Thursday, May 8, 2008

Can we just STOP using fixed coordinates for laying our user interface elements?

What is it with these Windows-people who still use fixed coordinates for laying out user-interfaces?! I thought that would be something that at least would be eradicated when Microsoft released the .NET platform a few years ago, but no. Every other decent UI toolkit (Qt, SWT, Gtk+, and a couple of others) has abandoned fixed coordinates for layout, but Windows people persist. Is there some misguided idea that "we MUST know exactly on the pixel how our user interface looks, and it has to look exactly the same everywhere"?

Yes, user interface layout is a difficult problem, but treating it as a drawing problem is not the solution.

Impressive data recovery

People at NASA have successfully recovered 90% of the data on a 400MB Seagate harddrive from the Colombia Space Shuttle. Yes, that's the one that crashed and burned at high altitude. Very impressive.

Monday, May 5, 2008

Microsoft is "getting the facts". Again.

Microsoft has a site which claims to help customers compare Windows Server editions with Linux. I stumbled across it while reading David M. Williams blog, and he pointed out a case study on the site involving Uppsala. Since I've lived in Uppsala for many years, I couldn't resist reading on. It turns out that there was no comparison at all. Uppsala hired a Microsoft Gold Certified partner to see if they could increase the security of their windows networks and the conclusion was that Windows Server 2008 is a better product than Windows Server 2003. No mention of Linux at all (except an off-hand remark by a server technician).

It's good to see that Microsoft still knows how to do real FUD.