Archive for March, 2009

Skype Named as the Largest Long-Distance Phone Company

According to a TeleGeography report, Skype has been named as the world’s largest long-distance phone company. Skype now accounts for 8% of all international call minutes. Skype’s international call traffic grew 41% in 2008 to 33 billion minutes. The online service allows users to talk from Skype client to Skype client for free. The service also includes a pay-for “Skype Out” service for calling a standard phone using a Skype client. That service also generated 8.4 billion minutes of calls in 2008. For this, Skype relies upon traditional phone and cell phone infrastructure. The Skype client also provides users with IM, video chat, and file transfer as well.

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Filed under News : Comments (0) : Mar 25th, 2009

iTunes 8.1 Window Weirdness In OS X

After upgrading to iTunes 8.1 on my MacBook, I noticed a weird behavior of the window. After unplugging from my external monitor at work, the iTunes window was too big for me to see the whole thing and I couldn’t grab the “resizer” at the bottom-right of the window since it too was off the screen. Clicking the green “+” changed it to its compact view, which didn’t allow me to resize the full window. Clicking it again brought me back to the same situation. For anyone else looking for this, here’s a fix that I found in the Apple support forums and it worked for me:

Open /Applications/AppleScript/Script Editor

Run the following:
tell application "iTunes"
set bounds of window 1 to {296, 97, 800, 600}
end tell

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Filed under How-Tos / Tips : Comments (0) : Mar 25th, 2009

Microsoft Implements App Store for Servers

Microsoft has seen the successes of the Apple App Store for the iPhone and iPod Touch and has created one of their own. Their app store, however, is for server-side web-based software. The store, named Web App Gallery, will allow users to select software to install and then it configures the server and resolves any dependencies for the application to run. Microsoft’s Lauren Cooney explains:

“Essentially, what we have launched with Windows Web Application Gallery is a marketing and distribution pipeline. So if a developer has a great app they want to include in the Web Application Gallery, we will market that worldwide – so they have the reach that they never had before.”

The store currently only contains 10 applications so far and they are all open source applications. It seems that Microsoft has embraced the fact that easing the distribution of open source web applications on their platform will help adoption of the platform.

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Filed under News : Comments (0) : Mar 24th, 2009

Linux Usage on Servers Looking Good, Netbooks Suffering

The recently Novell-sponsored IDC survey revealed that usage of Linux on the server as well as the desktop is up and will continue to grow in popularity. The survey polled 300 IT professionals at companies with more than 100 employees in several industries. According to the response, 55 percent of organizations are using Linux servers in their operations. 72 percent of the respondents reported that they were evaluating starting to use Linux or increase their use of Linux on the server side. On the desktop side, 68 percent said they were evaluating or going to increase usage. Approximately 49 percent said they were planning to run entirely on Linux on their servers within the next five years. With people scared about what the economy will bring them, they have been turning to lower-cost alternatives to Windows and don’t appear to be looking back.

On the netbook side, however, Linux isn’t doing so hot. In the past, the netbook market has been famed as the area where Linux would dominate. The numbers just aren’t showing this trend, though. Netbooks sold with Windows have accounted for 90% of netbook sales. Microsoft could face some competition, however, with Google planning to release a netbook as well as rumors of an Apple netbook next year.

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Filed under News : Comments (0) : Mar 22nd, 2009

Internet Explorer Will Never Beat Firefox’s Community

With today’s release of Internet Explorer 8, there’s been a bit of chatter of how IE seems to have leap-frogged ahead of Firefox. By nature, the browser war will always be this leap-frog game of innovating while implementing other browsers’ innovations to get ahead. However, Microsoft simply doesn’t have the community to maintain a leadership in the feature department.

Even if Microsoft has added some killer new features in IE, within a few months, someone from the Firefox community will build an extension to allow Firefox users to have the same functionality. Of course, the functionality won’t come included with the browser ‘out of the box’, but the functionality exists and users will likely not give up other extensions to migrate to IE. In fact, all of the new features that Microsoft is touting in IE8 are already implemented. You can download an accelerator, web slice-type extension, and grouped tabs extensions for Firefox if those features attract you. An extension for privacy mode in Firefox has existed since 2006, but it just hasn’t been integrated into the Firefox package.

The other thing that Firefox (and any other open source browser) has against IE (or Safari for that matter) is the fact that the community is the driving force behind added features and improvements. Sure, Microsoft listens to their users and tries to accommodate new features, but they’re not end users. A strong bond between end users and developers is key to attracting and keeping users using a piece of software.

As this war wages on, the leap-frogging will continue with IE as it releases major versions adding loads of new features, but Mozilla’s community will continue to deliver those features and others slowly as time goes on. The tortoise usually beats the hare, but in this case there’s thousands of tortoises and a comparatively small number of hares. Time will only tell, but Microsoft still has a huge climb ahead if it wants to be rated as the ‘best’ browser (whatever that means) by any amount of users for very long.

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Filed under News, Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Mar 19th, 2009

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