Craig McMurtry's WebLog

The Alienware Athlon 64 FX-55 was delivered last week. It's in an enormous black box that stands higher than my dining table, as you can see below. Looking at it makes me feel like one of the monkeys from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

You can read Mr. Cavnar-Johnson's comment here: http://weblogs.asp.net/craigmcmurtry/archive/2004/11/13/252837.aspx#256983 . I'm assuming that everyone else that read my original post did not misinterpret it, as he did, to mean that a service-oriented...

A comment from Christopher reminded me to mention this: today, the 64-bit version of Windows are not sold retail, and that will continue to be the case for the 64-bit versions that ship as part of the Windows Server 2003 SP1 release. It will be sold to...

Concerning operating systems, it is crucial to remember that Itaniums can only run operating systems compiled for the EPIC instruction set, whereas x64 processors will run operating systems compiled for them or for x86 processors. For Itaniums, Microsoft...

At this point, we have established that the 64-bit PC computing world is really very different from 32-bit PC computing. It’s not just a matter of the processors being faster. Whereas with 32-bit PCs, you could count on having an x86 instruction set at...

Folks who read my posts, and I am always very surprised to find that there are some, will know that unlike the majority of people who maintain blogs mostly devoted to technical topics, I never presume that anyone is interested in my personal life. Other...

What does the 64-bit hardware landscape look like today, 18 months after AMD introduced the first x86 processor? On September 8 th , at the Intel Developer Forum, Abhi Talkwalkar, general manager of Intel’s Enterprise Platform Group acknowledged that...

So, we find that the Itanium processor and the x64 Opteron processor are very different. They both incorporate ingenious ideas for drastically increasing the performance of the processor that go far beyond just making them 64-bit capable. Compared purely...

The first x64 processor was the AMD Opteron. The Opteron x64 processor has at least three very important features. First, it is a 64-bit processor. Remember that we said that instructions to a 64-bit processor can refer to memory addresses using 64-bit...

There are two quite different species of 64-bit PC: the Itanium and the x64. The Itanium species first appeared in 2001, whereas the x64 species first appeared in April of last year. What is the difference between the two species? Well, to understand...

What is a 64-bit processor, exactly? Well, when an instruction is sent to a processor, it will often refer to one or more locations in memory that contain data that the processor is to manipulate. Those locations are expressed as binary numbers. On a...

64-bit computing is here today. Quite literally: this is a 64-bit laptop, running a 64-bit operating system. And if you want to buy a 64-bit system, well, it’s dead easy: go to www.AlienWare.com , and order yourself a rig for home or for the office, and...

And, finally, here is what really, really, really, really annoys me in what I hear presumable gurus say about service-oriented architecture: for no good reason that I can fathom almost everyone that I have heard speaking on the topic wants to bring systems...

The conclusion to draw from these considerations is that in a service-oriented system we are focused first-and-foremost on the boundaries of trust between stores of data and on implementing the agreements among the owners of the data. The details of those...

Users of the contract document management application, branch administrators, will have a sheaf of contract documents on their desks and a salesperson in their office, and will want to record that they are giving the documents to the salesperson. So,...

Let’s turn our attention back to the employee, branch, and document data that we will be storing in a SQL Server database. I said that how we arrange the data within that repository will be important. Here is a diagram depicting that arrangement. We have...

Having undertaken this analysis at least one cogent insight jumps right out. It is that user data does not belong to the group for whom our application is being built. Indeed, in reality, it almost never does. So, it would probably not be a good idea...

Now let us subject these requirements to a service-oriented analysis. You will recall that when we used to do functional analyses of requirements, we would draw flowcharts to help us identify the processes that would need to be implemented. Then, when...

If we apply the approach that I described in my last post (too long ago) to the requirements of an arbitrary, yet commonplace line of business application, you will see the tremendous power of the approach as it yields significant insights even into the...

The term, service-oriented architecture refers to somehow incorporating services into the design of an application. I say, somehow because there is currently no consensus on how services ought to be used in truly service-oriented solution. Everyone...

All anyone's supposed to be thinking about in IT at the moment is how to adopt a service-oriented architecture, and how to prove that they have. Of course, the problem is that no-one can agree on what exactly a service-oriented architecture is, and to...

Let me summarize what I have proposed through this lengthy series of posts. We have discussed application security, which covers authentication and authorization. Concerning authentication, your customers want your applications to become better...

Now that we have considered how to use Windows Server 2003 Authorization Manager to authorize actions at the presentation tier, you may be wondering about its application to another common scenario. It is often the case that users in different roles within...

Note that the way we want to use the Authorization Manager API's differs somewhat from the PAG group's “Authorization and Profile Application Block.” In that block, the default use of the Authorization Manager API is to make a call to AccessCheck...

It's high time I finished this series . . . Okay, so obviously the idea with the Authorization Manager API is that when a button is clicked or a menu option is selected, one could have a call to AccessCheck to determine if that operation is allowed...