107276
submission
kumachan writes:
According to a Standards New Zealand spokesperson, the objection is that "the ISO [The International Organisation for Standardisation] has already developed a standard for XML open format [that is, Open Document] and the committee does not believe that there is a need for another standard, and that Microsoft's [standard] is in conflict with the existing one."
http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/news/82AF97DEB BAFD057CC2572990006C14C
103028
submission
alphabetasigmagamma writes:
The Computer Science Club of the University of Waterloo hosted a talk in 1989 with Bill Gates as the speaker. Recently this audio tape of the talk has been discovered by the Computer Science Club office and has since been digitized and posted on the Computer Science Club website at http://www.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/media/ In this talk you get to hear Bill Gates in an awkward position at Microsoft, promoting the then soon to fail OS/2 operating system product while at the same time downtalking slightly the significance of Windows. This rare glimpse into Microsoft in its early days shows some of the predictions that Microsoft got right as well as got wrong (such as the memory allocation issues in MS-DOS). In addition, Bill Gates discusses how he sees the computer industry in the coming years.
93410
story
alphadogg writes
"Quanta Computer has confirmed orders for 1 million notebook PCs for the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. The article goes into some background on the project, and lays out the enthusiastic adoption that the project is seeing overseas. The company estimates they'll ship somewhere between 5 and 10 Million units this year, with 7 countries already signed up to receive units. The machines currently cost $130, but with that kind of volume the original goal of $100 a machine may be viable. Even with the low cost, Quanta expects to make a small profit on each machine, making charity work that much easier."
