Blog of Henry Jia (贾宏宇)

Microsoft Announces 2006 Target Date for Broad Availability Of Windows "Longhorn" Client Operating System
Microsoft Announces 2006 Target Date for Broad Availability Of Windows "Longhorn" Client Operating System.

WinFS will be released after 'longhor'. The beta of WinFS will be released in the period of longhorn's release. 'Avalon' (the new presentation subsystem) and 'Indigo' (the new communication subsystem) will be also available on Win XP and 2003 in 2006.

See also: some of my experience on longhorn.

UN Backs Open Source With New Agency
Glad to see UN Backs Open Source With New Agency.

extensions of mozilla
Extensions & themes support is a very good and modern feature of mozilla. You may get many interesting stuff here. Many of them are talented and cool. Enjoy.

good topic on linux & open source by Linus Torvalds
Here is a good talk about Linux & Open Source from the interview of Linus Torvalds.

Mozilla 2.0 Roadmap
From the Mozilla 2.0 roadmap (posted in the Mozilla develop day 2004), there are some important changes.

1. Graphics & Content parsing enhancement
Performance improvement, Cairo library support, SVG enhancement, XTF (XTF - an eXtensible Tag Framework for Mozilla) support, Forms support/enhancement

2. As a development platform
Embedding, XUL enhancement (including xulrunner), JS enhancement, Managed Languages support/enhancement

3. UI
Enhanced XUL & JS

There are also still something not clearly defined and needed to be addressed. One important one is that the roadmap is mainly for Firefox. How about the roadmap for Thunderbird and other components like calendar after Mozilla Suite?

Microsoft to continuously lose big money in China?
After the No.1 PC manufacture in China, 'Lenovo', decided not to bundle Windows in its PC for small cities and villages (announced on 3rd, August), another big manufacture in China, 'Founder', decided not to bundle Windows in its new fashionable T series PC (announced on 6th, August). Will other PC manufactures also do like this? It will cause Microsoft's takings in China continuously decrease greatly. It's forecasted that Lenovo will sell 1 million such kind of PC in 2004. Assume one set of Windows will cost 500 RMB. Then Microsoft will lose 500 million RMB (60 million USD) for only this deal this year.

Here is the news in Chinese.

JDJ Editors' Choice Awards
Here is the current JDJ (Java Development Journal) Editors' Choice Awards. The recommended products are from a broad range and all of them are very creative and productive.

Janus - Breakthrough Application Compatibility Technology
Project - Janus will allow the user to run Linux binary applications unchanged on the Solaris OS 10. It's one of the new 600 features in Solaris 10. Unlike Linux emulations that act as interpreters of the Linux code for other platforms, Project Janus will enable the Solaris OS to run Linux applications natively on x86 platforms, greatly enhancing performance. Also, the user can continuously use the cool tools like DTrace, Dynamic File System and so on. Janus is shown in this week's LinuxWorld in San Francisco (Sun booth #1247).

OPEN-XCHANGE to be released under GPL
Glad to see more and more very good software open sourced. Here is the leading linux based collaboration server - "OPEN-XCHANGE" to be released under GPL (GNU General Public License).

Who will benefit? Yes, the end user. Of course. :-)

RealPlayer 10 for Linux is out
Great. RealPlayer 10 is out here. There is also a mozilla plugin included.

Mozilla Security Bug Bounty Program
It's quite interesting to see the security bug bounty program from the biggest open source browser application - Mozilla foundation.

Since more and more security holes and attacks are reported, and more and more money are put on the defense, people become more anxious about the computer environment they are using. As one of the most important parts of the modern desktop environment, browser's security is quite important to people's daily life, especially for those who make much trade on the internet or even depends on the internet for the daily life. Mozilla foundation's activity is welcome by the users. Then, how about IE, Opera and so on?

Linux based SunRay
Besides the Solaris based SunRay, the thin client computer or NC (network computer), which is accepted widely, Linux based SunRay will be released in the last quarter of this year. It will give the user a broad alternative selection of the OS (operating system). The user can select the one that matches his requirement quite well.

There is an demonstration planned for the Linux based SunRay in the LinuxWorld conference this week.

Sun Extends the JES Price Model...
To further expand customer choice, Sun announced that its business model for the Sun Java Enterprise System will be extended to third-party operating systems and hardware platforms. Besides Solaris Operating System (OS) for SPARC, AMD Opteron and Xeon systems, as well as Linux, Sun will add support for the HP-UX operating system on the PA-Risc architecture and the Microsoft Windows Operating System for x86 based hardware, including AMD Opteron-based systems, beginning next year. Customers will now be able to take advantage of the simple, predictable and affordable approach to reducing cost and complexity that the Java Enterprise System (JES) provides on hardware platforms of their choice. See the detail.

Feelings about Longhorn
I took a look at Longhorn today.

Besides the technologies (like the new .net framework) under it, Longhorn has a upgraded usability experience from XP. It shows a user centric solution. Here are some areas I noticed related to usability.

First, the information is organized in different groups for the user easy to access the information needed, especially for the large amount of information.

Second, the space is organized more efficiently. More and more windows can be hidden or shown or change their sizes according to the user's operation.

Third, easy for communication. The functions for contacts are greatly improved. You can easily find the needed people and communicate with them in your proposed way.

Fourth, the 'search' function is greatly improved. You can now search the files, emails and other information on the net in just a simple way.

Longhorn gives a good example to us developers to think about the usability. Besides the good/cool technologies, we also need good usability design to make a successful product. Avalon (together with WinFS, Indigo) is cool, the incentives to do so are cooler.

Mozilla Localization
To help and ease the availability of mozilla products towards different world cultures and languages through the support of the open source community, MLP (Mozilla Localization Project) is set up.

MLP is based on the i18n (international) framework and covers both the projects (Mozilla Suite, Firefox, Thunderbird) and documentation.

From the project status, here are many contributors actively working on this project. Also, glad to see that Chinese versions (zh_CN, zh_HK, zh_TW) are actively worked on.