I would like you to think about here things, three things that I’ve had a chance to decide are really important based upon the time I’ve spent at Microsoft, and I’ve spent in the information technology industry. Number one, great ideas matter. Number two, find passion. And, number three, be tenacious, be irrepressible.

Permalink

And there you have another piece of information – the following week Nokia begins talks on selling the phone division at Microsoft. While the results of these negotiations will not be public, but the deal could be closed before the end of 2011, both companies are very much in a hurry. After all, today the problem for the current management of Nokia does not produce good products, but as soon as possible to destroy the company, and interesting assets transferred to the MS.

NOTE : you would need to translate the webpage…

Permalink

This would definitely make Microsoft competitive with others…

• Skype is a cross-platform service available on OS X, iOS, Android, Linux and Windows. With Microsoft taking over it would have a cross platform communication software which works great on all platforms especially the iOS.
• Apple has FaceTime on its mobile platform for video conferencing… So I feel to compete with that Microsoft would launch something similar on its WP7 platform…
• This would make Microsoft be dominant across all platforms withWindows Live Messenger on the PC, Kinect in consumer market and Lync in enterprise…

But still $8.5 Billion sounds crazy for all this… But just think about it for a second, 663 Million registered users and millions of users online every minute… This would give Microsoft a huge user database and infrastructure that will not be part of any of its competitors… Some of us seem to be under the impression that this would mean end of Skype on OS X and iOS, but I being an optimist believe the services might end up improving…

I’m not a fanboy of either Flash or Silverlight… I’m a web developer, and I choose the tools best to solve a problem…

I agree to it that both Flash and Silverlight provide a great way to program rich applications with complicated interactivity… If your web application has simple interactivity, such as filling out forms or clicking buttons to make hidden things appear, you can do that easily with JavaScript… I can sense some cringes at that suggestion… Yes, HTML, CSS and JavaScript are prone to have cross-browser cross-platform incompatibilities, but a good html person with JQuery and browsershots.org should be able to handle it… That’s cheaper than paying a search engine consultant to figure out why your all-flash website doesn’t get any traffic…

Main problem with plugins like Flash and Silverlight is that they have never been regarded highly by search engines, so any time you have text in these plugins, you can pretty much assume that spiders won’t read it…

But seriously comparing Silverlight to Flash just doesn’t make sense… It’s like comparing an Iphone to lets say Motorokr… Its said that Silverlight was created for a far bigger purpose; to light up the web in the same way as Windows Presentation Foundation ( Avalon – PS : Just love there system of nomenclature ) was to light up the Windows Platform…

I really don’t have to speak more on this… Flash is normally installed on 95% of web browsers… compare that to Microsoft’s 26% that too I think only in companies which are pro Silverlight… The only way Microsoft can win over this Adobe’s monoploy over rich applications is if they make Silverlight a “mandatory plugin” which would certainly result in a mass adoption overnight…

Microsoft would be foolish to try to sway people from industry standards like Photoshop and Illustrator… So having a smooth flow between designers and developers is crucial and Microsoft will never do this as well as Adobe does… Silverlight does have a couple points in its favor… It is new so the plugin doesn’t have to support several back-versions… More developers like C# over ActionScript, however, I believe part of this argument is outdated… When Silverlight came out developers were excited because they hated ActionScript 2 and developing within the Flash IDE… Now there is ActionScript 3 and Flex Builder with Eclipse, which in my opinion can contend even with Visual Studio… Open sourcing Flex is a really good start in the right direction by Adobe…

Came across the really hilarious comic strip on Sad And Useless… You just have to have a look…

Bill – I went to a bank yesterday to talk about a loan…
Steve – What do you need a loan for???
Bill – i don’t, the bank does…

ASP stands for Active Server Pages and PHP formerly stood for Personal Home Pages and is now known as PHP Hypertext Preprocessor…

ASP is basically a toy from the Microsoft development toy chest and is used with Internet Information Server (IIS) which is a program that runs on Microsoft servers… However, there are 3rd party applications that can make it compatible with a few other servers. ASP is widely used for large companies Web needs…

Rasmus Lerdorf originally designed the PHP parsing language during 1994/1995… Some other major contributors were Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans who rewrote the parsing engine to create PHP version 3… The major NT and UNIX Web servers support it and it is widely used with the mySQL database. Small and medium Web developers use it religiously…

PHP has it’s own language and syntax, the language is simplified due to the programs incorporation of a parsing engine that is especially designed to make short work of translating PHP code into machine language that executes commands… If you were a programmer adept with the C++ language, you would probably be more comfortable using PHP than ASP… PHP uses C/C++ as base language and most syntax are similar to each other… Because a big chunk of programmers are still using C++ language, PHP are by far more popular than ASP…

On the other hand ASP makes use of a language that was dying before Microsoft managed to breathe new life into it… Visual Basic Script is the language used in ASP and was formerly used as a client side scripting language that was in direct competitions with JavaScript… This was back when Internet Explorer was still the #2 browser behind Netscape Navigator… During this era, JavaScript was whooping the pants off of Visual Basic Script with its wide acceptance amongst Web developers…

PHP is very much flexible when it terms of database connectivity… It can connect to several databases of which the most commonly used is the MySQL… Note that MySQL would not cost you a thing to use… But if you were to use ASP, you need to purchase MS-SQL, which is a Microsoft product… This makes PHP very attractive to the independent web developer…

Loading speed is a big factor in maintaining a website… If you are particular about speed, then you need to go with PHP… PHP codes runs much quicker than ASP basically because it runs in its very own memory space while ASP uses an overhead server and is uses a COM based architecture…

In working with PHP, most tools associated with the program are mostly open source software so you need not pay for them… As for ASP, you might need to buy additional tools to work with its programs…

In conclusion, both PHP and ASP have its own advantages and disadvantages… It basically depends on which part of developing a website you are most concerned with… Choosing between ASP and PHP basically depends on your own personal preference… It doesn’t hurt to confer with other programmers or webmasters and research more information on which programming would best fit the requirements of your website…

Truly speaking, I am not that much interested in ASP .NET… All I have is some basic knowledge on C#, Visual Basic and J#. But in the case of PHP, I love it!!! I have been developing PHP applications for more than a year and trust me, it is the simplest and easiest, yet, very powerful and efficient programming language for the web…

Cheers..

I

I found this nice site… http://ripie6.com/

RIPIE6 is the obituary notice of Internet Explorer 6’s death. It’s a message for all users who still use that “browser”. RIPIE6 is designed exactly for those old-fashioned people who don’t see the point of updating their software.

Microsoft has always had trouble with there User Interface (UI)… Gone is the infamous mobile smart menu and instead the main menu is now a grid-like interface, something microsoft is calling “tiles”, which are vertically scrolled and be personalized to be quick launches or separate widgets… The look of the interface has obviously been completely retooled too… Gone is the cumbersome navigation, and now it resembles the Zune HD UI, replacing small icons with big, gorgeous icons and grid structures… Social networking plays a major role in Windows Phone 7, as well…

The most important note here is that, Microsoft wants more control over phone manufacturers by making the manufacturers make Windows Phone 7 Phones with specific specs… Also, phone makers cannot use their own interface customizations that we have been seeing more recently (such as HTC’s TouchFlo)…

Availability is expected to be around the end of 2010 is it an IPhone killer we will see but with the huge install base for the apple IPhone it will be a tough battle…

Windows posted a walkthrough video, to give potential customers an idea of what to expect:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IOTrqlz4jo[/youtube]

There is also a pretty good interactive demo up at the official Windows Phone 7 Series site…

Dear Google Apps admin,

In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology.  This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5.  As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.

We plan to begin phasing out support of these older browsers on the Google Docs suite and the Google Sites editor on March 1, 2010.  After that point, certain functionality within these applications may have higher latency and may not work correctly in these older browsers. Later in 2010, we will start to phase out support for these browsers for Google Mail and Google Calendar.

Google Apps will continue to support Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 and above.

Starting this week, users on these older browsers will see a message in Google Docs and the Google Sites editor explaining this change and asking them to upgrade their browser.  We will also alert you again closer to March 1 to remind you of this change.

In 2009, the Google Apps team delivered more than 100 improvements to enhance your product experience.  We are aiming to beat that in 2010 and continue to deliver the best and most innovative collaboration products for businesses.

Thank you for your continued support!

Sincerely,

The Google Apps team

Email preferences: You have received this mandatory email service announcement to update you about important changes to your Google Apps product or account.

Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043

Looks like the Browser war is never gonna stop…

Steve Jobs took the stage today and officially introduced his iPad to the world… It appears as if the iPhone got the super-size treatment, complete with a home button….

At only half an inch thin, and sporting a 9.7″ screen, the iPad weighs in at only one and a half pounds…. It’s powered by Apple’s very own chip(A4)… Available with 16, 32, or 64GB flash storage, and has 802.11n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR. Oh, and you can run it for 10 hours while watching videos….

Surprising for Apple, NO built-in camera… This is one feature you would expect from Apple…. There is also no microphone, so programs like Skype, iChat etc. are out of the question for now anyway…. This was surprising for me to hear as there will be a 3G model, so i  assume you can insert a SIM card, therefore  it would have been nice to have the option to use the iPad as a mobile phone..

You will be able to use iWork with the iPad but this does not come standard with the iPad and can be bought separately from the App store… The SDK already downloadable on Apple’s homepage, maybe there will be a Microsoft office coming soon…

As for pricing of the device itself, it starts at $499, which is a very low cost of entry…. It will get you the 16GB base model without 3G… $599 will get you the 32GB Wi-Fi only model, and $699 will bump you up to 64GB… With 3G, the prices are $629, $729 and $829 respectively for the different storage capacities….

Apple also announced the release of the new iBooks store where you’ll be able to purchase visual books… The new iBook store looks visually mesmerizing with rich colors and Accessibility built in meaning you could have text read to you..

Here’s the official video of the iPad