Functional or forbidden enterprise fruit? There's a time and a place for everything, or so the saying goes. Is the time and place for Mac now and in the datacenter? InfoWorld Chief Technologist and Apple aficionadoTom Yager looks at the potentially potent additions of Leopard and Intel's 64-bit x86 chips to the mix as he attempts to debunk myths about Apple's corporate competency.
Planetation: InfoWorld Blogger in Chief Jon Udell had a podcast chat with Cyril Houri, founder and CEO of Mexens Tech-nologies. In it, Houri talks about hopes of annotat-ing the planet (Earth) via the company's Navizon (a positioning system combining GPS, Wifi, and phone positioning). Specifically, users could "map the locations of both WiFi access points and cell towers. Then people using vast numbers of de-vices on WiFi or cellular networks can use location-aware applications without having to own GPS gear."
Open source doesn't get the picture: Succesful open-source software projects abound, but developers often struggle to enlist the artistic skills of graphic designer and illustrators to give their wares the aesthetic oomph the need to broaden their appeal. Are these visual artists too greedy to give freely of themselves? Nope, says Neil McCallister. Rather, they're just not familiar with open source because open source has can be, well, too ugly at times. "Have you seen the GIMP? While it's often billed as the "open source Photoshop," it lacks many of the tools that professional graphic designers need for print production. Even worse, its UI is about as handsome and user-friendly as a piranha. What self-respecting graphic artist could tolerate it?"
Posted by Ted Samson on September 25, 2006 06:00 AM
