The Geekzone 06 meeting in Wellington last Saturday was a sell-out event featuring speakers such as local technology entrepreneur Rod Drury of Aftermail and Trade Me fame and Jay Templeton of home entertainment and IPTV boutique start-up Mabode.
The Eclipse Foundation has established itself as a premier open source software tools project. The organisation has gained support from vendors ranging from IBM (which helped found Eclipse in 2001) to Borland Software, BEA Systems, and seemingly every other major player in the software industry except Sun Microsystems and Microsoft.
Cisco and Microsoft are sharing details of their partnership on network access control technologies, which will include interoperable products and “out-of-the-box” capabilities in future product releases.
Microsoft will open a Christchurch office later this year and plans to search for local staff for some of the positions at the office. In a statement annoucing the plan to establish the South Island presence, Microsoft New Zealand managing director Helen Robinson is quoted as saying "We expect that some of the staff will come from our existing offices, and we will also hire directly from the Christchurch market, allowing locals to have new opportunities in the IT industry that previously were only available in the North Island".
If you support open source, one of the initial things you learn is that you must bash Microsoft. It’s understandable; of all the proprietary software companies in the world the one in Redmond takes the cake for ill-will towards the open-source community. Just look at the famed “Halloween documents” to see the extent of the bad blood.
The application lifecycle model, as Microsoft expresses it in Visual Studio 2005 Team System, forges a path familiar to participants in global-scale projects but which has never been scaled down for small to moderate efforts.
Parliament’s brand-new website suffered an embarrassing failure on its first day, despite performing faultlessly in tests, according to a spokesman for the company that developed the website, Terabyte.
One of Vista’s main security improvements is BitLocker Drive Encryption, which protects confidential data if computers are lost or stolen, says Wole Moses, a security expert at Microsoft’s regional Windows client solutions division in Turkey.
The New Zealand Open Source Society (NZOSS) is claiming a moral victory over Microsoft’s patent of XML schema after the software giant made changes to its patent.
Rumour had it that Trade Me’s Sam Morgan was going to speak at the opening of Microsoft’s Tech Ed 2006 in Auckland, and a whiff of disappointment flew through the air when Rowan Simpson, development manager of Trade Me, stepped up on the stage in his place.
As long as there’s money to be made, computer security will be an issue, said panellists at Microsoft’s Tech Ed 2006 conference in Boston in June. Security remains a problem because of commercial incentives to build malicious software, but progress is being made and the fight will continue, Microsoft says. “The biggest trend I think we hear talked about is the move towards kinds of commercial malicious software,” such as spyware and software to harvest passwords, says Adam Overton, a group manager on the Microsoft Anti-Malware Team. The chance for monetary gain means there will be a lot more of this software, he said at the panel session.
A major report on security trends released by Microsoft at Tech Ed conference in Boston is remarkable because it comes from such a large sample group: the more than 270 million users of the Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool, which ships with Windows.
Although it has a population of anything up to 35,000 itinerant ‘Microsofties’ and other visitors, it can be a lonely life for an expatriate Kiwi on the Redmond campus. “It’s so rare to come across a New Zealander in the grocery store or on the bus, you inevitably end up standing with them for half an hour and having a chat about when you were last in New Zealand and who was on Shortland Street,” says Paul Andrew, technical product manager for Windows Workflow Foundation.
What are the emerging trends for 2006?
Sean McBreen is the director of Microsoft New Zealand’s developer and platform strategy group. He helped organise Tech Ed 2005 and has been involved in Tech Ed 2006 from the start. We asked him to take a peek behind the curtain and give us the low-down on what to look forward to this year.