In a surprising news, apparently Microsoft is looking at releasing a Linux version of Office in 2014. With all due respect to Linux and its fans, the platform is hardly a lucrative market for Microsoft today. There are however some significant changes to come. Many governments throughout the world are pushing the open-source software to be used in public and quasi-public sectors. There is an official plan to move to the open source software in Russian Federation by 2015. There are initiatives like this in other countries as well. I am not going to argue whether it’s a good decision or bad, but it will definitely have a tremendous impact on the software sales by Microsoft in the years to come. After we take this movement into account, the decision to migrate Office to Linux might not be weird after all. There is one little problem though. Simply migrating Office to Linux won’t be enough. The Microsoft Office has to be open-sourced in order to be eligible. Open-sourced Microsoft Office? I said it was a surprising news…
Microsoft Office to be released on Linux?
February 10, 2013
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Posted by Oleg Kokorin
Yandex beats Bing to become 4th largest search engine
February 9, 2013
Wow, nobody saw that coming!
Yandex surpassed Bing on the number of monthly search queries in November and December 2012. You might think (as I first did) that it happened in some local market, say ex-USSR territory or something. However, the figures are for the worldwide number of queries.
Now that’s just embarrassing. You would think with all the money Microsoft throws to buy users, they’d get higher in the online search game, not lower. Congratulations to the Yandex team though!
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Posted by Oleg Kokorin
Windows 8
October 26, 2012
This headline says it all…
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Posted by Oleg Kokorin
MobileNoter SE 4.2 for Android released
September 8, 2012
This new release is a significant improvement over the previous one:
- Ability to add new pages was added (previously one could add new sections only);
- If there is an update conflict during sync, the user is notified and she gets to decide which version of data should have the priority;
- Minor bug fixes.
This cool version is coming to Android tablets and iOS in like a couple of weeks!
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Posted by Oleg Kokorin
A beautiful concept of the future phones
November 13, 2011
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Posted by Oleg Kokorin
Chinese GULAG takes over Wintergrasp
June 12, 2011
From the “you can’t make this stuff up” department: China’s labor camp prisoners are forced to play video games to earn credit points and virtual goods that the prison guards later redeem for real money. Now, it may sound like fun to slay goblins and demons while serving your time, it is quite the opposite. You do your “gold farming” at night, and during the daytime you still have to dig tranches, break rocks, and whatever other things are to do in the coal mines. When the prisoners weren’t earning enough money, they were beaten for real, unlike the way a dragon destroys your virtual hero in a game.
So when a Western gamer buys a cool sword in the World of Warcraft, chances are high that she’s buying a result of a prison labor. That’s because there are 100,000 estimated full-time gold farmers in China, with most of them being prisoners. These 100,000 are about 80% of the total WoW gold farmers in the world.
I wonder if they already started making the prisoners play on-line poker or run Nigerian scam schemes?
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Posted by Oleg Kokorin
I wish other companies were like Apple…
October 21, 2010… and declared optical disks dead.
Not that I have anything against optical disks. It’s just that I haven’t used any of the hundreds of DVDs that I have in home for like 2-3 last years. Even if I buy a gadget that comes with an installation CD, most of the time Windows 7 doesn’t need the disc to work with the device. It downloads drivers via internet.
It’s a real bummer that you can’t buy a decent notebook without an optical drive built-in. The only models without optical drive are netbooks and subnotebooks, all under 13.3″ screen. It’s time to start offering some good models without optical drives and see how customers react. That’s what Apple started doing at least a year ago with their Air series.
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Posted by Oleg Kokorin
The difference between a good business and a good investment
July 10, 2010A good business is a company that generates profits. A good investment is the investment that grows significantly better than the market on average. If a company (Apple) exceeds another company (Microsoft) in market capitalization (i.e. it’s a better investment), but their profits don’t catch up, that means that the investment growth is based on faith. The faith that Apple will eventually generate better profits than Microsoft. That might happen or might not. And if that doesn’t happen soon enough, the investors will be disappointed and they will punish Apple’s capitalization. Simple as that.
Despite all the criticism, Microsoft is a very innovative company. They created tablet PCs, ebook readers, and Windows Mobile ten years ago. Too bad these things were too early for that time.
They created this 5 years before iPad:
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Posted by Oleg Kokorin
NSFW: Catch the latest news about eyePhone, twitcher, and the Killer App!
July 6, 2010The Always Amusing Futurama is back! You surely want to know about the Third World, the eyePhone, and the evil Killer App a thousand years from now. Watch episode 3! Did I say a thousand years?
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Posted by Oleg Kokorin
TechCrunch was just hacked
January 27, 2010As of this exact moment, the TechCrunch site is definitely hacked. There is some offensive messsage at the top of the homepage. I’d post the screenshot, if it hasn’t contained lots of f-bombs. So, “turns out” LAMP isn’t more secure than Windows? 
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Posted by Oleg Kokorin
