News About Information Technology

iPhone sales double in 2011 113% rise

2011-04-22T08:01:00.000-07:00

The sales of iphones has nearly doubled Apple's profits in the first 3 months of 2011.

Net income for the three months to March jumped 85% on the same period a year ago, with iPhone sales of 18.65m - a rise of 113%.

Apple reported quarterly net profits of $5.99bn (£3.6bn), 95% up on the $3bn it made a year ago. Revenue was $24.67bn, a rise of 83%.

However, iPad sales have been below expectations, selling only 4.69m in the first quarter, and iPod sales also fell by 17%.

Apple chief executive Steve Jobs said in a statement: "With quarterly revenue growth of 83% and profit growth of 95% we're firing on all cylinders."

Mr Jobs, who went on medical leave in January with an undisclosed illness, continued: "We will continue to innovate on all fronts throughout the remainder of the year."

University of Nottingham saves £60k a year through VoIP migration

2011-04-06T21:30:00.001-07:00

Kathleen Hall email Tuesday 05 April 2011 17:06 The University of Nottingham is saving up to £60,000 a year after moving to a voice over IP (VoIP) system. Following its recent installation of a Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) telephony system, the university signed a deal with Node4 to migrate its existing 11,000 analogue telephone users over to the SIP system over a number of years. Anthony Tunley, telecoms group leader at the University of Nottingham, says the university has cut call costs by 50% by connecting its SIP telephone system to Node4. "We realised we needed to cut costs and migrate to VoIP," he said. But Tunley says that figure is likely to increase considerably as it works towards full migration over the next few years, as it has so far only migrated 10% of its telephone system. The new system also enables the university to address the need to provide telephony to schools in remote regions such as Lincoln and Boston.

University of Nottingham saves £60k a year through VoIP migration

2011-04-06T21:30:00.000-07:00

Apple dodges $625m patent infringement damages award

2011-04-06T21:20:00.000-07:00

A US District Court judge in Texas has thrown out what would have been a record $625.5m damages award against Apple in a patent infringement case involving a document management and display system. Judge Leonard Davis overturned the jury's finding against Apple in the case filed by a company called Mirror Worlds in March 2008. Mirror Worlds said several features in Apple's Mac computers, iPhones and iPods infringed patents held by the company. The technologies at issue were Cover Flow, which lets users flip through album covers and other content; Time Machine, which performs automatic backups; and Spotlight, which is software for searching computer hard drives, according to Australian reports. In October last year, a jury found Apple had infringed three patents and awarded $208.5m in damages for each patent. But Apple asked the court to postpone the award, saying there were several issues to be addressed, including the way the damages were calculated. Judge Davis vacated the damages award, saying that, apart from the sufficiency of evidence regarding infringement, there was insufficient evidence to support the jury's $208.5m damages award.

New Cisco Router Supports 322Tbps, Designed for Internet Video

2011-03-22T23:18:00.000-07:00

New Cisco Router Supports 322Tbps, Designed for Internet Video

By David Coursey, PCWorld

What can you do with 322 terabits per second? Cisco Systems says it's enough bandwidth to allow every person in China to make a video call--simultaneously. And if that's something you want to do, Cisco says it now has hardware capable of the task.

The company's newest large-scale core router, the CRS-3, is capable of handling such a speed, which Cisco said is 12-times as fast as its closest competitor and three times the speed of its predecessor. It has invested $1.6 billion in the product's design and engineering.

The CRS-3, announced today, is the product that Cisco last month said would "forever change the Internet and its impact on consumers, businesses and governments."

CRS stands for "Carrier Routing System," a reference to the device's use by large telecom providers.

Tbps stands for terabits-per-second and a terabit is a trillion bits. Compare that to the megabits-per-second that today's highest-speed business and consumer broadband connections are measured in.

Among other 322Tbps tasks: Transmitting every motion picture ever made (5 minutes), downloading the entire printed collection of the Library of Congress (1 second), or transmiting the entire DNA sequence of 56,000 people (also 1 second).

Cisco Chairman and CEO John Chambers announced the new router on a Monday conference call, during which he said the CRS-3 would be available before the end of this year. Field testing is underway and pricing for the new router is said to start at $90,000.

While 322Tbps sounds like--and is--incredible bandwidth, the CRS-3 is merely a response to the growth of video over the Internet.

"Video brings the Internet to life,” said Chambers. “You are moving from a messaging platform to a video platform," Chambers said. He predicted the bandwidth required for Internet video would grow by 200-500 percent per year.

"The Internet will scale faster than any of us anticipate," Chambers said.

Aimed at Internet providers and telecom companies, the CRS-3 is a curiosity for most businesses, but one that demonstrates the demand for bandwidth shows no sign of slowing. Video will play an increasing role in filling the fiber optic pipelines of the future.

David Coursey has been writing about technology products and companies for more than 25 years. He tweets as @techinciter and may be contacted via his Web site.

Student used spyware to steal passwords, change grades

2011-03-22T09:44:00.000-07:00

Omar Khan is expected to be sentenced to a month in prison for altering his school record
by Robert McMillan
A former high school senior from Orange County, California, has pleaded guilty to charges that he installed spyware on school computers in order to boost his grades.

Omar Kahan, of Coto de Caza, California, was one of two Tesoro High School students arrested three years ago in connection with the incident. The other student, Tanvir Singh, pleaded guilty in September 2008. Khan's guilty plea came as his trial was finally set to start this week.

Prosecutors say that in his senior year of high school, Khan developed a habit of breaking into school offices to steal tests and mess with the school's computers. He "installed spyware devices on the computers of several teachers and school administrators throughout his senior year," the office of the Orange County District Attorney said in a news release.

These passwords gave him access to the tests and the ability to boost his grades. Khan changed his Spanish, calculus and English grades from C's and D's to A's and a B+ and altered the grades of 12 other students, prosecutors said.

On April 18, 2008, he was caught cheating on a statistics test. That weekend he broke into the school's assistant principal's office and "stole the test in an attempt to destroy the evidence that he cheated," the DA's office said.

On April 21, he changed his transcript grades in the school's grade database and immediately asked for certified copies of his transcripts so that he could appeal rejection letters from the University of Southern California, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of California, Los Angeles.

Singh tagged along with Khan to steal an English test during a May 19 nighttime break-in. He has since served 200 hours of community service, a DA spokeswoman said.

Khan, now 21, is due to be sentenced on August 26. Though he had been facing a maximum of 38 years in prison on the felony burglary and public-record tampering charges, he's expected to be sentenced to 30 days in jail, 500 hours of community service, and ordered to pay about $15,000 in restitution.

Cisco sends employees home to work

2009-06-26T09:03:00.000-07:00

today revealed it has garnered more than $277 million in productivity savings by letting employees work from home using the company’s own virtual office technology.

[ Slideshow: Taking a look at telework ]

Not only does Cisco's telecommuting technology help the company save on collaboration technologies, but also the company’s telework programmakes employees happy, survey results show. Cisco based its productivity savings on the number of billed hours at an average of $91 per hour, with the total figure reaching about $277 million. In addition, the vendor estimated employees garnered fuel cost savings exceeding $10 million per year.

Yet cost savings was not the primary goal of the survey, Cisco executives say.

“Our main intent was to really evaluate the social, economic and environmental impacts associated with telecommuting,” says Rami Mazid, vice president of global client services and operations at Cisco. “We sampled employees who have the flexibility and desire to telework to get the most up-to-date information, and the key conclusion is that employee productivity is much higher and collaboration is the same if not better when working remotely.”

Cisco also found that 91% of the nearly 2,000 respondents to a late 2008 survey believed the ability to telecommute is “somewhat or very important” to their overall satisfaction on the job, improving the vendor’s talent retention rate. More specifically, 69% of employees surveyed cited higher productivity when working from home and 75% said the timeliness of their work improved. More than 80% of respondents reported that their ability to communicate and collaborate with coworkers is the same or better when working from home. About two-thirds said their overall work quality improved when telecommuting, and 80% cited an improved quality of life by telecommuting.

Cisco’s survey showed that responding employees spend about 63% of their time communicating and collaborating, and 40% of those polled are not located in the same city as their manager. The average Cisco employee telecommutes about 2 days per week, and 60% use the time saved by telecommuting to work, while 40% put the extra hours toward personal activities.

The company, which about 18 months ago ramped up its telework program in response to a request from CEO John Chambers, estimates that about 20,000 Cisco employees use its Cisco Virtual Office (CVO) to work remotely from their homes. Another 80,000 Cisco employees and vendors have the company’s software product installed on their clients, which enables end users to VPN back to Cisco’s network securely from any location.

“Teleworking has been going on for quite some time at Cisco, but not at the scale we have today. It increased 18 months ago and we provided additional capabilities about 12 months ago and are seeing a huge demand to have CVO installed in employees’ homes recently,” Mazid adds. “A properly executed program for telecommuting can be extremely effective at unlocking employees’ potential by increasing work-life balance, productivity and overall satisfaction.”

Facebook rolls out storage system to wrangle massive photo stores

2009-04-03T11:02:00.000-07:00

Homegrown system, Facebook Haystack, built to handle multiplying files of user photos

Needing to better deal with 50 billion files worth of photos, engineers at Facebook are installing a new photo storage system they say is 50% faster than traditional systems.

The storage system, dubbed Haystack, has been under development in-house for the past couple of years, and Facebook has been rolling it out in limited test versions to parts of the network for the past few months. The company expects to use Haystack to store all Facebook photos by next week, according to Bobby Johnson, director of engineering at Facebook.

And Jonathan Heiliger, vice president of technical operations, toldComputerworld today that based on tests, Haystack is more than 50% faster than traditional photo storage systems.

"In terms of cost, if it's twice as efficient, we can have 50% less hardware," said Johnson. "With 50 billion files on disk, the cost adds up. It's essentially giving us some [financial] headroom."

Johnson and Heiliger said they began building the new storage system to better handle the growing number ofphotos Facebook has to store. Many of their 175 million and 200 million users share photos of everything from their pets to vacations, weddings and days at the beach. That means users are posting and calling up their own photos, as well as their friends' and family members' photos. Keeping the system running efficiently was a growing challenge.

Johnson noted that Facebook deals with 15 billion photos - not including all of the replications. User data grows by 500GB per day. And Facebook has 50 million requests per second to its back-end servers.

A spokesman for Facebook said more specifics about the new system will be released in a few weeks.

Johnson, though, said the system is so much faster than the previous one because of changes made to its setup. Haystack is tailored for small files that don't change very often, instead of for a small number of large files that are changing all the time. Traditional file directories also need file names, and a lot of resource cost goes to just finding the files. The new system uses ID numbers instead of names; that mapping is very small and doesn't involve directory structures or file names.

Johnson said that so far, the rollout of the new system has gone very smoothly.

Five-year-old Facebook's user base passed one-time leader MySpace last year, according to a recent report.

Facebook, once regarded as the up-and-coming social network, had almost 222 million unique visitors last month, while MySpace came in at 125 million, according to online researcher comScore Inc. That's a dramatic change, since the Facebook-MySpace race for unique visitors was a near dead heat in April 2008.

The company is closing in on a big milestone -- 200 million users, executives said today.

Massive computer spy network uncovered

2009-04-03T11:00:00.000-07:00

Massive computer spy network uncovered; Google downplays Google Docs security concerns; and Intel to release faster low-power laptop chips.

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A 10-month cyberespionage investigation has found that 1,295 computers in 103 countries and belonging to international institutions have been spied on, with some circumstantial evidence suggesting China may be to blame. The 53-page report, released on Sunday, provides some of the most compelling evidence and detail of the efforts of politically-motivated hackers while raising questions about their ties with government-sanctioned cyberspying operations. It describes a network which researchers have called GhostNet, which primarily uses a malicious software program called gh0st RAT to steal sensitive documents, control Web cams and completely control infected computers. The analysts did say, however, they have no confirmation if the information obtained has ended up being valuable to the hackers or whether it has been commercially sold or passed on as intelligence.

Google Docs users shouldn't lose sleep over the security concerns a security analyst has raised about the hosted suite of office productivity applications, Google said late Friday. In an official blog posting, Jonathan Rochelle, Google Docs' product manager, details why the company has determined that the issues included in the analyst's report are far from critical. Google's conclusions aren't a surprise. Hours after Ade Barkah published his report last Thursday, Google responded with a preliminary statement saying it was investigating the matter but that it didn't believe there were significant security issues with Docs. Nonetheless, Google evidently sees some merit in Barkah's report. Google has added information regarding Barkah's observations to its Docs "help" pages about creating drawings and about adding viewers and collaborators to documents.

Intel is expected to refresh its line of laptop chips Monday with new ultra-low-voltage processors that should make ultraportable laptops operate faster without sacrificing battery life. Intel currently offers ultra-low-voltage processors for fully functional thin and light laptops, such as Apple's expensive MacBook Air and Lenovo's ThinkPad X300. These chips fit into small spaces and draw less power than conventional laptop chips. The chips are about the size of a dime, or 60 percent smaller than mainstream laptop chips. The chips will run at clock speeds of up to 1.6GHz, a speed bump from earlier chips that ran at up to 1.40GHz.

The U.S. Library of Congress has begun uploading its audio archives to iTunes, and it will soon begin to post videos on YouTube, in an effort to make its materials easier for the public to access. The library already offers the materials at its own Web site but the expansion to YouTube and Apple's iTunes is part of the library's efforts to make its 15.3 million digital items more accessible. The decision to post audio and video on iTunes and YouTube follows a successful launch early last year of a library photo archive on Flickr. Since January 2008, the library's photos on Flickr have been viewed about 15.7 million times

...And those are the top stories from the IDG Global IT News Update, brought to you by the IDG News Service. I'm Sumner Lemon in Singapore. Join us again later for more news from the world of technology.

Bribery case creates possible IT security nightmare in D.C.

2009-03-14T09:15:00.000-07:00

Arrest of security exec leaves district officials facing 'huge mess' over potential security issues

After being arrested on bribery chargesyesterday, the District of Columbia's top information security official is being held without bail, partly because of uncertainty about whether he still has the ability to access the district's IT systems.

That's just one of many potential security issues facing D.C. government officials after the FBI raided the district's IT offices and arrested Yusuf Acar, its acting chief security officer, and a second man in connection with an alleged bribery scheme.

For instance, Acar had access to personnel data and other confidential information in the district's systems as part of his job. Court documents submitted by the FBI claim that several other district employees were also involved in the bribery scheme. Security analysts warn that Acar and his alleged accomplices could have created backdoors into systems. And since the alleged scheme included misdoings on a purchase of security software, there may be questions about the quality of the district's security tools.

From an IT security standpoint, municipal officials in Washington have a nightmare on their hands, said Johannes Ullrich, chief technology officer at the SANS Institute's Internet Storm Center in Bethesda, Md.

As a security official in the IT department, Acar would have had widespread access to the district's networks and probably also its databases and password files, Ullrich said. In addition, he would have been privy to details about its user-access-control procedures. That level of access and knowledge could have enabled him to do a variety of things, virtually undetected, if he so chose, according to Ullrich.

Without a thorough forensics investigation, there's no telling whether anything nefarious was actually done to the district's systems, Ullrich noted. He said some of the classic rogue-insider actions that D.C. officials should look for include installing backdoors, stealing data andplanting logic bombs designed to destroy data after a specified period of time has elapsed. Another is tricking other users into installing malware or compromised devices on their systems.

At Acar's arraignment in U.S. District Court yesterday, Assistant U.S. Attorney Thomas Hibarger cited a number of reasons why the IT worker should be held in jail pending a bond hearing scheduled for next Tuesday. First and foremost, Hibarger said there was a "serious risk" that Acar, who has relatives in Turkey, would try to flee the country. But Hibarger also pointed to Acar's broad system-access privileges and said prosecutors didn't know for sure that he would be blocked from accessing the district's network.

Federal investigators haven't said whether they think any of the data in the district's systems was compromised as part of the alleged bribery scheme. A spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office said today that he couldn't comment on the investigative steps being taken.

Asus soups up Lamborghini laptop with 1TB SSD

2009-03-04T09:21:00.000-08:00

Lamborghini VX5 also sports a Blu-ray drive

March 3, 2009 (Computerworld) Asustek Computer Inc. unveiled a new laptop at the CeBIT show in Hannover, Germany, today that comes equipped with a 1TB solid-state disk (SSD) drive, a 16-in. high-definition display, a Blu-ray drive and leather-covered panel rests.

The Asus Lamborghini VX5 laptop comes with an LCD cover designed to remind users of the Lamborghini Reventon sports car's aluminum-alloy fuselage.

Its piano-painted mirror surface is also supposed to mimic the car's finish. The notebook comes with a 1TB SSD from pureSilicon Inc., which launched the compact flash-memory drive in January.

Asus' new Lamborghini VX5. Pricing and release date have yet to be determined.

The pureSilicon SSD boasts a data-transfer burst speed of 300MB/sec., a sustained read speed of 240MB/sec. and a sustained write speed of 215MB/sec.

The Lamborghini VX5 will also come with an Intel Core 2 Quad CPU and 4GB of RAM. "It features a 'twin turbo' mode that users can utilize to accelerate CPU and GPU performance via a speed key," Asus said.

The notebook also has an illuminated "chiclet" keyboard that automatically lights up in low light conditions.

The laptop's display is a 16-in. "full HD" screen -- 1080p, or 1920 by 1080 pixels -- along with a dedicated Nvidia GeForce GT 130M graphics chip with 1GB of GDDR 3 video RAM.

The laptop's Blu-ray drive and the onboard HDMI socket allow output to an HDTV for watching movies.

Asus has not yet set a release data or price for the new laptop.

iPhone apps that foretell the future page 2

2009-03-04T09:13:00.000-08:00

NumberKey Connect makes a perfect companion to Apple's wireless Bluetooth and laptop keyboards, which lack number keys. It even offers four different themes, and its behind-the-scenes use of Bonjour translates to an automatic and reliable connection for your Macs running 10.5.5 and above, with an iPhone 2.1 or later. Simple in form and execution, this solution is both infinitely useful and potentially prophetic concerning future device interaction.

Of course, there's always full-on computer control, and for that you can use the free Mocha VNC Lite. As long as there's a wireless network connection -- including 3G signal -- and a properly configured Mac or PC, you can access your computer and control it as if you were in front of it, all from your iPhone.

The software provides support for all sorts of interaction using gestures and taps, including different input modes for controlling the screen or for manipulating icons on the computer.

Use Mocha VNC Lite to control either a Mac or a PC remotely.
Click to view larger image

For my part, I've used Mocha a few times to access mission-critical servers, allowing me to input commands via Mocha's on-screen keyboard remotely and helping me avoid a very bad day. At home, I use the software for accessing the Mac that controls my optical disk carousels. With Mocha and some not-so-fancy AppleScript, I can access the Mac to pick one of several hundred movie titles without having to interrupt the current program on screen.

My own examples are just scratching the surface as to what can be done with the ability to control a computer from anywhere you are.

Clearly, these are the first steps for the iPhone in device interactivity. Although the pairing of two wholly different devices to perform a specific task isn't anything new to the computer scene, the iPhone's software platform and wireless connectivity options portend an almost endless array of possibilities.

Note to Apple: For this to truly become the future, you need to open up hardware accessibility to third parties! (Although logic dictates you may already be working on this.)

iPhone + home automation

Apps: iPhone Home Controller 2.0, Smarthome

Imagine being able to read the contents of your fridge by glancing at a list stored on your iPhone; dimming the kitchen lights with a gesture on the touch screen; and finally being able to determine beyond all doubt that you did, in fact, turn the iron off.

As we march into the future, there is an emerging marketplace for mainstream hardware that bridges the gap between the iPhone and household appliances. While direct-connectivity options built into appliances are the next logical step, there are currently third-party options that enable home automation for existing homes.

Be warned, however; home automation is getting better, but it's still all rather geeky and niche-y, complete with dedicated online forums run mostly by über nerds who are to regular nerds what nerds are to normal people. If you're still curious after that caveat, there are a few sites that offer complete solutions, including Smarthome.com and the iPhone Home Controller 2.0.

For examples of home automation via the iPhone, the Smarthome site even offers a Web video that demonstrates dimming lights, turning on and off sprinklers and adjusting temperature. It also shows the ability to monitor all of the actions remotely using an IP-based Web camera.

If you still want more, check out this list of home automation software, compiled specifically for the iPhone, including many more options than I'm able to cover here.

iPhone apps that foretell the future

2009-03-04T09:08:00.000-08:00

More than just useful or fun, these iPhone apps point the way toward the future -- of the iPhone and smartphones in general.

Ah, the Apple App Store. Since July 2008, the month when Apple opened its wildly popular library of applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch, the world has been treated to more than 20,000 apps, with some 500 million downloaded as of February 2009.

Programs run the gamut from necessary, useful and a ton of fun all the way through to "none of the above."

And then there's another class of software -- iPhone apps that foretell the future.

These are the applications that offer clues as to how mobile users are likely to use their smartphones -- whether it's an iPhone or one of the iPhone's rivals -- in the months and years to come. (Just today,Amazon.com released a Kindle e-reader app for the iPhone.) While I focus specifically on the iPhone here, it's likely that other smartphone platforms will take a similar course as well.

With an eye on what's out there now in the App Store -- and what that inventory indicates about what could be coming next -- I've sorted through thousands of programs to pick a few apps that indicate the direction we could see the iPhone and other future mobile devices take.

Ready for a little reading of the tea leaves? Here's my personal list of iPhone apps that best exemplify the future of mobile applications.

iPhone + computer

Apps: Remote, NumberKey Connect, Mocha VNC Lite

In the future, we will definitely see a higher degree of interaction between the iPhone and the computer, and there a few popular products out right now that point the way.

Use Remote to access your tunes from afar, particularly if your computer or AirPort Express station is hooked up to a sound system.

Since the beginning, Apple has offered Remote, which has become a very popular app (and the price is right -- it's free). For the two of you who have never tried it, Remote allows the iPhone to access and control, via local Wi-Fi, iTunes content stored on a computer, which is incredibly useful if your computer or AirPort Express station is hooked up to a sound system.

The app offers an impressive amount of control, supporting nearly as many features remotely as you'd get if the content were stored on the iPhone itself.

In fact, the single thing that I found missing is the inability to view lyrics within music tracks.

Despite that one shortcoming, it's simple to set up, simple to manage and extraordinarily useful. This free app is a perfect example of cross-device interactivity.

NumberKey Connect lets your iPhone act as the Mac's number pad.
Click to view larger image

Another excellent example of computer-to-iPhone interaction is NumberKey Connect ($1.99) from Balmuda, which allows the iPhone to act as a Mac's number pad.

The software works in tandem with a small program running on your Mac (this computer-specific software is Mac-only as of press time, supporting both Intel- and PPC-based Macs) and like Remote, it utilizes Apple's Bonjour service-discovery networking protocol.

6 timesaving tips for Word 2007 End Part

2009-02-27T05:59:00.000-08:00

5. Give yourself some extra room between paragraphs.

If you're someone who likes to make notes between paragraphs while you edit or revise a document, or if you want to add new text to a single-spaced outline, give yourself a little extra room to work in by automatically adding a line of space between your paragraphs.

Select the whole document by hitting Ctrl-A, then hit Ctrl-0 and a new empty line will appear after every paragraph. Select All again and hit Ctrl-0 to make the extra lines go away. (This tip works in earlier versions of Word as well, except hitting Ctrl-0 a second time doesn't remove the extra spaces.)

6. Add random placeholder text.

Sometimes you need to add random text to a document as part of a demonstration or to get a feel for a new layout. The designer's standby is lorem ipsum, a block of Latin derived from Cicero's De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum (On the Ends of Good and Evil).

The lorem ipsum text has no meaning for modern readers, which makes it perfect for not being distracted by what the text says, so you can instead focus on what it looks like.

Place your cursor where you want the random text to start and type:

=lorem(x,y)

where x is the number of paragraphs you want to insert and y is the number of sentences each paragraph should contain. When you hit Enter, Word will insert the desired chunk of text. For example, =lorem(1,4) generates this:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Maecenas porttitor congue massa. Fusce posuere, magna sed pulvinar ultricies, purus lectus malesuada libero, sit amet commodo magna eros quis urna. Nunc viverra imperdiet enim.

Prefer your dummy text in English? Word 2007 will also insert English text, drawn from a Word 2007 tutorial, by replacing lorem with rand, like this:

=rand(1,4)

(Interestingly, in earlier versions of Word, the =rand function inserts repetitions of the classic typesetter's dummy sentence, "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." The tutorial text that Word 2007 uses is longer and more varied.)

HAVE YOUR SAY

What are your best tips for Word 2007?

Both =lorem and =randare handy ways of generating natural-looking text at blazing-fast speed.

I hope these tips save you some time next time you use Word 2007. Some of the features mentioned here were available (in some form or other) in earlier incarnations of the program, but if you didn't go digging through layers and layers of menus, you'd have never known it. New or old, though, all these functions can be useful to anyone who works with Word.

And there are probably further functions yet to be discovered -- I'm still looking for that Write Article button I just know has to be hidden in there somewhere.

Logan Kugler is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer who has written about technology and business for more than 30 national magazines, including MacLife, PC Magazine, Success and Advertising. Age.

6 timesaving tips for Word 2007 Part two

2009-02-27T05:58:00.000-08:00

You can even use this trick to find and replace one term with another -- "run" with "walk," "ran" with "walked," "running" with "walking" and so on. (Rather than choosing Replace All, it's better to review Word's suggestions individually to be sure the correct form is used each time.)

Combined with the new Reading Highlight feature in Word 2007, this makes for a powerful editing tool. For instance, most writers try to avoid using the verb "to be" too often in their work, preferring more active and descriptive verbs (e.g., "runs" rather than "is moving quickly").

Enter "be" as the search term, select "Find all word forms" and click Reading Highlight --> Highlight All. Every use of "is," "was," "has been," "are" and so on will be highlighted, making it easy to pay special attention to them while editing.

The various forms of "to be" are highlighted.

3. Work in two parts of a document at the same time.

Word's Split View allows you to view and work in two parts of the same document in one screen. This makes cutting and pasting chunks of text from the start to the end of a long document a breeze; adding references or endnotes is also a piece of cake.

You can even keep your outline or table of contents visible in one pane while you work away in the other. Each pane in the Split View can be scrolled independently, so you can move around as much as you need to.

To activate it in Word 2007, simply go up to the View tab, and in the Window area select Split. (In earlier versions of Word, select Window --> Split.) Your cursor will jump to the middle of the page on top of a horizontal "split line," and moving your mouse will move the split line up and down. Find a place where you want to split the page and click your mouse to place the line.

Your document will now be viewed through two independent panes, and you can work in either one. If you don't like where you put the split line, just grab it with your mouse and you can move it around as much as you want.

Look at two separate parts of your document in the same screen with Word's Split View.

Once you've entered Split View, changing back to the default is as simple as repeating the process. Just go up to the View tab and instead of Split, this time you'll see Remove Split. (In earlier versions of Word, select Window --> Remove Split.) Click that and presto -- your screen is back to normal.

4. Make changes in the Print Preview screen.

You're all ready to print, but first you decide to have a look at the Print Preview screen (select Office button --> Print --> Print Preview or hit Ctrl-Alt-I) to see how the document will appear on paper. That's when you spot the glaring error you missed. Normally, you'd have to exit out of the Print Preview screen and return to the document, then find the error all over again.

But with Word 2007, you can easily change the behavior of the Print Preview screen so you can edit your document without exiting Print Preview. In the Preview area in the Print Preview ribbon, uncheck the box next to Magnifier. As soon as that's done, clicking on the document will place your cursor just as it would in the normal editing screen. You can fix a typo, add a word or even rewrite whole paragraphs if you choose.

Uncheck the Magnifier option to edit your document in the Print Preview screen.

Then click Print and send it directly to the printer. You can save your changes here in Print Preview or back in normal view.

6 timesaving tips for Word 2007

2009-02-27T05:56:00.000-08:00

Unleash the power of Word 2007 with these quick tips

Microsoft's Word has always been an impressively powerful piece of software, with dozens, if not hundreds, of features most people never knew existed. The new"Ribbon" interface in Word 2007 attempts to make some of those features easier to find and use, but there are still a lot of really handy features that you may not even know to look for.

Here are six quick things you can do with Word 2007 that will save you oodles of time. Once you give them a try, you'll never want to do without them.

(Editor's note: Some of these tips work in earlier versions of Word. We've noted where that's the case, along with the variations in the steps you'll need.)

1. Highlight all appearances of a word or phrase in a document.

Traditionally, to find a word or phrase in a Word document, you would hit Ctrl-F (or select Edit --> Find from the pull-down menu), enter your search term and click Find Next to go to the next instance of the word in the document. From there, you'd continue to click Find Next to search for the next usage, and the next one after that, and rinse and repeat.

In Word 2007, you can run a single search that highlights every instance in the document, making it easy to scan through and find the exact instance of the word or phrase you're looking for (or to see if you've used the phrase far too often).

Choosing Highlight All in the Find dialog

Start a search as you normally would by hitting Ctrl-F and entering your search term. But instead of clicking Find, click on the Reading Highlight button at the bottom of the search window and select Highlight All. Every instance of your search term will be highlighted in whatever highlight color you have selected on your Home tab (yellow by default).

Voila! Your search term is highlighted throughout the document.

To remove the highlighting, simply hit Ctrl-F again to bring up the search window, click the Reading Highlight button and select Clear Highlighting. The highlighting will disappear.

2. Search for a word and all its variations.

Another powerful feature in Word 2007's search function is the ability to search for variations on a word, like plurals or verb tenses. (Earlier versions of Word can do this as well.) Click Ctrl-F to open the search form as usual, enter your search word and click the More button at the bottom. Check the box next to "Find all word forms."

Choosing "Find all word forms" in the Find dialog

When you run the search, Word will locate not only the word you entered, but all its variations. For example, say you want to find every time you describe the sport of running in your document. Enter "run" and Word will locate not just every instance of the word "run," but also "ran," "running" and "runs."

Note that Microsoft's terminology here is a little misleading. It doesn't actually find all forms of all words. For example, if you search on "music" and select "Find all word forms," it won't find "musical" or "musician." But if you enter a verb, Word will find all its tenses; if you enter the singular form of a noun, it will find the plural as well; and if you enter an adjective like "good," it will also find "better" and "best."

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For example, Apple Inc. released its Canvas design element in Safari for developers to play with, and then later offered the Canvas element to W3C as a possible CSS module. The idea has been accepted, although the first working draft has yet to be created.

For its part, IE8 will include a new feature called Access Control Specification, which handles cross-domain requests. "It's a new object, a new API that lets Web developers make a request across Web site domains," and it creates an object called a CrossDomainRequest (XDR) object, Wilson says. But it may be at odds with a similar effort at the W3C, the Access Control for Cross-Site Requests draft specification.

While Access Control is a standards draft in the Web Apps Working Group, says Wilson, "the working group declined our proposal of the separate object XDR, and wants to use Access Control" instead. While Microsoft has "concerns" about that approach, Wilson says that developers can allow the use of both objects by writing code that switches between objects as needs dictate. But in the long run, he says, "We hope to implement the working group's final spec."

Do developments like these foreshadow a return to the bad old days of browser wars? "If one of the teams starts ignoring that hard-won wisdom, we could be back where we were before," Meyer says. Adding lots of new capabilities outside of the standards-making process could easily "break forward movement" on standards.

Wilson doesn't see the XDR action as a move away from standards. "We were pragmatic, however, in recognizing we were better off building a parallel object for the time being," he says.

But all in all, Meyer thinks that Microsoft and other vendors are more cautious than they once were about getting too far ahead of the curve. "To a large degree, the browser vendors have learned their lesson."

Broken browsers: A sign of life?

While most of the Web code out there still isn't fully standards compliant, most major Web sites are much better than they used to be. Even with the 95% of Web sites that aren't fully compliant with all W3C specifications, in most cases the violations are trivial to the end user experience. "They forget an Escape or an ampersand," says Le Hegaret.

The browser's user agent string can easily be changed to fool browser detection schemes. Click to view larger image.

"There are developers who are unwilling or unable to follow the specifications.... there are gaps in the specifications that allow vendor-specific technology to take off, and there are parts of the existing specs that have not been implemented by all major browsers," says Lawson. But, he says, "I think the situation is improving."

Web standards are an ongoing process in which the goal posts keep moving all the time. They will never be perfect, nor will Web pages that follow them, even when those pages are created by standards-aware professionals with the best of intentions, says Meyer.

He points to one project where he was pulling images from Flickr into a Web site as an example. "The code [from Flickr] had unencoded ampersands in the links," he says. Meyer had a choice: "I could spend a half a day writing code to make sure I encoded every ampersand or I could do some real work." He chose the latter.

For all of the recent gains, the open Web is still very much a work in progress, but that's a good thing, Meyers says. "The only time you don't have issues to be resolved is when a system is closed and dead."

THE AUTHOR OF THIS FANTASTIC STORY IS Robert L. Mitchell.

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Corporate holdouts

The last to get standards religion may be internal-facing corporate Web sites, many of which were built specifically to work with Internet Explorer. "You find more proprietary approaches in the corporate environment because they control which browser they're using," says Le Hegaret. For example, ActiveX controls, which work only on Windows and are supported only in Internet Explorer, are more common on internal-facing Web sites.

Because IT can control which browser is used, organizations can protect themselves in the short term from the move to a standards-based Web. However, as market share for earlier versions of Internet Explorer drops over time, more and more Web developers will stop building customized sets of style sheets for Internet Explorer. It's simply too expensive to keep supporting a one-off case.

"If your Web site has to work with IE6, you have to add 20% to 30% in extra development time," says Koch. He predicts that developers will start dropping support for IE6's quirks within the next 12 to 18 months.

By making IE8 standards compliant by default, Microsoft is putting its corporate customers on notice that it's serious about standards. Koch was pleasantly surprised by Microsoft's change of heart. The broader community of Web developers is "suddenly more important than corporate developers. That's something I never expected to see."

Several other factors keep developers stuck in the past when it comes to coding Web sites. Many people are learning using outdated tutorials or are working with tools that aren't up to date and generate noncompliant Web pages. And the ease with which designers can borrow from one another on the Web helps propagate problematic practices.

"We're feeling the effects now of decisions that were made seven years ago. That's what frustrating to me," Featherstone says. And the challenge doesn't just involve overcoming technical problems such as the need to rework Web sites built exclusively for IE6. The attitude toward Web authoring was different then, he says: "It was, 'Let's get it out there quick and get it live,' not 'What's the best way to do this?'" In some quarters that attitude still persists.

The first release of Google's Chrome had a problem loading Gmail.

Click to view larger image.

But Web developers who want to learn can find plenty of up-to-date educational resources online says Zeldman. These include information offered by the Web Standards Project; the W3C's W3C tutorials and validation suite for Web pages, and Opera Software's Web Standards Curriculum. Resources are also available at sites such as Zeldman's A List Apart, Digital Web Magazine, and many others.

Zeldman says if you're not on the standards bandwagon, it's time to get on board. "Your Web sites will load faster, on more browsers and devices, reaching more people at lower cost," he says. "You'll spend more time iterating new features and coming up with new designs and net content ideas, and less time just getting the damn thing to work."

Innovations

As in the bad old days of browser wars, browser vendors still develop and include new features in their browsers that aren't yet standards -- and it may not be clear to developers that what they're embedding in their Web sites could change. In some cases, features are added to browsers and then submitted as possible standards later -- a process that could force developers who implement those technologies too early to rework their Web sites as the specification evolves.

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No browser today is 100% standards-compliant, says Meyer. "I don't think they ever can be. But they're certainly much, much closer than they used to be."

Tooling up for standards

Offering developers good tools that produce clean, standards-compliant code is critical to having an interoperable, standards-compliant Web. "Tools like Dreamweaver have made tremendous strides forward in standards support," says Derek Featherstone, group lead for the Web Standards Project. This advocacy group is best known for the Acid3 Browser Test, which checks browsers for standards compliance.

Meyers agrees that the improvement has been dramatic. "You really have to work to make them not produce standards-oriented markup and CSS now," he says.

But Web authoring tools are just one piece of the puzzle. Other sources of Web output -- such as Microsoft Word, with its ability to save a document as a Web page, and the default page templates used by many content management systems -- aren't always up to snuff.

"You have many automated tools -- wikis, content management systems -- that produce millions of pages every day. We need to make sure all of those tools provide valid markup," says Le Hegaret. While some tools do a good job -- and some even link to the W3C's HTML validator -- overall "we still have less support in authoring tools than we'd like," he says.

Educating the masses

You can have complete, unambiguous standards in place, fully compliant browsers and state-of-the-art authoring tools that generate compliant code, but nothing will change until Web site developers change their behavior. "There are lots of people who just slap code together until it works," says Meyer. But how do you get the world's Web developers -- and the more than 20 billion Web pagesthey've created -- up to speed?

Although the user is running Firefox 3, this site doesn't think so.

Click to view larger image.

Getting developers on board has always been a challenge. When Cascading Style Sheets were largely ignored by most developers in 2001, developer apathy almost killed the effort. Zeldman and his peers at the Web Standards Project evangelized to the broader community, converting high-profile developers at some of the largest and most successful Web sites to the new standards religion. "Today, as a result of that grass-roots advocacy, all browsers support standards, and most clued-in Web designers use standards as a matter of course," he says.

But many still aren't clued in, and education is now the Web Standards Project's biggest focus, says Featherstone.

Zeldman says developers who aren't following standards today fall into three groups. "Some are unwilling, some don't know any better, and some are willing and know better but are prevented from implementing best practices because of wrong-headed directives by out-of-touch marketing departments -- and sometimes, even IT departments."

Koch thinks that too much of the Web development community today consists of amateurs. "There are a lot of Web developers who haven't the faintest idea of what they're doing," he says. But he expects that to change as standards take hold. "Over the next few years, the people who aren't professionals will be out of a job."

But Le Hegaret thinks amateur designers are part of the fabric of the Web. He doesn't think they need to understand the details of the specifications to publish on the Web. "People shouldn't have to know CSS to produce nice Web pages. They should just have their tools produce CSS for them," he says.

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"Once that happens -- once sites that worked fine in old versions of IE start breaking -- the unwilling will get religion about Web standards," says Jeffrey Zeldman, executive creative director of the Web development firm Happy Cog and publisher of A List Apart, a Web site for developers.

Compatibility drag

However, not all the problems in IE7 are being fixed in IE8. One example of a problem that is being carried over is the nonstandard way in which IE defines an event handler in JavaScript. In event handling, a programmer writes a script that executes in response to an event, such as a user clicking on a link on a Web page.

"Microsoft deliberately ignored the standard," says freelance Web developer and author Peter-Paul Koch, who is known for his publication ofbrowser compatibility tables at Quirksmode.org. "They said, 'OK, we have the standard, but we are not going to implement it,'" and now that same event-handling module is moving into IE8. In response, Microsoft's Wilson says, "Event handling is something we still intend to bring into compliance with the DOM standard. However, we simply couldn't get it into IE8." And he notes that there are "well-known work-arounds" that developers can use.

Fortunately, the event-handling issue doesn't come up often, says Koch. He says he's glad to see Microsoft making progress with IE8's support for CSS 2.1, and he thinks it is unreasonable to expect Microsoft to fix everything overnight.

Even so, some observers believe that Microsoft is a few steps behind competing browsers, such as Firefox, Opera and Safari. The makers of those browsers are already implementing some of the more mature modules in the emerging specifications -- including the Canvas video element in HTML 5 and Scalable Vector Graphics. Some competing browser vendors "are already implementing CSS 3 because some modules are in the candidate recommendation phase," says W3C's Le Hegaret.

Field of challengers

The four biggest competitors to IE -- Firefox, Safari, Opera and Chrome -- have their share of problems as well, but they pale in comparison to the problems surrounding IE -- particularly earlier versions such as IE6. "There are slight differences between Firefox and Safari and Chrome but they are very minor," says Koch.

But there are problems. Firefox is the No. 2 browser on the market, with a share of about 20%. While Firefox follows standards, it is not perfect. For example, Web sites may write to Firefox-specific properties, such as the Gecko DOM Range.comparePoint method and other similar events, says Bruce Lawson, Web evangelist at Opera.

A reporter's online banking app ran fine in IE7, Firefox, Safari and Chrome, but not Opera.

Click to view larger image.

In fact, differences in how standards have been interpreted and bugs in the implementation have created issues for Opera, he says. Lawson calls those problems "Mozilla-isms."

Opera had to resort to adding JavaScript-based hacks to work around the compatibility layer that some Web sites had created for Firefox, says Lawson. For example, Opera changed how it handled the Date.getYear() method so that it returned a full year when the year was > 1999 or <>

It did this for cross-browser compatibility, "despite breaking the JavaScript spec," Lawson explained. Opera changed it, breaking the spec in version 9.5, because, Lawson says, "Mozilla and Apple got it wrong and it was breaking many pages -- mostly airline calendar widgets.

"In some cases, we supported the IE technology that the compatibility [layer] worked around but didn't support the Mozilla properties, so we had to force the site to give us the original IE code for that functionality. This is clearly not the best way to develop cross-browser Web sites."

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Because of IE's overwhelming market share, many developers have historically coded their sites to the nonstandard methodologies and work-arounds required to support IE6 and earlier browsers. Those sites often don't render properly when viewed from competing browsers, even if those browsers follow W3C standards. To address that, many developers keep two sets of cascading style sheets -- one for IE and one for everything else.

But times have changed. It used to be that everyone developed for IE first. Now it is the special case. Many developers code to a standards-compliant browser such as Firefox first and then present a different style sheet to IE users.

That's what Eric Meyer does. Meyer, a prominent Web developer, author and principal at Complex Spiral Consulting, says he might develop in Firefox first, using an extension like Firebug, then test it in Safari, Opera and other standards-compliant browsers. "In the end, I'll fire it up in IE, find out what went wrong and work the code around that," he says.

Looking toward IE8

As it develops its next version, Internet Explorer 8, Microsoft has gotten serious about supporting standards first. "In the past we've focused more on [backward] compatibility than interoperability. Now we're trying to be as interoperable as possible," says Wilson.

Microsoft's IE group is also playing a larger role at the W3C. "Microsoft has expressed that they want to support standards 100% on several occasions, and they are participating in our groups," says Le Hegaret.

Despite the progress, Microsoft still lags behind other browser vendors in incorporating the latest standards, such as Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), which is implemented in Firefox, Safari and Opera. (See box below for more information about the core W3C standards.)

Pages that use ActiveX generally work only with IE. Click to view larger image.

But with many parts of Internet Explorer in need of updating, Microsoft had to choose where to focus its attention when it developed IE8. "We tried to move everything forward across the board in IE8, but we picked one area we wanted to get right," and that was support for CSS 2.1, says Wilson.

Wilson's goal is to have a complete implementation of CSS 2.1 when IE8 finally ships. But the CSS 2.1 specification is still in the Candidate Recommendation stage. Wilson says IE's release will go forward next year whether CSS 2.1 is final or not.

He's confident, he adds, that there will be "minimal interoperability problems." If definitions do change in the final Recommendation, future versions of IE will change to support that, he says.

As with any other fully standards-compliant browser, IE8 will work on all Web sites that follow the standards -- and break when visiting sites that were designed to exploit the proprietary features and other idiosyncrasies of Internet Explorer 6 and 7. To fix that, Web site designers will either need to make their Web sites conform to standards or add a tag in the Web page header that tells IE8 to switch to IE7 behavior.

CORE W3 STANDARDS

While the W3C has more than 120 standards (which it calls recommendations) in place, the five most prominent are:

HTML for markup
Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) for XML-based graphics
the Portable Network Graphics (PNG) graphics file format
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
the Document Object Model (DOM), a programming interface for accessing and updating Web page content

Some of the most active and forward-looking work is being done in the groups working on the emerging HTML 5 and CSS 3 specifications.

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Better browsers. Better standards. Better tools. So why are Web pages still breaking?

Jeffrey Zeldman must have thought he'd never live to see the day. Ten years after he co-founded the Web Standards Project, all of the major browser vendors have shown renewed commitment to supporting World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)standards in the last few years -- and they're following through.

The specifications in the latest standards initiatives are tighter than ever. Web authoring tools are generating more compliant code. Two of the three rendering engines that underpin the major browsers in use today are open source. And, for the first time ever, the latest version ofMicrosoft's browser, Internet Explorer 8, will operate strictly in standards-compliant mode by default. In other words, it will support the W3C standards before it provides backward compatibility with nonstandard methods supported by Microsoft's previous browsers.

Those who lived through the browser wars of the '90s might think that hell has frozen over, were it not for one, small problem: Users still experience plenty of problems on the Web. A recent reportissued by browser vendor Opera Software ASA showed that the average page on the Web strays from WC3 page markup specifications 47 times. Overall, just 4.13% of the 3.5 million Web pages Opera searched were fully standards-compliant when tested against the W3C validation suite.

Why? Because there are still older Web sites that haven't been updated, and many developers still don't design their pages to meet modern standards and best practices. Different browser vendors still interpret some standards differently in some cases and don't fully implement all of the W3C-standard features in others. Developers for some Web sites still lock out users who have the "wrong" browser by using whitelists or blacklists that block unapproved browsers or browser versions.

As for the standards themselves, some existing specifications still suffer from ambiguities or leave some desired features undefined. And improvements in the thoroughness of new standards, such as CSS 2.1, also have a down side: They have slowed the standardization process -- a fact that has frustrated some Web developers and could tempt browser vendors to once again innovate outside of the standards framework.

Turning the Microsoft ship

Microsoft's Internet Explorer doesn't dominate the browser market in the way it once did, but it still has the largest market share by far. IEcurrently accounts for about 70% of the browsers in use, down from a high of about 95% in the pre-Firefox days. Of that 70%, about half are running IE7 while about one quarter are still using IE6 or earlier versions.

Idiosyncrasies in the various versions of IE -- especially IE6 -- have created problems for other browser vendors and Web developers. Even Microsoft has struggled to maintain backward compatibility with bugs, nonstandard methods and other issues it has created for itself. As a result, Microsoft has had to drag along an installed base of corporate and public Web sites that were built to the quirks of its previous browsers, trapping itself into endless iterations of standards noncompliance to provide backward compatibility.

This site warns, "Users with IE7 will be unable to view the site properly."

Click to view larger image.

"It's difficult for them to keep their own bugs alive over the years because they know that they can break thousands of pages," says Philippe Le Hegaret, interaction domain lead at the W3C.

For example, in an inconsistency in IE thatChris Wilson, platform architect for Internet Explorer, calls the "CSS overflow problem," Microsoft's IE7 browser displayed overlapping text when viewing Web pages designed to IE's nonstandard approach used in IE6. The Web sites were sending IE 7 a special case style sheet for IE6 while serving up standards-compliant renditions of the pages to Firefox and every other standards-compliant browser. The sites worked with every browser except for IE7.

Microsoft lashes out at Adobe over Silverlight comments

2009-02-22T07:09:00.000-08:00

An Adobe exec says the rival to Flash has 'fizzled'

Microsoft is crying foul over recent comments made by an Adobe executive that Silverlight has "fizzled" as a competitor to Adobe's Flash.

In his blog, Tim Sneath, director of the Windows and Silverlight technical evangelism team, accused Mark Garrett, Adobe's executive vice president and CFO, of "living in a fantasy world" if he thinks that Silverlight adoption is waning.

"The idea that Silverlight is in anything other than rude health is more to do with what Adobe would like to be the case, rather than what actually is the case," he wrote in the blog posting. "The suggestion that 'Silverlight adoption has fizzled out in the last 6-9 months' is pretty risible, in fact. For starters, Silverlight 2 shipped four months ago, and in just the first month of its availability, we saw over 100 million successful installations just on consumer machines. That doesn’t sound like 'fizzling out' to me."

Sneath was responding to comments Garrett made when answering a question about Silverlight and the competitive landscape at the Thomas Weisel Partners Technology & Telecom Conference 2009 in San Francisco on Tuesday. In his comments, confirmed Thursday by an Adobe representative, Garrett said Silverlight adoption was strong when the technology was right out of the gate but has tapered off in the past six to nine months.

Sneath's reference to Silverlight 2, the second version of the technology, is key to his defense of the technology. Silverlight, which comprises a tool for developing and designing Internet applications and a media player for delivering content, was first introduced in Version 1.0 in April 2007. However, it wasn't until the release of Silverlight 2 that the technology was fully baked and became truly viable as an alternative to Adobe Flash.

But Microsoft lost customers when Silverlight didn't live up to its expectations, even after Silverlight 2 was released. MLB.com, which switched from Flash to Silverlight to stream live baseball games beginning in August 2007 with Silverlight 1.0, said in November -- a month after 2's release -- that it was dumping Silverlight and had signed a two-year deal with Adobe to use Flash again for live streaming.

That said, some high-profile Web sites have used Silverlight 2 to live-stream some notable events recently -- the inauguration of U.S. President Barack Obama last month and the 2008 Summer Olympics in August were among them.

In his post, Sneath pointed out some other recent high-profile Silverlight customers, not just in the U.S. but also overseas. In the U.S., both Netflix and the Home Shopping Network launched on-demand services that use Silverlight, he said. In Europe, satellite broadcast network Sky launched a video-on-demand service using Silverlight in December, and the technology also is being adopted for television broadcasting portals in Japan and Korea, Sneath added.

But Flash has had a significant head start, and adoption of the technology remains strong, according to Adobe. It has been doing some touting of its own lately, not just about Flash but also about a new technology, Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR). AIR allows developers to use the same tools with which they build Web-based applications to create desktop apps.

Two weeks ago, Adobe said the newest version of Flash, Flash 10, was installed on more than 55% of computers worldwide in the first two months of its release and is expected to surpass 80% adoption by the second quarter, the fastest installation rate of any versions of the technology. Moreover, AIR has reached nearly 100 million installations in less than a year after release.

Flash is actually gaining momentum since Microsoft released Silverlight, according to comScore research for 2008 that shows Flash increasing its worldwide share of video on the Web from 66% to more than 80%.

Also, although Silverlight has scored some high-profile Web sites as customers, enterprise developers have said its adoption among businesses -- a scenario in which it actually has an advantage over Flash because of Microsoft's historical strength in that market and the ability of developers to use .Net tools to build Silverlight applications -- has been lackluster.

Developers cited Silverlight 2's launch during an economic recession -- when businesses, particularly enterprises, are hesitant to switch to new technologies -- as a factor hampering its adoption.

Firefox 3.1 delivery slips; developers question TraceMonkey progress

2009-02-22T07:04:00.000-08:00

JavaScript engine bugs push release to Q2; Microsoft's IE8 may ship first

Some Mozilla Corp. developers have recommended that the company consider yanking the new JavaScript engine, dubbed TraceMonkey, from Firefox 3.1 to get the browser back on track and out the door.

Their comments came as Mozilla's head of engineering acknowledged that the browser's final delivery date will slip.

In a message posted to a company message forum, Firefox developer David Baron wondered how long Firefox 3.1 should be held up by TraceMonkey problems. "Without TraceMonkey, we probably could have shipped 3.1 final by now, or, if not now, within the next month," Baron said. "I think there should be a limit to the amount we're willing to slip 3.1 to accommodate TraceMonkey, and I think we should decide what that limit is."

Graydon Hoare, a Mozilla developer who works on TraceMonkey, agreed. "I have to concur here," he said in a message on the same forum thread. "TraceMonkey is really cool tech, and a remarkably quick initial development, but it's not the whole enchilada of the browser." Hoare, however, said it made more sense to disable TraceMonkey by default -- an approach used through Beta 1 -- rather than pull it from the product.

Mozilla has made much of TraceMonkey, and the performance boost it gives Firefox, since it introduced the new JavaScript engine last summer. But TraceMonkey bugs, and the slow pace in patching them, were responsible for delays last month, and for a three-week stretch this month when Mozilla put off scheduling the next preview, Beta 3.

The biggest bug now delaying Beta 3's release is a TraceMonkey issue.

But Mozilla will probably not pull the engine, said Mike Shaver, Mozilla's vice president of engineering, in an interview Saturday. "We're always looking at all of our choices, but I don't think it's likely," he said. "TraceMonkey is a big part of Firefox 3.1, and a big part of what we want to have for users."

Saying that Firefox 3.1 in its current form is "quite a stable product," Shaver said patience is a development virtue. "We're taking the time to get this worked out," he said. "No one will remember when Firefox 3.1 shipped other than the guy who writes the Wikipedia entry. But people will remember how Firefox 3.1 runs."

Comments by developers such as Baron and Hoare are in no way a "revolt" by programmers, said Shaver, who added that such discussions are normal at Mozilla, and during software development in general. "There's always talk about what we should trade off," he said.

Mozilla conceived Firefox 3.1 as a "fast-track" update to June 2008's Firefox 3.0, but the new browser's progress has been much slower than originally planned. At one point, Mozilla was shooting for a final release as early as the last months of 2008, and hinted that it would use just a single beta to do so.

Today's Story "Becoming an IT Consultant" End Page

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You cannot assume that family and friends will automatically respect your work space and honor the working hours or the structure you've set up for yourself.

"You have to talk about your schedule. Lay out your ground rules. It's got to be clear that the computer in dad's office, for instance, is for business and not for watching YouTube," says Mathis.

For help with printing, presentations and administrative support, get to know your local copy shop. "They'll let you send them stuff online," says Rodgers.

To elaborate: many local and national office supply chains offer services whereby customers can send electronic documents via e-mail in the morning and pick up completed PowerPoint or paper-based presentations hours later.

Mind your finances

Over and over, consultants say what scared them most about striking out on their own was the absence of a regular paycheck and company-provided health benefits.

"I was scared to death," says Mathis. "I liked direct deposit."

The best thing that newly minted consultants can do is educate themselves about the sales cycle of consulting services. It may take 12 to 18 months between an initial meeting and the time a contract for services is actually signed. For this reason, most consultants recommend having the equivalent of two years' worth of expenses socked away in the bank.

"Chances are you won't see a return for a good 12 to 18 months," says My CIO's Chaabouni. "You need willpower and reserves to sustain the lack of income for 12 to 18 months. You need to stick it out at least 18 months and maybe even longer given this economy."

As for setting fees, Rodgers' strategy is to charge what the market will bear, which means different rates depending on the location of an assignment. Even within Arizona, for example, she charges less in Tucson than in Phoenix.

Another pricing strategy is to make sure your fees are less than those of Accenture and the other big, national consulting firms, Rodgers says. ???If I can price myself equal to or less than them, it's still excellent money" and makes her services attractive to clients, she says. To find out what the big firms are charging, Rodgers says she asks consultants with whom she networks. She also often partners on projects with other consultants or firms and can see what others are charging that way.

Ask for prepayment or a retainer. Make sure your client has some skin in the game.

MOEZ CHAABOUNI, MY CIO

Money coming in needs to be managed. Chaabouni's advice: "Get yourself a good accountant, and pay your taxes before you pay yourself." Because consultants get paid in large chunks on an irregular basis, "it's so easy to get intoxicated by a big check that you may go on a spending spree," he says. "If I get a check and I don't make an immediate payment to theIRS, I may be hurting downstream. A good accountant will educate you and help you and keep you true."

In addition to your own books, mind your potential clients' finances as well. "If the client is a start-up and hasn't been in business all that long or if their business model is shaky or there is some other red flag, demand prepayment or demand a retainer," Chaabouni advises. "Make sure they have some skin in the game."

Finally, as an independent consultant, health care insurance is bound to be one of your bigger expenses. There are several options. If you're married, check to see if you can participate in your spouse's health care plan. Otherwise, various professional associations, such as theIndependent Computer Consultants Association, a national nonprofit based in St. Louis, offer group health insurance plans for independents. A third option is teaching part-time at a local university as a way to become eligible for employer-based health care benefits at a reduced cost.

Navigating the cultural changes

As much as he hates to admit it, one of the biggest culture shocks for Mathis was learning to function without a support staff. "As embarrassing as it is, one of the most difficult parts for me of going from executive to consultant was I had to take care of myself," Mathis says. "I was so used to someone taking care of my schedule and reminding me of appointments, and when all of a sudden they're not there, it's a culture shock. You're your own salesperson and secretary."

Changing your professional lifestyle can also be tough on your family, Mathis says. He spends a lot of time on the road, staying in hotel rooms. He books his own travel through an agency that charges him a flat fee of $20 per trip.

"When you've been traveling first class and the limo picks you up and someone is there to make sure all the arrangements are flawless and then you don't have that level of support, it's a shock," agreesComputerworld columnist Bart Perkins, a former CIO and now managing partner at Louisville, Ky.-based Leverage Partners Inc.

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"It's a little bit intoxicating that people will pay me for what I know, but I travel a lot," says Mathis. "People don't buy services over the Internet. They'll read your proposal, but they want you to come to them and present it. My wife will tell you there are times she wishes I was still a CIO," he says.

On the upside, however, Mathis is able to schedule three- and four-week family vacations and get to more of his children's ballgames. "I have seen 100% more of my kids' games than when I was a CIO," Mathis says.

"But in the middle of dinner if the phone rings and it's a prospective client, I take the call," he says. "When you're only eating what you kill, and something comes across your path, you chase it."