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The world of the developer is a simple one. You write code. If it compiles, you got yourself an application. It could be a client application (web or desktop) or a service (web or server).
When you're an architect, or even worse, a BDM, a CxO, a business analysts... things get mote complex. Services, applications, systems they are all juggled around and in the end mashed up in a way that no one really knows which one means what any more and all can continue to charge serious amounts for consultancy or analysis before a single line of code will be written.
My (overly simplified and extremely put with a wink) statement is triggered by a ZapTake piece written by Ron Schmelzer that basically says that Microsoft doesn't get SOA. (here). This is the part where you can see the clowns juggling...
Even the customers they trot out on their conference calls and in their events claim to have implemented SOA on Microsoft products, but when pressed admit that it's nothing more than Web services-based EAI.
And:
The real power of SOA is not simply in standards-based integration (didn't XML and EDI provide that, too?), but in the power of composing heterogeneous services in environments of continual change.
I believe the author pressed submit a little too soon and forgot to include ESB. That would have added at least 30% to the consulting fee!
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I know exactly what’s going to keep me busy for the next 6 months. Tech Ed EMEA 2008. This year I'm not only the content owner for Tech Ed Developers, I'm also the business owner for both Tech Ed Developers and Tech Ed IT Forum Professionals.
So far, two important decisions have been made.
1. Tech Ed IT Forum will be renamed to Tech Ed IT Professionals. This decision was taken earlier already for the US Tech Ed Events (which our now split for the first time too) and I will explain in a later post why we feel this is a better name. The target audience and the type of content of the event will stay the same.
2. For the last two years, we first had Tech Ed Developers and the week after that Tech Ed IT Forum. We are switching them around this year. We have been checking availability with our top speakers and found it would work out better this way.
That brings us to these dates.
http://www.microsoft.com/europe/mseventseurope/
Tech Ed is a great event and I'm thrilled to be so closely involved for another year. I'm already looking forward to seeing you all there!
Hans
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No comment... http://www.engadget.com/2008/03/29/linux-becomes-only-os-to-escape-pwn-2-own-unscathed/#comments
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I'm not really super impressed by the article. First because there's not a lot new and visonary in there and secondly because I think mr. Anderson leaves out some relevant facts just because he wants to believe in what he's writing.
These are some observations I have now...
Ryanair
Ryanair didn't make anything free. They made it cheaper but not free. The article points out where the company makes money but I think that it's equally important to point out that their customers simply pay less for less. Boarding from the tarmac, and no food or drinks are obvious ones but a real cost to the customer is also that they are typically a 60$ cab ride away from the city they want to visit instead of a 30$ ride. Just saying that for the customer that way of travelling still isn't anywhere close to free.
Open Source
In the business models section, mr. Anderson refers to Open Source as being a Gift Economy. Sure, some of the contributors are giving away their brain cycles for free but most contributors are being paid for contributing by their employers because their companies adopt the system or because their companies run a pure 'cross-subsidies' business on the 'free' software. Most of the time, there's very little altruism involved.
Sometimes companies just want to get bought
Some companies give away their services for free because they are not in it to become profitable. They just want to get bought by Google, Yahoo or Microsoft. This is the bubble type of free. The low cost of offering these services enables these companies to do so for a while before they run out of VC money.
Just to be sure I'm not misunderstood. I love the fact that we can enjoy many more things at lower costs. However, I believe 'there's no such thing as a free lunch' still stands. If you get something valuable, you will return something valuable. If not as an individual, then as a group . And would bring us back to the long tail story :-)
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It's great to see that Microsoft continues to improve the reponse rates on the online forums by adding customer support engineers that answer your questions. Equally great to see is that efforts are taken to sharing the learnings from these 1-1 engagements.
You can can search http://support.microsoft.com using the keyword: kbrapidpub to find all articles that have been published using the rapid publishing process! These articles are the results of taking these learnings and sharing them quickly.
On the following VB Forums you can now also file bugs. Yes, they still happen :-)
· Visual Basic Language,
· Visual Basic Interop and Upgrade, and
· Visual Basic Power Packs
Oh, and if you want to get certified, you can still benefit from a free second shot in case you fail. But of course you wouldn't be needing that, I assume.
With Second Shot all MCP candidates can get a free second chance to pass a Microsoft IT Professional, Developer, or Microsoft Dynamics certification exam. This offer is open to worldwide MCP candidates who fail their first attempt at an exam. This offer extension is for a limited time only!
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As I explained in my email earlier today, I'm upgrading my home infrastructure to create a safer place for my digital memories. My first step has been to rebuild my home desktop PC.
I was using an HP Pavillion before and I also had a Dell Dimension 8300. There are a number of reasons I chose the Dell to take forward even though the processor is a bit slower than the HP's. The main reason is that the Dell Dimension really has a beautiful spacious case. It is so easy to add/remove hardware components from this box that folds open like a book. I'll never buy a small cases system for my home again.
So I scavenged the HP and put all the memory and the hard disk into the desktop giving me these hardware specifications:
- Intel Pentium 4 - 2.4Ghz
- 2GB RAM
- Primary HD: 120Gb - 7200RPM
- Radeon 9800 Pro Graphics card
At the time it was a very decent configuration. But even though I work at Microsoft, I was still a bit nervous installing Vista Ultimate on the machine. Would the performance be OK?
Now I have it up and running, I can say it works beautifully! Here's the performance Index:
As you can see, the 3.5 score is due to the processor speed. All else is way above that and provides a nice and snappy experience.
I'm glad the Dell had the nice graphics card in it. That makes a big difference. In fact this card supports dual monitors so I have now have one connected via DVI and one via VGA.
Here are some of the special things I experienced while upgrading, configuring and using my Vista at home.
- I have issues with my Vista Boot Manager.
I first tried to upgrade my machine to XP Media Center. Now I still have two entries in my boot menu
- Windows Vista Ultimate
- Upgrade to Windows XP professional (or something like that)
I tried to remove that second (and apparently default entry) from the boot.ini file but Vista apparently does not have a boot.ini file.
You need to use a command line tool (bcdedit) to change the boot database. But I think there is a bug since that tool doesn't show the Windows XP entry at all.
A tip I want to give you is to avoid using the bcdedit tool unless you are a specialist. There are some great free tools. VistaBootPro and EasyBCD
- The one driver that Vista didn't find was the driver for the sound card. I just unpacked all the XP drivers for the Dell Dimension 8300 sound card in a temp folder (you can find them here). Then I let Vista search for a device driver in this temp folder and that fixed it.
It shows the sound card as a SoundMax Integrated driver.
- I now have dual monitors. This is fantastic but a little challenging when using Media Center with it. The issue is that when you put your media center on the second screen, it locks up your mouse pointer so you can no longer go to the primary screen.
The only trick I found is to press the Windows key while you are in the media center application and then you can move the cursor out to the other screen.
As I said before, the system works fine now and I get really good performance on hardware that's a couple of years old. I'm positively surprised. Now I can start thinking about my strategy regarding storing pictures safely...
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I always thought that hard disk crashes were happening to people who were rough on their hardware. I never experienced a hard disk crash since I started to work with PC's. Until half a year ago, that is. Since then I had 2 HD's crash on me.
The first one was the most serious. Because I'm terrible at backing up my systems, I lost all my pictures between July 06 and October 06. I don't care so much about email and other data.
That still didn't teach me a lesson. I just had my external Western Digital 500GB MyBook crash. Fortunately after a night of letting it sleep in the fridge I could recover the file using FileScavenger.
So now I'm going to deal with this seriously! I don't want to loose my families' digital memories.
I'm tackling this issue like this:
1. Rebuilding my home desktop machine (Dell Dimension 8300) with Vista
2. Figuring out a strategy to keep all my families' pictures in one folder (possibly with subfolders)
3. Uploading everything to my Flickr Pro account using 'some' tool
4. Installing a Windows Home Server for back ups
I'm hoping that redundany at home and over the web will create a truely safe home for our digital memories.
I'm about ready to blog about the first step...
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I was thrilled to hear Microsoft is hoping to aquire Yahoo! I've been a fan of Yahoo! ever since I've been using the internet. I would love to know when I first created My Yahoo page. Recently I've also become a paying subscriber of Flickr which works really well in combination with Windows Live Photo Gallery.
So I was not dissappointed when I found out that Microsoft wasn't going to distribute the 44.6 billion dollars amongst its 79 000 employees ;-) I was really happy!
Then of course came the analysis of the deal. Although the usual suspects delivered on the expectation and painted a gloomy picture, I read mostly positive reactions.
The one critical reaction that was expected but I disliked most was that of David Drummond (SVP Google). Of course Google crossing their fingers that somewhere this deal will be blocked. But using a blog for this and standing up as the defender of the free web is completely overdoing it in my opinion. In such cases, I prefer senior execs not to blog at all.
It's clear that the online ad market Google dominates, is one of scale. For sure, they wish they had many smaller competitors but is that what's really best for competition in this space? I'll leave to the real industry watchers to fight it out but I found the blog post way too cheesy. A press release would have been just right. Just like Microsoft's General Councel Brad Smith did.
In the meantime I love to see the speculation on a name change in case the deal goes through. Although I don't expect a name change, I would love to see the Yahoo! brand stay alive for all internet services and then why not a change to ...
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Save 89 minutes of your life! Incredible, extra ordinary, great, incredible. Better, better, better :-)
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I wasn't there, just followed it on engadget and Macrumors...
Seems like a lot of great announcements to me but with expectations being sky high (air high, anyone), I'm not sure these announcements will just do the trick.
Coolest thing seems to be the MacBook Air. Looks very thin. But it's pricey and what I would be worried about most is the heat. The MacBook Pros already produce heat like a they're a nuclear home device so how will they have overcome that with an even smaller device? I want to see and feel before I believe this isn't mostly hot Air.
UPDATED: Also, the device seems to have a touch sensitive screen. Also the device seems to have a multi-touch trackpad.
Cool. But why not make it a real Tablet? With writing and all? That would have been a killer, imho.
The Apple TV seems to be the next big thing. But Apple seems to want to get rid of CD's and DVD's completely. This might work in some parts of the world but not nearly everywhere. A movie's size (in HD) is still of a different magnitude than a song. And besides that many people still want to by a DVD or HD-DVD or BluRay disc. If the Apple TV device would play one of these formats that again would have made a world of difference but it doesn't seem to be that way.
So from what I saw so far, I think there are a some very nice v.next improvements but nothing that just totally rocks my world...
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Just read about this interesting project: http://www.beyondlimits.ws/dailyupdate.html
Some 30 ICT managers from the Belgian IT scene are doing some interesting climbing in the Andes.
I'm interested but am now failing to find out more since there have been no daily updates? Out of 30 ICT managers I would expect at least some to blog but I can't find anything...
So I suggest that after conquering mountains, Belgian ICT managers try to conquer new media.
UPDATE: the site has been updated. The team is taking a new route because of volcanic activity.
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Today, the day really starts in the valley.
Press and blogosphere have been beating the drums about MacWorld since CES' most exciting thing was the not so funny prank by Richard Blakeley.
What will blow our minds today? Will Apple buy or merge with Adobe? Will the next iPhone have 3G, video camera, GPS (yawn)?
What if Apple would just open up? They could open up on so many fronts. I suggest:
- they license MacOS to other harware
- they create a true partner ecosystem around software
- they hire Scoble as Chief Evangelist
That wouldn't be the most exciting new product news but it would sure be an exciting cultural change for the company. Probably just as difficult as merging its culture with Adobe's would be.
Ahhh, enough speculation already, a couple of hours and we'll know.
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Bill's Last Day: The CES Keynote video
I guess I just like people with opinions that dare to go against the flow. Whether you agree or not, it is an interesting opinion. http://discovermagazine.com/2007/dec/long-live-closed-source-software/
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VMWare, Parrallels, boorcamp? This guy has some hands-on experience and is willing to give advice.
Vista on Macintosh at IdentityMine
