My first one

Projet de loi sur l'Energie; quelles cons?quences pour le march? de l'immobilier genevois?

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Le projet de loi datant du 7 mai 2008 relatif ? la modification de la loi sur l??nergie est actuellement en cours d?examen aupr?s du Grand Conseil. L?optimisation de la consommation ?nerg?tique dans les b?timents en est l?enjeu majeur.

Le taux de logements vacants au 1er juin 2008 ? Gen?ve

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT

L'enqu?te f?d?rale annuelle des logements publi?e par l?OCSTAT nous indique une stagnation du taux de vacance ? Gen?ve.

Hausse des taux hypoth?caires

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Vers un redressement des rendements?

La Lex Koller pas encore abrog?e mais assouplie

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 00:00:00 GMT

La construction d'un complexe h?telier par des investisseurs ?trangers vient d'?tre accpet?e alors qu'elle est soumise ? la Lex Koller. Cet assouplissement ouvre des portes ? de nouveaux projets.

Microsoft, Novell eye Moonlight beta, system management

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 18:42:09 GMT

Marking the two-year anniversary of their controversial interoperability agreement, Microsoft and Novell this week are announcing upcoming availability of both the beta version of Moonlight, which puts Microsoft's Silverlight rich Internet application technology on Linux, and the general release of Advanced Management Pack for Suse Linux Enterprise for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2.

The November 2006 agreement has had the two companies cooperating in having Microsoft offer Suse Linux support certificates from Novell and agree not to sue each other's customers over intellectual property issues. Some have protested that the agreement legitimized Microsoft's claims that Linux violates its patents.

[ For a two-year retrospective on the agreement, featuring comments from Microsoft, Novell and an opponent of the arrangement, see The Microsoft-Novell Linux deal: Two years later. ]

But the two companies are marching on with the two milestones. Moonlight is an open-source implementation of Silverlight, offering Linux users high-definition media capabilities, according to a Microsoft representative. The project is being shepherded by Novell.

Moonlight will be provided as an open-source plug-in for the Firefox Web browser, Microsoft and Novell said. The first source code for the project was released in May. The beta release will be available free of charge.

Advanced Management Pack for Suse Linux Enterprise for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 is due the first half of 2009.

Microsoft and Novell have collaborated on systems management to ease customers' management tasks associated with mixed IT environments, Microsoft and Novell said. Advanced Management Pack for Suse Linux Enterprise extends cross-platform Linux monitoring capability of Microsoft System Center Operations Manager. It enables management of Windows and Linux servers from a single console.

In another development in the open-source realm, Yahoo said this week that its BrowserPlus Web development technology will be offered in an open-source manner.

BrowserPlus features a plugin framework for building Web applications that contain desktop capabilities. It can be extended with JavaScript APIs to access desktop facilities.

"By releasing BrowserPlus as an open source project, Yahoo will enable open development on the platform for in-browser desktop applications across the Web," a Yahoo representative said. "This will allow developers to rapidly extend the platform in a distributed fashion. Yahoo's hope is that community contributions and review will ensure BrowserPlus stays a secure, robust platform running on all popular operating systems and browsers."

Yahoo said that the two-year-old project was a failure in some respects. The company had been looking to uncover innovative ideas in native clients applications and massage them into reusable client libraries. Yahoo was extracting good solutions to problems with wide appeal and making them easy for anyone in the company to apply, Yahoo said.

"At the end of our two-year run we had many C++ libraries, which ran on every operating system under the sun, to perform tasks ranging from the mundane (say, logging) to the exotic. To our dismay, we didn't have client teams all over Yahoo scrambling to use the stuff we built. We did, however, learn a lot from this experience," Lloyd Hilailel, of the Yahoo BrowserPlus team, said in a statement.

SAP slashes NetWeaver developer subscription price

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 18:23:17 GMT

Citing the weak economy, SAP has cut the cost of developer subscriptions for its NetWeaver platform by roughly 50 percent, according to a post this week on an official company blog.

SAP began offering individual developer subscriptions for the technology about a year ago, in an apparent effort to draw additional interest. The company has been trying to move customers still on older systems onto NetWeaver-based platforms like ERP 6.0, and also working to resolve an SAP skills shortage in the job market.

[ Keep up with app dev issues and trends with InfoWorld's Fatal Exception and Strategic Developer blogs. ]

"You may be curious as to the reasons behind this reduction," wrote Claudine Lagerholm, senior product manager for SAP Developer Network subscriptions, on Monday. "Since the launch, many of you have been vocal about the subscriptions program, particularly how it should evolve over time, the geographical expansion needed, and to some extent the pricing. We've heard some subscribers say that they've received a great deal of value for the money; however, we've also received feedback from others that the financial burden for individual subscribers was rather high."

"As you are all aware, the economic landscape has changed very drastically in the last few months, so we've decided now was a good time to adjust the pricing," she added.

NetWeaver Development License subscriptions now cost $1,170 and €1,071, down from $2,300 and €2,082.50. A lesser-featured NetWeaver Composition License is now priced at $520 and €476, a reduction from $1,100 and €1,011.50.

The reduced-cost subscription package includes the same features and components as before, Lagerholm wrote. Customers who signed up or renewed on or after Sept. 1 will get a six-month extension to compensate for the price change.

Subscriptions are still only available to users in Germany and the United States. SAP is not ready to give a date for other country launches, Lagerholm said.

SAP's move brought a thumbs-up from the U.K.-based SAP consulting firm Pixelbase. "On the whole a very good move by SAP, enabling more developers to gain access to the full dev suite at a much reduced price," states a post on the company's blog. "The only remaining fly in the ointment now is the restriction to Germany and the US."

Additional comment from SAP could not immediately be obtained on Wednesday.

Ballmer: Yahoo acquisition won't happen

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 18:13:52 GMT

A change at the helm of Yahoo won't revive a Microsoft takeover offer, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said during the company's annual shareholders meeting on Wednesday.

"Acquisition discussions are finished," he said.

[ For complete coverage of the Microsoft-Yahoo merger talks, see InfoWorld's special report. | Keep up on the latest tech news headlines at InfoWorld News, or subscribe to the Today's Headlines newsletter. ]

But he continues to leave the door open to another sort of deal with Yahoo. Microsoft is still interested in doing some sort of search collaboration deal, as it proposed before negotiations between the companies fell apart.

On Monday, Yahoo announced that CEO Jerry Yang intends to step down from that role after the company finishes its search for a successor. Yang has been heavily criticized for his resistance to Microsoft's takeover offer earlier this year. Yang will continue to remain on the board.

Microsoft executives, including Bill Gates who appeared for the first time at an annual shareholders meeting since his transition to working for Microsoft only part time, discussed a wide range of other subjects during the meeting.

Ballmer hinted that Windows 7, the next iteration of the operating system, could come next year. The company hasn't nailed down an exact timeframe for its availability but Ballmer referred to the release of Windows 7 "in the year ahead."

Ballmer described the earnings growth the company experienced this year, but warned that the economic downturn will pose challenges in the future. "Our industry and our company won't be immune," he said.

"We are looking at every aspect of our business to reduce costs," he said. That involves a close inspection of all aspects of the business that can be run more efficiently and includes slower growth particularly in headcount for the rest of the financial year and even into the next year, he said. Microsoft has recently denied an official hiring freeze, despite reports from employees who say they've been told that open positions were being reconsidered and no new positions would be created.

Microsoft advised against and shareholders voted down a couple of proposals that would have required the company to do more to protect freedom of speech rights in countries with oppressive governments and refuse to work with such governments to identify Internet users. Formal policies would do more than Microsoft's recently announced involvement in a group that has defined a code of conduct related to freedom of expression, said Larry Dohrs of Newground Social Investment who presented the proposal at the meeting. That agreement contains too many loopholes that let companies like Microsoft circumvent or ignore its commitments, he said.

China is notorious for its censorship of the Internet and for its harsh reaction to people who speak against the government online. But Microsoft sees great potential in China, despite that and heavy piracy rates in the country. While two to three years ago Microsoft saw a significant reduction in piracy rates in China, it hasn't seen the same level of progress in the past year, said Brad Smith, general counsel at Microsoft.

But the sheer size of the market makes it promising if the industry can stamp out piracy. "It will maybe take some patience but China looks like a bigger net opportunity for the company since they're not participating as fully as we'd like in the market because of piracy but it's an upside that hopefully we can realize over time," Ballmer said.

RSS Advertising

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 10:21:47 GMT

Take a Bow ....... By Rihanna.
See more info...

ISO publishes Office Open XML specification

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 15:27:06 GMT

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has published the specification for a Microsoft-created file format that caused bitter debate during its path to become an international standard.

The documentation for Office Open XML (OOXML) runs 7,228 pages and can be ordered on CD from the ISO for 342 Swiss francs ($285). The specification is named ISO/IEC DIS 29500:2008.

[ Microsoft isn't the only productivity suite in town; see how rivals Google Docs, Zoho, OpenOffice, and IBM stack up in InfoWorld's "Test Center's review: Office killers pack some heat" ]

Microsoft won a hard-fought battle in April when the ISO announced enough countries voted to approve OOXML as an international standard.

OOXML was opposed by many on grounds it was unneeded, as software makers could use OpenDocument Format (ODF), a less complicated office software format that was already an international standard.

The debate became so embittered that IBM, which backs ODF, threatened in September to consider leaving standards bodies that allowed dominant companies such as Microsoft to wield what it perceived as undue influence. Microsoft was accused of leaning on countries in order to secure enough votes for OOXML to pass.

OOXML's publication means software developers can begin implementing the specifications into their products for free. Some developers have already used parts of OOXML in their products, mostly to operate better with other Microsoft software.

Microsoft uses a version of OOXML in its Office 2007 productivity suite. Company officials have indicated that future software products would adhere to the ISO-approved OOXML specification.

The ISO said the specification "is intended to be implemented by multiple applications on multiple platforms."

Surfaces d'activit?s vacantes ? Gen?ve

Wed, 12 Nov 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Le nombre de surfaces d?activit?s vacantes en 2008 dans le canton de Gen?ve s??l?ve ? 100'290 m2 au premier semestre d?apr?s l?enqu?te annuelle de l?Office cantonal de la statistique.