microsot

Judging Java: Google and Oracle go to court

week in review Oracle's Java patent and copyright lawsuit against Google and its Android mobile operating system kicked off this week with some familiar faces taking the witness stand.

Oracle attorney David Boies began his arguments by focusing on a particular presentation on July 25, 2005, listing "Must take license from Sun" as one of the bullet points of the agenda. Google CEO Larry Page, who testified via his video deposition, was essentially questioned about whether this presentation was written and led by Andy Rubin, senior vice president of mobile at Google (aka the father of Android), … Read more

Microsoft's Bing goes down

In what could be a blow to its image, Microsoft's main Bing search site suffered through an outage on Thursday evening.

Visitors to Bing.com were getting a browser error message rather than a search bar. Service was down for at least 45 minutes before being restored around 7:10 p.m. PST.

Microsoft acknowledged the issues on its Twitter feed and said it was looking into the matter. It later offered the following explanation, posted to a Bing blog by Satya Nadella, senior vice president of the Online Services division:

The cause of the outage was a configuration … Read more

Who needs Microsoft Office? Freeware puts twists on old apps

Most people become so accustomed to using Microsoft Office that they never consider its alternatives. But there are more than one way to process words and spreadsheets: Word and Excel aren't the only games in town.

In fact, it's getting easier and easier to do without the most popular Office applications. Other than Outlook--which my company uses--I haven't opened a Microsoft Office app since last February, when my HP laptop died prematurely.

In fact, it wasn't easy removing the trial version of Office Enterprise 2007 that was preinstalled on the Sony Vaio that replaced the piece-of-crap HP that died. I've been working just fine using the free Jarte word processor and Gnumeric spreadsheet.

Can Microsoft open up to open source?

The answer to this is an emphatic "yes," as Sam Ramji relates in a recent interview. It's not a question of "can" but rather one of "will." Does Microsoft have the will to embrace open source?

There are many answers to that question, as many employees as there are employed at Microsoft.

Sam, Bill Hilf, and others within Microsoft are clearly sincere in their embrace of open source. They don't, however, make any pretense that open source is the Absolute Answer for Microsoft. But they clearly see much that the company can learn from open source.… Read more