Still reeling from the iPhone explosion, I eagerly sought out more interesting tech news this week to satiate myself with.
Apple buys the CUPS printer framework. Since switching to a BSD core, CUPS has been at the heart of Apple’s “it just works” mantra although us Linux users (and BSD users as well) have enjoyed CUPS for ages. CUPS (Common UNIX Printing System) has been around for a very long time and makes dubious use of the IPP (Internet Printing Protocol, basically printing over IP, like VoIP) standard that makes printing to decent printers dead simple. I made heavy use of this at my old job when I began to switch as many printers from their proprietary Canon/Toshiba protocols to IPP. This really made the 5 Mac users on campus extremely happy and made my job a helluva lot easier.
LaTeX squares off against Microsoft Office and easily trumps it in terms of proper typesetting. I haven’t used Office in well over a year because it’s a bloated piece of garbage but I always did hate the fact that certain fonts and typefaces just didn’t look “right” when typing certain works. Taraborelli shows how easily LaTeX can do everything Office does, and more, with very little effort. I’ve always stayed away from LaTeX and have used the likes of OpenOffice.org and Abiword for my word processing but I’m definitely tempted to give LaTeX a try now.
Shoperro and Viewpoints set to square off against Epinions and each other for user-generated reviews. It seems both are going to be rolling out for-pay revenue models but unless something has changed in the last 4-5 years, this may not last long since Epinion removed this feature long ago.
Google snatched up Postini after using their services for Gmail and other projects for a couple of years now. I’ve only got experience with Postini’s spam capabilities and it’s great and my company’s customers love it. From all the people that I know that have used Postini in the past have never had anything bad to say about it. This was the one acquisition lately that made me feel warm and fuzzy on the inside because it’s something extremely immediately relevant to today’s world and Google decided to give them a few truckloads of cash to keep doing what they’re doing.
Inviteshare.com allows you to easily share invites you have for invite-only or closed beta sites. Right now, there are 37 sites you can give out invites for (it was 15 or so when I joined earlier today) and the process it extremely simple. The site also looks great, even in this day of web 2.0. The design is an intelligent 3 column fixed-width layout that presents all the information you need, right now, in the proper places. IS has been getting literally pounded for days now, with 500 Internal Server Errors popping up every few seconds and this is clearly due in no part to being on the front page of TechCruch. Having been public since July 7th, I believe the site has now easily passed the 2 million pageviews mark and is probably climbing close to 40,000+ uniques. Not bad for a simple service launched this week.
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3 responses so far ↓
Is anyone doing more to take Unix to the mass market than Apple? I own print testing on my Apple app development team. Life is sweet with CUPS.
I’m no big fan of WYSIWYG office suites myself, even though I help develop one, and prefer text editors like TextMate. However, I don’t know many people who care that much about typesetting either. LaTeX is no question very good at what it does but the LaTeX as Office alternative seems a bit wack to me.
Almost no one, since the inception of commercialized Linux, has done more for UNIX and its derivatives than Apple has in the last 5 years. I strictly state commercial because there are obviously non-profit distros that have done a ton of work in pushing *NIX to everyday users as well. Life is definitely sweeter with CUPS and now that Apple owns CUPS, it’ll be even more sweet.
I won’t be using LaTeX solely as an Office replacement however, I will be giving it a try. I hardly type anything that’s not a simple text file so really, it’s just me messing around with LaTeX.
“Just messing around with LaTeX”?
James,you are such a freakin’ geek.