Microsoft sees end of Windows era
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Microsoft has kicked off a research project to create software that will take over when it retires Windows.
Called Midori, the cut-down operating system is radically different to Microsoft's older programs.
It is centred on the internet and does away with the dependencies that tie Windows to a single PC.
It is seen as Microsoft's answer to rivals' use of "virtualisation" as a way to solve many of the problems of modern-day computing.
Tie breaking
Although Midori has been heard about before now, more details have now been published by Software Development Times after viewing internal Microsoft documents describing the technology.
Midori is believed to be under development because Windows is unlikely to be able to cope with the pace of change in future technology and the way people use it.
Windows worked well in an age when most people used one machine to do all their work. The operating system acted as the holder for the common elements Windows programs needed to call on.
"If you think about how an operating system is loaded," said Dave Austin, European director of products at Citrix, "it's loaded onto a hard disk physically located on that machine.
"The operating system is tied very tightly to that hardware," he said.
That, he said, created all kinds of dependencies that arose out of the collection of hardware in a particular machine.
 |  If Windows ends up being less important over time as applications become more OS agnostic where will Microsoft make its money?  Michael Silver, Gartner |
This means, he said, that Windows can struggle with more modern ways of working in which people are very mobile and very promiscuous in the devices they use to get at their data - be that pictures, spreadsheets or e-mail.
Equally, he said, when people worked or played now, they did it using a combination of data and processes held locally or in any of a number of other places online.
When asked about Midori by BBC News, Microsoft issued a statement that said: "Midori is one of many incubation projects underway at Microsoft. It's simply a matter of being too early in the incubation to talk about it."
Virtual machines
Midori is widely seen as an ambitious attempt by Microsoft to catch up on the work on virtualisation being undertaken in the wider computer industry.
Darren Brown, data centre lead at consulting firm Avanade, said virtualisation had first established itself in data centres among companies with huge numbers of servers to manage.
Putting applications, such as an e-mail engine or a database, on one machine brought up all kinds of problems when those machines had to undergo maintenance, needed updating or required a security patch to be applied.
By putting virtual servers on one physical box, companies had been able to shrink the numbers of machines they managed and get more out of them, he said.
"The real savings are around physical management of the devices and associated licensing," he said. "Physically, there is less tin to manage."
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Equally, said Mr Brown, if one physical server failed the virtualised application could easily be moved to a separate machine.
"The same benefits apply to the PC," he said. "Within the Microsoft environment, we have struggled for years with applications that are written so poorly that they will not work with others.
"Virtualising this gives you a couple of new ways to tackle those traditional problems," he said.
Many companies were still using very old applications that existing operating systems would not run, he said. By putting a virtual machine on a PC, those older programs can be kept going.
A virtual machine, like its name implies, is a software copy of a computer complete with operating system and associated programs.
Closing Windows
"On the desktop we are seeing people place great value in being able to abstract the desktop from actual physical hardware," said Dan Chu, vice president of emerging products and markets at virtualisation specialist VMWare.
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Some virtual machines, he said, acted like Windows PCs to all intents and purposes. But many virtual machines were now emerging that were tuned for a particular industry, sector or job.
"People take their application, the operating system they want to run it against, package it up along with policy and security they want and use that as a virtual client," he said.
In such virtual machines, the core of the operating system can be very small and easy to transfer to different devices. This, many believe, is the idea behind Midori - to create a lightweight portable operating system that can easily be mated to many different applications.
Microsoft's licensing terms for Windows currently prohibited it acting this way within a virtual appliance, said Mr Chu.
Michael Silver, research vice president at Gartner, said the development of Midori was a sensible step for Microsoft.
"The value of Microsoft Windows, of what that product is today, will diminish as more applications move to the web and Microsoft needs to edge out in front of that," he said.
"I would be surprised if there was definitive evidence that nothing like this was not kicking around," he said.
The big problem that Microsoft faced in doing away with Windows, he said, was how to re-make its business to cope.
"Eighty percent of Windows sales are made when a new PC is sold," he said. "That's a huge amount of money for them that they do not have to go out and get.
"If Windows ends up being less important over time as applications become more OS agnostic where will Microsoft make its money?" he asked.
 The battery fault does not affect the vast majority of iPod Nanos |
Apple has admitted that a battery fault had led to a small number of its first generation iPod Nanos overheating.
But it said that the problem was "rare", occurring in 0.001% of devices sold between 2005 and 2006 adding there had been no serious injuries or damage.
The comments came after the Japanese government began investigating a possible battery defect in the Nano.
There have been two reports of the music players overheating in Tokyo, scorching nearby paper.
Economy, Trade and Industry ministry official Hiroyuki Yoshitsune said the government was in touch with Apple to investigate the defect.
Battery problems
Apple said the overheating problem, which could lead to the iPod failing to work and being damaged, could be traced to a single battery supplier.
"There have been no reports of serious injuries or property damage, and no reports of incidents for any other iPod Nano model," it said.
Any customer worried about their device, bought between September 2005 and December 2006, should contact customer services, Apple added.
Lithium-ion batteries, which are used in iPods, have been blamed for a series of fires in laptops, which resulted in global recalls.
In 2006, Apple was forced to recall some 1.8 million lithium-ion Sony-made laptop batteries that were prone to overheating.
Russia rejects UN Georgia draft
Filed under: Author:Russia has rejected a draft UN Security Council resolution on Georgia, saying it contradicted the terms of last week's ceasefire deal.
The draft text called on Russia to pull back its forces to the positions held before the current conflict.
But Russia says the truce allows its troops to stay in a buffer zone on the Georgia side of South Ossetia's border.
Moscow earlier dismissed a Nato warning that normal relations were impossible while its troops remained in Georgia.
The conflict broke out on 7 August when Georgia launched an assault to wrest back control of the Moscow-backed breakaway region of South Ossetia, triggering a counter-offensive by Russian troops who advanced beyond South Ossetia into Georgia's heartland.
Georgia says its action was in response to continuous provocation.
UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband, who is visiting the region, is to visit a camp for displaced people in Georgia on Wednesday. Tens of thousand of people have been made homeless by the recent conflict.
On Tuesday, Mr Miliband held talks with Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, to update him on Nato's reaction at an emergency meeting of foreign ministers in Brussels which demanded that Russia pull its troops out of Georgia.
The foreign secretary criticised Russia's failure to keep to a promise to withdraw troops from Georgia.
Meanwhile, a Russia's main security service, the FSB, says a Russian officer has been detained accused of spying for Georgia.
An ethnic Georgian, Mikhail Khachidze was arrested in the southern Russian region of Stavropol near Georgia, an FSB spokesman said.
"[He] was involved in collecting secret information on Russian armed forces, its combat readiness as well as data on other servicemen," he said.
Russian veto
At the UN, Russia's ambassador said the French-drafted UN resolution went against the terms of the ceasefire brokered by France's President Nicolas Sarkozy.
Vitaly Churkin said the resolution should incorporate all elements of the six-point peace plan agreed last week.
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He also objected to language in the draft reaffirming Georgia's territorial integrity, saying South Ossetia and Abkhazia did not want to be part of Georgia.
Russia can veto UN resolutions and the ambassador told the BBC that putting the text to a vote would be pointless.
He said: "It's a waste of time because the process of the withdrawal of Russian forces will continue."
Following a rebuke from Nato's 26 foreign ministers in Brussels, Moscow accused Nato of bias in favour of the "criminal regime" in Tbilisi.
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Russia risked becoming the "outlaw" of the conflict, in an interview with CBS news on the sidelines of the Nato emergency meeting.
Russia says President Dmitry Medvedev told President Sarkozy that by Friday, Russian troops would either be sent home, be pulled back to South Ossetia or to a buffer zone along the border.
HAVE YOUR SAYAs an American, I find Bush's and Rice's comments regarding the attacks on a sovereign nation in the 21st Century just too embarrassing to bearB Coyle, Maryland
Russia said it had begun a pullback on Tuesday as it withdrew 11 military vehicles from the Georgian town of Gori.
A Russian officer told reporters invited to watch that the column was heading for South Ossetia and then home to Russia, but Georgia dismissed it all as a show.
BBC correspondents there say there are still several artillery positions and checkpoints in Gori.
And the operators of the Georgian Black Sea port of Poti told the BBC that Russian forces had seized the commercial harbour.
In an apparent goodwill gesture on Tuesday, the two sides exchanged prisoners at a checkpoint near Tbilisi, but on the same day Russia paraded captive Georgians on armoured vehicles.
How to Manage Priorities With Excel
Filed under: Microsoft Author:How to Manage Priorities With Excel
Writing your priorities on paper works if you’re able to knock them off in an afternoon. With a torrent of incoming tasks at home or work, many get carried over to the next day (or week or month). This Excel spreadsheet watches approaching deadlines and shifts task priorities accordingly. In 20 minutes the steps below provide a more effective way to manage your priorities. Steps
- Create a "Home" or "Office" tab. Open a new Excel spreadsheet. Right click on the "Sheet1" tab at the bottom and click on Rename. Type in "Home" or "Office".
- Rename Sheet2 as "Template" and Sheet3 as "Points" by repeating Step 1.
- Create the Importance table. On the Points tab, fill in columns A, B and C:
- Define the name "Importance". Select from Cell A2 to C7. Click on Insert Name Define
Define the name as "Importance" and click OK. - Create the Effort Table. Repeat steps 3, 4 and 5 to create the Effort table in columns E, F, and G. Select cells E2 to G6 and give them the name "Effort".
- Create the Urgency table. Repeat steps 3, 4 and 5 to create the Urgency table in columns I, J and K. Name them "Urgency".
- Enter headings on Home tab. Click on the Home tab and insert headings in row 1:
- A - Priority A formula, 1 for the most important task, but can be over 100
- B - Task Name of the task.
- C - Importance An A, B, C, D, E, or F from the table.
- D - Effort A 1-5, from the Effort table.
- E - Urgency A formula based on Due date.
- F - Due Date when the task should be finished. Due dates are not hard and fast. Ramp Up tells you how early you could start the task and Extension tells you how many days it could slide. Getting a haircut might have a Ramp Up of 5 and an Extension of 4 - it doesn’t make sense to get a haircut 2 weeks early and people might notice if it was more than 5 days late.
- G - Ramp Up Days prior to Due date you could start task.
- H - Extension Automatic extension of Due date
- I - Days Left Formula. Number of days before Due date; negative if Due date has passed.
- J - Finished Date task was actually completed.
- K - Comment Any details for the task.
- Enter your list of tasks. Note Priority, Urgency and Days Left are left blank. They will be filled in with formulas. Here’s a sample of home tasks.
- Enter formulas for Days Left, Urgency and Priority. The formulas below are for row 2.
- I (Days Left) =F2-IF(ISBLANK(J2),TODAY(),J2)
- E (Urgency) =IF(I2>G2,5,IF(I2>0,4,IF(I2=0,3,IF(I2+H2>0,2,1))))
- A (Priority) =VLOOKUP(C2,Importance,2,FALSE) + VLOOKUP(D2,Effort,2,FALSE) +VLOOKUP(E2,Urgency,2,FALSE)
- Change the format for Cell I2 to Integer by right clicking on the cell, selecting format and make it a Number with 0 Decimal places.
- Copy formulas for Priority, Urgency and Days Left to the remaining cells in each column. Select cell E2 and type CTRL-C. Select cells E3 to E10 and click CTRL-V. Repeat to copy cell I2 to cells I3 to I10. Finally, repeat to copy cell A2 to cells A3 to A10. Ignore the odd values you get for undefined tasks.
- Sort the rows by Priority. Select from cells A1 to K, for as many rows as you have data. Then click on Data Sort.
- Save your priorities spreadsheet, including the date for versioning.
- Mark tasks Finished. As you complete tasks, mark the date in the Finished column. Remember CTRL-; (control key and semi-colon) immediately enters the current date.
- Watch Priorities change each day. Here are the priorities over several days. On July 13 all tasks are before the Ramp Up period, so have large numbers. On July 20th, higher priorities (smaller numbers) appear for four tasks, including Mow Lawn which has hit its Due date. On the 21st, the priority is higher because we're in the Extension period and on July 23rd it's even higher because it's beyond the Extension period. Pay bills also goes through an escalation on the 23rd and 25th.
Tips
- Keep separate Excel files for family/home and work.
- Split large tasks into smaller ones.
- Read articles listed below on prioritizing and time management.
- Sort the task list every day if necessary.
- Copy recurring tasks to the Templates tab, so you can find and recopy them back easily.
- Add conditional formats on Due date to indicate when it is overdue.
- Weekly, monthly (or perhaps double that) count the number of completed tasks in each period. This may be the only positive feedback you might get on your work.
- Feel free to change the points given for each part of priority.
- Feel free to add more columns - who assigned the task, category, etc.
- Use AutoFilter to select past due tasks (Urgency=1) or highly important tasks (Importance="A")
Warnings
- Save the spreadsheet every few sessions for recovery.
- The calculated priorities are not ordinal numbers. Completing a “1” priority task doesn’t shift all the others up. Priorities can range to over a hundred and not all numbers are possible. Focus usually on priorities between 1 and 12.
- Don't worry about having too many tasks - even two months of tasks can wait at the bottom of the list until their due date approaches.
- Time management is highly personal and this spreadsheet may not fit with your needs and preferences. It may feel intrusive or just too demanding to visit daily. It may work for you, but not your friends or vice versa.
- Instead of carrying your Excel files with you all the time, use Google Spreadsheet so your files will always be available to you.
Housing starts and permits tumble in July
Filed under: finincial Author:The annual pace of housing starts at 965,000 slimly beat Wall Street's expectations of 960,000, but it was the lowest since a 921,000 unit rate in March 1991. In June, housing starts rose 10.4 percent, revised up from the previously reported 9.1 percent.
Building permits, an indicator of future construction, dropped to an annual rate of 937,000, well below the 970,000 analysts polled by Reuters had forecast.
The magnitude of the drop in permits was the biggest since a plunge of almost 24 percent in February 1990, while the number was the lowest since March this year, when they were 932,000.
Single family homes, which constitute the bulk of new housing, were especially weak. The annual unit rate of 641,000 single family homes started in July was the lowest since January 1991, when they were 604,000. Building permits were 584,000, the lowest since 523,000 in August 1982.
U.S. stocks extended their losses and U.S. Treasury bond prices pared their gains after the data were released.
In June, new home construction was boosted by a change in New York City building codes. But July's national numbers hinted that the United States may still be mired in a housing downturn.
"It can be seen as a payback in June from the building code change in New York City. We may see another decline in August," said Dana Saporta, economist at New York's Dresdner Kleinwort Securities LLC.
"The fundamentals in housing are still poor," Saporta added.
(Reporting by Lisa Lambert, Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)
