Forever Techie

Microsoft is funding a new foundation to bring together companies with proprietary software and open source programmers, with the aim of developing projects based on free software
The name of the new foundation is CodePlex, it's a site created by Microsoft dedicated to open source projects, according to its promoters is a nonprofit organization led by Sam Ramji, senior director of platform strategy at Microsoft.

The foundation's Web site its creators claim that this is intended as a "complement to the organizations and foundations of existing open source, creating a forum where best practices and sharing of knowledge can be fostered by a large group of Attendee '.

A South African company's information technology announced this week that has proven to be faster to transfer data with the help of a pigeon to send them across the network of Telkom, the largest Internet company in the country.

Speed Internet connectivity and the largest economy in Africa are low because of lack of bandwidth, which is also expensive.

A local news agency SAPA reported that a pigeon 11 months old, Winston, took one hour and eight minutes to fly 80 kilometers from the offices of IT Unlimited, near Pietermaritzburg, to the coastal city of Durban with a memory card tied in one of the legs.

Including download the data, it took two hours, six minutes and 57 seconds for only four percent of the same data to be transferred with a line of Telkom.

The SAPA reported that the IT Unlimited decided to do the "test" after the officials frustrated with the slow Internet connection.

The company has 11 service centers to customers in the country and usually needs to transfer data to its other units.

The speed Internet in the region must improve so that a new submarine cable fiber optics of 17 thousand kilometers long, linking the southern and eastern Africa to other networks, to become operational before the opening World Cup in South Africa Africa, in 2010.

Motorola presented on Thursday, the first of several mobile phones developed in partnership with Google in an attempt to recover from two years of falling sales.

"Cliq" is the first phone using Android software developed by Google and will hit stores in the fourth quarter of this year. In Europe, the new model Motorola will enter the market with a different description: "Dext ".

With Android, the new model of Motorola has a sliding keyboard and a five megapixel camera.

Before the end of the year, Motorola will launch another phone with the Android software. With this bet, the brand aims to regain market share occupied by rival Apple, Nokia and Samsung.

About Wine

Wine is a translation layer (a program loader) capable of running Windows applications on Linux and other POSIX compatible operating systems. Windows programs running in Wine act as native programs would, running without the performance or memory usage penalties of an emulator, with a similar look and feel to other applications on your desktop.

The Wine project started in 1993 as a way to support running Windows 3.1 programs on Linux. Bob Amstadt was the original coordinator, but turned it over fairly early on to Alexandre Julliard, who has run it ever since. Over the years, ports for other Unixes have been added, along with support for Win32 as Win32 applications became popular.

Wine 1.0.1 was released recently, and our developers are currently working towards a Wine 1.2 release. There are bugs and missing features, but many people find Wine useful in running a growing number of Windows programs.

Wine Benefits

Last but not least, Wine can provide benefits over Windows right now:

• Wine makes it possible to take advantage of all the Unix strong points (stability, flexibility, remote administration) while still using the Windows applications you depend on.
• Unix has always made it possible to write powerful scripts. Wine makes it possible to call Windows applications from scripts that can also leverage the Unix environment to its full extent.
• Wine makes it possible to access Windows applications remotely, even if they are a few thousand miles away.
• Wine makes it economical to use thin clients: simply install Wine on a Linux server, and voila, you can access these Windows applications from any X terminal.
• Wine can also be used to make existing Windows applications available on the Web by using VNC and its Java client.
• Wine is Open Source Software, so you can extend it to suit your needs or have one of many companies do it for you.