software

Fusion, or confusion?

For Niranjan Reddy, a technical lead at Office Depot, the answer was Fusion, with less confusion.

That was Reddy's assessment, after listening to Thomas Kurian, top executive on Oracle's Fusion middleware efforts, during his keynote speech Tuesday at Oracle OpenWorld on the company's Fusion Middleware 11g beta.

"We wanted to see how much better it would be to use Fusion 11g with E-Business (Suite) 12," Reddy said. "Right now, we're using many different adapters outside of Fusion Middleware, but with Fusion 11g and E-Business 12 we could bring it all … Read more

Filemaker is betting that its new database software, Bento, will please Mac users seeking a multipurpose personal information manager. The application will ship in January 2008 for $49, or $99 for a family pack. A free test drive is available on the Web site of Filemaker, which is owned by Apple.

Like the Japanese lunch box for which it's named, Bento appears to be a tidy organizer. Sorting and searching options look elegant. The software could serve a variety of purposes, such as tracking freelance work gigs, sending party invitations, plotting an exercise regime, cataloging household items, creating libraries … Read more

Microsoft and open-source site SourceForge plan to offer a free plug-in early next year that will convert Office 2007 files to the Daisy format, which translates text to speech.

The free tool will add a "Save as Daisy" option within Word 2007 and 2003. Daisy, or Digital Accessible Information System, XML files can be "read" aloud by speech synthesizers, paired with audio narration, and used to create electronic Braille. Users can navigate open-standard Daisy documents quickly by jumping between page elements such as headers and indexes.

The Daisy Consortium of 70 nonprofits has aimed since 1996 … Read more

Google's Android software gives Sun Microsystems' Java technology a starring role--but not the version of Java the rest of the mobile phone industry has been developing since the 1990s.

Instead, Google struck off on its own in an attempt to improve performance and openness for the software used in the Open Handset Alliance phones. That means programmers will have a new variety of Java to reckon with--offset somewhat by Google's $10 million code contest to draw developers in.

One difference is Google's development of its own core Java virtual machine (JVM) technology called Dalvik, the software that … Read more

CHICAGO--Fewer than half of architects were building with green features in mind five years ago, but 90 percent will be by 2012, according to Autodesk.

Seventy percent of respondents to Autodesk's Green Index survey said client demand is accelerating efforts to design buildings that use less energy, cut material waste, and cost less to operate.

Autodesk, which makes professional, 3D drafting applications, announced at the Greenbuild convention last week that it's developing software, code-named "Project Chicago," to help designers score ratings points from the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design system run by the U.S. … Read more

OK, kids. Sharpen those pencils, sharpen those minds. Here's a pop quiz on a bit of Oracle nostalgia, as Larry Ellison, Oracle co-founder and chief executive, kicked off Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco on Sunday with 30 years of highlights:

What was the name of Oracle, before it became Oracle? A: Software Development Laboratories (SDL) B: Laboratories Software Development (LSD) C: BEL Systems (Bob Miner, Ed Oates, Larry Ellison, founders) Answer: Software Development Laboratories. Ellison, during his keynote speech, dedicated the evening's event to the late Bob Miner.

When Oracle began selling its first commercial SQL relational database … Read more

Google's long-awaited upgrade to Gmail has broken nearly all of the plug-ins designed to enhance the Web-based e-mail client's functionality. Better Gmail was one of the most thorough Gmail extensions for Firefox, and the publisher has rushed out a new version to meet the new Gmail.

The handful of additional features it provides are good, no doubt. There's the forced https connection, useful for us paranoids but probably ineffective against the combined might of the U.S. Government and AT&T. There's a forced mailto, as well, so that all mailto's in other HTML … Read more

Software crashes all too often, and since misery loves company, computer users often swap horror stories. Back on Halloween, Lee Gomes did so publicly in the Wall Street Journal. His problem was with the Adobe Premiere Pro, a video editing program and, while I found it interesting, the article didn't offer advice for avoiding or dealing with software crashes. That's what I hope to do here. First though, defending your privacy.

ERROR REPORTING

When applications crash, a window often pops up asking if you want to report the problem to Microsoft. Gomes writes that the Microsoft employees who … Read more

It's not surprising that Billy Marshall, former Red Hatter and current CEO of rPath, would be dismissive of Red Hat's new appliance operating system, given that he will be competing with it. But what I did find surprising is how dead-on his assessment is of enterprise software.

We talk about certification a lot (i.e., "Yes, we are certified to run on SQL Server"). The customer takes this to mean, "It will work well with SQL Server." But this isn't always the case. In fact, as Billy points out, it is often not the case:

According to Red Hat, the product will be a valuable alternative to rPath because it preserves application "certification." Apparently this means that customers will still need to assemble, configure, and maintain the components inside the virtual appliance. After all, "certification" is only valuable when the components are not provided as an integrated, optimized, and tested unit.… Read more