Unapologetically opinionated views on technology, in the office and out
Simon Bisson is a freelance technology journalist. He specialises in architecture and enterprise IT. He ran one of the UK's first national ISPs and moved to writing around the time of the collapse of the first dotcom boom. He still writes code.
Mary Branscombe is a freelance tech journalist. Mary has been a technology writer for nearly two decades, covering everything from early versions of Windows and Office to the first smartphones, the arrival of the web and most things inbetween.
Phase change memory will probably just miss the Windows 8 schedule but it's been looking the most promising advance on flash storage - which is going to hit a problem with density and storage life in the not too distant future. The larger your flash memory, the shorter the storage life and some of the really high density flash memory that's been talked about could store information for as little as an hour.
The people who keep proclaiming that privacy is dead tend to be the ones who gain the most form the death of privacy, Danah Boyd (from Microsoft Research) pointed out at the SXSW conference last month.
Will Office 2010 have fully 'standards-based' OOXML support - and does it need it?Alex Brown, the Convener of the Geneva Ballot Resolution Meeting where OOXML became an ISO standard, has been claiming that the OOXML process has broken down because the beta version of Office 2010 doesn't have support for the 'strict' version of the OOXML ISO/IEC 29500 format agreed as the future of OOXML in the standard.
How about the Google apps?On the one hand, everyone complains about fragmentation with multiple devices and multiple resolutions and not every phone getting Android updates; on the other Wired says device makers who do Android things that aren't phones aren't getting the OS love - they want the marketplace and updates and device certification and a framework for making sure apps can be compatible.
For Lady Ada Lovelace day (celebrating women in technology), I always like to write about not so much one specific woman in technology but about women generally. It's not just how do I choose, though that's hard: it's that by randomly picking some of the women I've talked to recently I feel I can point out the breadth of what women are contributing to tech.
A second screen for your laptop. Reading email attachments in the cloud on your Symbian phone or watching a presentation on the phone while you talk on the phone.
Microsoft is in the same rush to ship Windows Phone that it was to fix its search engine by launching Bing. Microsoft veterans on both teams have told us (separately) of an unrivalled sense of urgency and purpose.
While Internet Explorer 9 may have had the limelight on MIX’s second day, Microsoft also made significant moves towards data accessibility with further announcements around its Open Data Protocol, and the release of the second CTP of its Codename “Dallas” data set marketplace.Asking the questions, “How do you enable many experiences?
Because the wireless Internet is currently a choice between affordable and ubiquitous (pick one - especially when roaming), I can't assume I'll always be able to get online to get files from our server.
The 'Bloom box' fuel system that Silicon Valley is fussing about isn't free energy or perpetual motion; it's a clever way of storing the energy from gas (natural or biogas) in solid oxide fuel cells more efficiently than a gas generator (although when they say it's far more efficient than the US electrical grid that's not saying much, as that emits considerably more CO2 than the UK national grid and loses more of it in transmission).