but competing big vendors. E.g., no profiling of data formats for interop of less and more featureful implementations, no round-tripping provisions. Still, some major concessions offered.
Paul Merrell

Internet users raise funds to buy lawmakers' browsing histories in protest | TheHill - 0 views

thehill.com/...y-lawmakers-browsing-histories

surveillance state browsing-history legislation

shared by Paul Merrell on 31 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • House passes bill undoing Obama internet privacy rule House passes bill undoing Obama internet privacy rule TheHill.com Mesmerizing Slow-Motion Lightning Celebrate #NationalPuppyDay with some adorable puppies on Instagram 5 plants to add to your garden this Spring House passes bill undoing Obama internet privacy rule Inform News. Coming Up... Ed Sheeran responds to his 'baby lookalike' margin: 0px; padding: 0px; borde
  • Great news! The House just voted to pass SJR34. We will finally be able to buy the browser history of all the Congresspeople who voted to sell our data and privacy without our consent!” he wrote on the fundraising page.Another activist from Tennessee has raised more than $152,000 from more than 9,800 people.A bill on its way to President Trump’s desk would allow internet service providers (ISPs) to sell users’ data and Web browsing history. It has not taken effect, which means there is no growing history data yet to purchase.A Washington Post reporter also wrote it would be possible to buy the data “in theory, but probably not in reality.”A former enforcement bureau chief at the Federal Communications Commission told the newspaper that most internet service providers would cover up this information, under their privacy policies. If they did sell any individual's personal data in violation of those policies, a state attorney general could take the ISPs to court.
Gary Edwards

Five reasons why Microsoft can't compete (and Steve Ballmer isn't one of them) - 2 views

betanews.com/...teve-ballmer-isn-t-one-of-them

Microsoft Joe-Wilcox Google IBM Monopolist OpenWeb

shared by Gary Edwards on 30 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • discontinued
  • 1. U.S. and European antitrust cases put lawyers and non-technologists in charge of important final product decisions.
  • The company long resisted releasing pertinent interoperability information in the United States. On the European Continent, this resistance led to huge fines. Meanwhile, Microsoft steered away from exclusive contracts and from pushing into adjacent markets.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • Additionally, Microsoft curtailed development of the so-called middleware at the core of the U.S. case: E-mail, instant messaging, media playback and Web browsing:
  • Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates learned several important lessons from IBM. Among them: The value of controlling key technology endpoints. For IBM, it was control interfaces. For Microsoft: Computing standards and file formats
  • 2. Microsoft lost control of file formats.
  • Charles Simonyi, the father of Microsoft, and his team achieved two important goals by the mid 1990s: Established format standards that resolved problems sharing documents created by disparate products.
  • nsured that Microsoft file formats would become the adopted desktop productivity standards. Format lock-in helped drive Office sales throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s -- and Windows along with it. However, the Web emerged as a potent threat, which Gates warned about in his May 1995 "Internet Tidal Wave" memo. Gates specifically identified HTML, HTTP and TCP/IP as formats outside Microsoft's control. "Browsing the Web, you find almost no Microsoft file formats," Gates wrote. He observed not seeing a single Microsoft file format "after 10 hours of browsing," but plenty of Apple QuickTime videos and Adobe PDF documents. He warned that "the Internet is the most important single development to come along since the IBM PC was introduced in 1981. It is even more important than the arrival of the graphical user interface (GUI)."
  • 3. Microsoft's senior leadership is middle-aging.
  • Google resembles Microsoft in the 1980s and 1990s:
  • Microsoft's middle-management structure is too large.
  • 5. Microsoft's corporate culture is risk adverse.
  • Microsoft's
  • . Microsoft was nimbler during the transition from mainframe to PC dominance. IBM had built up massive corporate infrastructure, large customer base and revenue streams attached to both. With few customers, Microsoft had little to lose but much to gain; the upstart took risks IBM wouldn't for fear of losing customers or jeopardizing existing revenue streams. Microsoft's role is similar today. Two product lines, Office and Windows, account for the majority of Microsoft products, and the majority of sales are to enterprises -- the same kind of customers IBM had during the mainframe era.
  • Gary Edwards on 30 Aug 11
     
    Excellent summary and historical discussion about Microsoft and why they can't seem to compete.  Lot's of anti trust and monopolist swtuff - including file formats and interop lock ins (end points).  Microsoft's problems started with the World Wide Web and continue with mobile devices connected to cloud services.
Gary Edwards

PDF Viewer Module for Drupal - Embed Documents to Your Web-Pages - 1 views

groupdocs.com/...ument-viewer-module-for-drupal

Document-Viewer

shared by Gary Edwards on 25 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • Great news for all Drupal CMS users! We have released a PDF viewer module for Drupal. The module allows you to seamlessly embed PDF documents, as well as PowerPoint presentations, Excel spreadsheets, word processing documents and images into web-pages on your Drupal website.
  • The PDF document viewer module for Drupal utilizes our GroupDocs Viewer's functionality and provides you with the following benefits:
  • GroupDocs Viewer converts PDF and other business documents to HTML5, meaning that your website visitors don't need any browser plug-ins or Flash to view documents hosted with our document viewer. You just put a document on your Drupal web-page and visitors can view it right away.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • While viewing documents, users can quickly turn pages with the Go Forward/Backward buttons, just like in a slideshow. Also users can jump straight to a certain page and preview pages with thumbnails.
  • High-fidelity rendering. Thanks to utilizing HTML5 technology, embedded documents look just like the originals. Layout, formatting and fonts are retained and text looks sharp.
  • Finally, thanks to the newly released module, you can easily integrate the GroupDocs Viewer's functionality into your Drupal website and start hosting PDF and Office documents on your web-pages in minutes.
  • sers can zoom in or out of documents, as well as print and download the original file right from your Drupal web-pages.
  • Options like text copying, document printing and downloading can be disabled so that users can't copy the document.
  • GroupDocs Viewer doesn't convert documents to images, but renders them as real text documents. Your visitors will be able to copy text right from the embedded documents or search for a particular text within the document.
  • Supported Document Formats GroupDocs document viewer module for Drupal supports almost all common business formats. Documents with the following formats can be embedded to your web-pages: PDF documents Word processing documents (DOC, DOCX, TXT, RTF, ODT, etc.) PowerPoint presentations (PPT, PPTX) Image files (JPG, BMP, GIF, TIFF)
Gary Edwards

Andreessen Horowitz & the Meteor investment - 0 views

a16z.com

VC venture-capital Andreessen-Horowitz

shared by Gary Edwards on 25 Jul 12 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 25 Jul 12
     
    Web site for Andreessen Horowitz VC. List of blogs for general partners. The reason for linking into a16z is the $11.2 Million they invested in Meteor! Meteor is awesome. My guess is that Meteor will provide a very effective Cloud platform to replace or extend the Windows Client/Server business productivity platform. Many VC watchers are wondering if a16z can recover the investment? Say what? IMHO this is for all the marbles. Platform is everything, and Cloud Computing is certain to replace Client/Server over time. Meteor just move that time frame from a future uncertainty to NOW. The Windows Productivity Platform has dominated Client/Server computing since the introduction of Windows 4 WorkGroups (v3.11) in 1992. Key technologies that followed or were included in v3.11 were DDE, OLE, MAPI, ODBC, ActiveX, and Visual Basic scripting - to name but a few. Meteor is an open source platform that hits these technologies directly with an approach that truly improves the complicated development of all Cloud based Web Apps - including the sacred Microsoft Cow herd of client/server business productivity apps. Meteor nails OLE and ODBC like nothing i've ever seen before. Very dramatic stuff. Maybe they are nailing shut the Redmond coffin in the process - making that $11.2 Mill a drop in the bucket considering the opportunity Meteor has cracked open. The iron grip Microsoft has on business productivity is so tight and so far reaching that one could easily say that Windows is the client in Client/Server. But it took years to build that empire. With this investment, Meteor could do it in months. Compound documents are the fuel in Windows business productivity and office automation systems. Tear apart a compound document, and you'll find embedded logic for OLE and ODBC. Sure, it's brittle, costly to develop, costly to maintain, and a bear to distribute. Tear apart a Meteor productivity service and you'll find the same kind of OLE-ODBC-Script
Gary Edwards

The right office apps for the iPad at work - 0 views

www.networkworld.com/...the-right-office-apps-for.html

iPAD-Apps WiFi-Apps Reviews

shared by Gary Edwards on 02 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • The first flaw is that it doesn't retain style sheets in the documents it saves. That's significant damage to the original file and will cause major issues if the document goes through any publishing workflow, such as for eventual HTML conversion or use in Adobe InDesign. The styles' text formatting is retained, but as local formatting only.
  • The second flaw
  • The third flaw
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • That app is GoodReader ($2). You can do most of the markup you would in Adobe Reader, such as notes, highlights, and even free-form shapes (for example, to circle an item). Once you get the hang of using your finger like a mouse for such actions, it's an easy-to-handle app. GoodReader is not just a PDF markup app. It can also view Office files, text files, and pictures, as well as play audio files. In addition, it comes with a Wi-Fi file-sharing capability to transfer documents to your computer.
  • Gary Edwards on 02 Dec 10
     
    Good review with some important pointers that all software developers should pay attention to.  iPAD apps are essentially WiFi Web Apps at some level.  Once again the NoteCase Pro - Google Docs issue of HTML-CSS Stylesheets vs. in-line custom formatting comes up.  Again. excerpt: InfoWorld.com investigated the available programs and put together a recommended business apps suite that should be the standard install on corporate iPads. I was surprised to find that none of the iPad productivity suites is ideal, though one comes close. (I've added U.S. iTunes links for each app covered.) Related Content View more related content Get Daily News by Email Of course, beyond the productivity apps that nearly everyone uses, iPadders have further needs, so I've also put together a collection of additional business apps that you might make available to employees or point them to for more specialized work.
Paul Merrell

Firefox gets an early taste of 3D Web standard | Deep Tech - CNET News - 0 views

news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-10357723-264.html

WebGL Webkit

shared by Paul Merrell on 24 Sep 09 - Cached
  • A nascent technology called WebGL for bringing hardware-accelerated 3D graphics to the Web is getting a lot closer to reality. Last week, programmers began building WebGL into Firefox's nightly builds, the developer versions used to test the latest updates to the open-source browser. Also this month, programmers began building WebGL into WebKit, the project that's used in both Apple's Safari and Google's Chrome. Wolfire Games picked up on the WebKit move and offered a video of WebGL in action.
  • Even the company with the most to lose from that direction--Microsoft--is embracing it with a Web-based version of Office
  • Although Google is a WebGL supporter, it's also developing a higher-level 3D graphics technology called O3D for browsers. Google is working on building O3D into Chrome, but the fruits of that labor aren't yet available.
Paul Merrell

NSA Spying Inspires ProtonMail 'End-to-End' Encrypted Email Service | NDTV Gadgets - 0 views

gadgets.ndtv.com/...encrypted-email-service-526769

surveillance state secure-email ProtonMail

shared by Paul Merrell on 20 May 14 - No Cached
  • ne new email service promising "end-to-end" encryption launched on Friday, and others are being developed while major services such as Google Gmail and Yahoo Mail have stepped up security measures.A major catalyst for email encryption were revelations about widespread online surveillance in documents leaked by Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor."A lot of people were upset with those revelations, and that coalesced into this effort," said Jason Stockman, a co-developer of ProtonMail, a new encrypted email service which launched Friday with collaboration of scientists from Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the European research lab CERN.Stockman said ProtonMail aims to be as user-friendly as the major commercial services, but with extra security, and with its servers located in Switzerland to make it more difficult for US law enforcement to access.
  • "Our vision is to make encryption and privacy mainstream by making it easy to use," Stockman told AFP. "There's no installation. Everything happens behind the scenes automatically."Even though email encryption using special codes or keys, a system known as PGP, has been around for two decades, "it was so complicated," and did not gain widespread adoption, Stockman said.After testing over the past few months, ProtonMail went public Friday using a "freemium" model a basic account will be free with some added features for a paid account.
  • As our users from China, Iran, Russia, and other countries around the world have shown us in the past months, ProtonMail is an important tool for freedom of speech and we are happy to finally be able to provide this to the whole world," the company said in a blog post.Google and Yahoo recently announced efforts to encrypt their email communications, but some specialists say the effort falls short."These big companies don't want to encrypt your stuff because they spy on you, too," said Bruce Schneier, a well-known cryptographer and author who is chief technology officer for CO3 Systems."Hopefully, the NSA debate is creating incentives for people to build more encryption."Stockman said that with services like Gmail, even if data is encrypted, "they have the key right next to it if you have the key and lock next to each other, so it's pretty much useless."
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • By locating in Switzerland, ProtonMail hopes to avoid the legal woes of services like Lavabit widely believed to be used by Snowden which shut down rather than hand over data to the US government, and which now faces a contempt of court order.Even if a Swiss court ordered data to be turned over, Stockman said, "we would hand over piles of encrypted data. We don't have a key. We never see the password."
  • Lavabit founder Ladar Levison meanwhile hopes to launch a new service with other developers in a coalition known as the "Dark Mail Alliance."Levison told AFP he hopes to have a new encrypted email system in testing within a few months and widely available later this year."The goal is to make it ubiquitous, so people don't have to turn it on," he said.But he added that the technical hurdles are formidable, because the more user-friendly the system becomes, "the more susceptible it is to a sophisticated attacker with fake or spoofed key information."Levison said he hopes Dark Mail will become a new open standard that can be adopted by other email services.
  • on Callas, a cryptographer who developed the PGP standard and later co-founded the secure communications firm Silent Circle, cited challenges in making a system that is both secure and ubiquitous."If you are a bank you have to have an email system that complies with banking regulations," Callas told AFP, which could allow, for example, certain emails to be subject to regulatory or court review."Many of the services on the Internet started with zero security. We want to start with a system that is totally secure and let people dial it down."The new email system would complement Silent Circle's existing secure messaging system and encrypted mobile phone, which was launched earlier this year."If we start competing for customers on the basis of maximum privacy, that's good for everybody," Callas said.
  • Paul Merrell on 20 May 14
     
    They're already so swamped that you have to reserve your user name and wait for an invite. They say they have to add servers. Web site is at https://protonmail.ch/ "ProtonMail works on all devices, including desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones. It's as simple as visiting our site and logging in. There are no plugins or apps to install - simply use your favorite web browser." "ProtonMail works on all devices, including desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones.
Gary Edwards

Ray Ozzie's startup has mobility, communications at core - Computerworld - 0 views

www.computerworld.com/...obility_communications_at_core

Ray-Ozzie Cocomo Cloud-Productivity-Platform

shared by Gary Edwards on 13 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 13 Mar 12
     
    Interesting, but lightweight interview with Ray Ozzie.  Look at the productivity comment in particular.  He also mentions "social productivity" as being an aspect of "communications".  My guess is that his new startup, Cocomo, will gear up towards a Cloud Productivity Platform where this new capability of integrated web communications is woven deep into collaborative productivity applications.  With enough juice to blow the legacy Windows - MSOffice Productivity environment out of the water.  We shall see. excerpt: When he joined Microsoft he thought it had a "tremendous history," he said, with great technology assets and people. But it was a company struggling to adjust to changes in the PC and server markets, he said. "I tried my best to communicate with various groups what their purpose in life was," he said. For instance, he tried to convince the Office group that it should focus on selling productivity, as opposed to selling PC-based productivity products, and the Xbox group that it should sell entertainment, not boxes or discs.
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