This is where I post a bunch of interesting stories that I wanted to write about over the last week, but which I never had a chance to post…
The biggest thing, by far, is the fact that Microsoft has finally decided that a free viewer would dramatically improve the marketability of Visio, and have released Visio Viewer 2003 which allows free viewing of Visio documents (mostly diagrams and charts, like UML or network topology) created with any version of Visio since Microsoft acquired it on version 5. It’s implemented as an ActiveX control, which means you’ll have to host it in Internet Explorer … but which may allow all sorts of cool things like embedding the documents in web pages, or other Office documents (I’ll have to play with that). Of course, it requires Windows 2000 or later [ ] so any of you with those old unsupported operating systems just better upgrade.
Speaking of unsupported OS’s, Microsoft has announced continued paid support for Windows 98 until June 2006. [ ] Source: Microsoft, LifeCycle Page, and PCWorld
Mira — the expensive LCD displays which allowed wireless access to your PC, as long as you didn’t wander too far, and nobody else came along to use the PC — is now on the back burner at Microsoft. I wish I could say I was suprised, but the inability to use streaming video or allow multi users, and licensing incompatibility with Windows XP Home (combined with a steep price) basically crushed any chance this thing had from the very start. [ ] I don’t know not why Microsoft even bothered with these, since it really just caused confusing when they released it along-side the full tablet PC’s (which, incidentally, don’cost about the same, but are fully capable of standing-alone) allowing the remote displays to work, as well as the expense of a “dumb” monitor are reasons that this technology is being shelved. Source: InfoWorld
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