And for dessert, a slice of humility pie

Excerpts from the blog

Are they serving crow in the Sun Microsystems cafeteria?

The company announced Wednesday that it will sell and support servers pre-installed with Windows, the software its former chief executive famously and repeatedly called a "hairball."

Now Sun has joined the roster of Microsoft OEM partners.

Wednesday's deal was presented as an expansion of the "strategic alliance" formed three years ago, when Sun settled its antitrust claim against Microsoft. They also agreed to make sure their systems work well with each other when virtualized.

Sun must need Microsoft to compete better against Dell and Hewlett-Packard.

Matter of translation

A new visual, multilingual search tool developed at the University of Washington's Turing Center was presented Wednesday at the Machine Translation Summit in Copenhagen.

The idea was to help people who don't speak major languages, said Oren Etzioni, a UW computer-science professor, in a release:

"We want to serve the vast number of people who don't speak one of the major languages. As the Internet becomes more widely available outside of the major industrialized nations, it becomes increasingly important to serve people who don't speak English, French or Chinese."

"PanImages" uses tagging, online image collections and translation tools to improve search results for people who speak languages that aren't well-served by today's online services.

The service automatically translates search terms into about 300 languages and returns images from Google and Flickr, according to the release:

PanImages promises to help people who speak languages that have a small Web presence. Imagine you are a Zulu speaker looking for a picture of a refrigerator, Etzioni said. You type the Zulu word for refrigerator ("ifriji") into an image search and get two results. The same search using PanImages generates 472,000 hits. In a test of so-called minor languages, PanImages was able to find 57 times more results, on average, than a Google image search.

PanImages includes around 300 languages and 2.5 million words, but it's designed to grow through user contributions of words and translations.

Filling potential

Directors of Microsoft's emerging markets are in town this week for a meeting, so the company invited a handful of local journalists to dinner for an update on the company's "Unlimited Potential" program.

Headed by former Windows client boss Will Poole, Unlimited Potential is spreading the PC gospel to developing countries and populations that have yet to embrace computing.

Its goal is to reach an estimated 5 billion people who can't afford or access computers, including 1 billion that it hopes to reach by 2015.

The group is a grab bag of researchers, product people and marketers spread around the world. They're working with governments, schools and nonprofits on projects, including pay-as-you-go computers and special versions of Windows.

I was surprised by how sympathetic Poole is to the One Laptop Per Child project led by the MIT Media Lab that has developed an inexpensive PC for developing countries. Poole said he's particularly impressed by the device's display, which switches from color to grayscale when it's used in bright light, although he's still not enthusiastic about its using open-source software.

Geographic question

Great story in The Boston Globe about Facebook moving west, after being turned down by a Boston-area investor.

The piece has interesting details about Facebook's early days, but not everyone will agree with a few points.

It suggests that consumer Internet companies have to be in Silicon Valley to really take off. That's a great subject and an open question.

It also floats a potential $6 billion valuation of Facebook, which seems just crazy, especially now that the economy and mergers-and-acquisitions boom are cooling off.

This material has been edited for print publication.

Brier Dudley's blog appears Thursdays. Reach him at 206-515-5687 or bdudley@seattletimes.com.