Tech WorldInteresting developments in the world of tech.OLPC's open source qualms underscores a larger limit- September 6, 2008 It's all very noble. MIT researcher and pundit Nicholas Negroponte challenges the PC industry to develop and sell a $100 PC for poor countries so their populations can be computer-literate and thus more able to compete in a global economy. He then puts his money where his mouth is and establishes the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) organization, which then develops a $200 laptop to help achieve those goals. Early on, OLPC decides to go open source, to save money on the software on these ultracheap.http://weblog.infoworld.com/techwatch/archives/016932.html Celebrating Parallels and its desktop virtualization gift- September 6, 2008 This week, Parallels announced that it has sold 1 million copies of Parallels Desktop, a utility that lets Intel-based Macs run Windows alongside Mac OS X. Although EMC's VMware unit now offers a similar product, it was Parallels that pioneered this application. And this application has played a significant role in making the Macintosh more widely acceptable in both personal and business environments, as it got rid of the "what if my app won't run on the Mac" dilemma that overshadowed Apple...http://weblog.infoworld.com/techwatch/archives/016933.html The World Banks web of data could be webbier- September 5, 2008 As Stefan Tilkov notes tearfully, the REST API for the World Bank data leaves something to be desired. The URI to fetch the list of countries looks like this: http:open.worldbank.orgrest.phpmethod=wb.countries.get In my review of the Leonard Richardson and Sam Ruby book RESTful Web Services I summarized their best practices for making a service &8220;look like the web&8221;: Data ...http://blog.jonudell.net/2008/09/05/the-world-banks-web-of-data-could-be-webbier/ World Bank data now available through APIs- September 4, 2008 By way of David Stephenson I&8217;ve learned that the World Bank now offers an API for several of its data sets on development, governance, and business conditions, plus a collection of photos. Here are the indicators you can explore, for many countries, going back to about 1960 (though the data are sparse in some cases): Agricultural land ...http://blog.jonudell.net/2008/09/04/world-bank-data-now-available-through-apis/ It's JavaOne, but where's Scott- September 4, 2008 Scott McNealy, who was the longtime CEO of Sun Microsystems and still is company chairman, has been absent from the company's JavaOne conference in San Francisco this week. A longtime fixture at the event even after stepping down as CEO in 2006, McNealy instead is in Washington, DC on business for Sun Federal, a Sun subsidiary that works with federal government accounts. McNealy is president of Sun Federal. McNealy had been known for presentations that injected humor into the event, such as..http://weblog.infoworld.com/techwatch/archives/017096.html Missing the iPhone's point- September 4, 2008 Every week, it seems, some device maker or cellular carrier is announcing its iPhone killer. The latest is the HTC Touch, whose main claim to fame is that it has beat Apple's iPhone to the 3G market (3G being the set of faster cellular networks than what the current iPhone uses). Never mind that the HTC Touch won't ship until June -- around the time that the new 3G iPhone is rumored to launch -- so any claims of being first are premature. But who cares if the HTC Touch is first to run on 3G...http://weblog.infoworld.com/techwatch/archives/017078.html The platform lock-in game moves to the cloud- September 4, 2008 In the last week, there's been a lot of noise around cloud computing, thanks to Microsoft's announcement today of its Dynamics CRM Online service launching and the joint Google-Salesforce.com announcement last week that paired Google Apps with Salesforce.com's CRM tools. For analysis of Microsoft's Tuesday news concerning Dynamics CRM, at which it also foreshadowed services that will follow in July, read Microsoft reaches for the cloud. The idea of cloud computing is highly appealing, as it..http://weblog.infoworld.com/techwatch/archives/016916.html Microsoft reaches for the cloud- September 4, 2008 At a press briefing Tuesday, Microsoft Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner put some meat on the bones of Microsoft's "software plus services" strategy to deliver cloud computing capabilities to customers. Turner reviewed Microsoft's current on-demand offerings -- mainly Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, plus hosted versions of Exchange and SharePoint -- but also revealed that major new announcements would follow at the Microsoft Partner Conference in early July. When asked whether Microsoft...http://weblog.infoworld.com/techwatch/archives/016920.html Freebase, Wikipedia, Powerset- September 3, 2008 Athough I&8217;ve explored Freebase in several ways, I hadn&8217;t seen the way it is now integrated &8212; along with Wikipedia &8212; into the Powerset demo of natural language search. It&8217;s quite eye-opening to see the answer to a deceptively simple query like Tim O&8217;Reilly&8217;s siblings. Assuming that a database goes to the trouble of actually knowing ...http://blog.jonudell.net/2008/09/03/freebase-wikipedia-powerset/ |