Fred's online thoughts. What you can expect: Opinions on the Outsourced Product Development Business, technology in general and from time to time food! I have lots opinions on our great Canadian politicians, but you will have to pay me a beer when we get to meet to hear about them!
Amazon vs. Apple in music downloads? As millions of songs figuratively fly off the shelves of Apple Computer's recently launched iTunes Music Store, analysts are looking at Amazon.com as one of the likeliest candidates to take the next crack at the retail music-download business.
Comment: please please please make it so...
Microsoft to pay AOL $750 million | CNET News.com Despite AOL's seven-year contract to use IE in its flagship service, Parsons was vague about the future of Netscape beyond maintaining it as a subsidiary under AOL. He said AOL is continuing to evaluate Netscape for its value, but pledged AOL's support for IE.Comment: This is scary if you ask me. I'd like them to say something more forward looking about Netscape. Something we can feel investing time in using/developing/testing their products isn't wasted, because some of us feels it's not right for one CO to own the big WWW. As long as the web means a browser on the client to use it, we need more than one brand of browsers, copmetition. I'll spare the rhetoric of why....;-) The bashers have a point that's all I'm going to say!
JD PowerBlog and .net XML-RPC lib
Comment: A library to do XML-RPC from C# is a good thing as Martha would say!
Novell vs SCO vs MS In a statement, Provo, Utah-based Novell, which sold its Unix technology to SCO in 1995, said Wednesday the Unix copyrights and patents never transferred to SCO. It also said SCO doesn't have facts to back up its assertion that certain Unix code had been copied into Linux.
Comment: If this turns to be true and as nasty as it sounds, what did MS just license from SCO ;-)
Not yet quite portable but
Comment: It shows promises, why not jsut a key chain, I'm much more likely to have this all the time with me...But this has got some my cool and useful leds going.
MS and SCO source code and patent deal
Comment: I know it's old news, but here are my 2cents: Everyone, yours truly includede, thought MS would be the first one to try to enforce its patents on the OSS movement...Out of deperation Companies and people will do things that aren't not always fun and the hip thing to do.
Encrypted, Distributed, Mesh Net
Comment: This seems nice...not only from the fiddling with angle...Could this be competition or complementary to the P2P MS SDK
Simon Willison: CSS ain't Rocket Science
Comment: CSS apparently ain't rocket science, Anyway I'm keeping this tutorial around for when I get around to do stuff with CSS, the buzz is good about it.
Microsoft's Thinking Outside the Office Box With solution accelerators, he explains, "the primary business model is to create a need for (Microsoft) features and products," as opposed to generating revenues directly.
Comment: Pardon my pessimism here but do I read this right...Since we own the market of just about every imginable horizontal app out there, we will need start flooding it with free verticals, which by coincidence is a big ecosystem for ISV basing their products on MS techno...I've always said it, MS is mean killing machine. I read stuff bashing MS and Bill Gates, they almost look to me like pleas for mercy from the writers, and I think stop bashing start innovating as the saying goes...but when I read this stuff coming from MS, they have a point...
Tigris.org: Open source software engineering
Comment: A source of information I had forgotten about...Software Engineering tools that might become handy to leverage in the future.
Fast Company | The Seven Sins of Deadly Meetings Adopt Intel's mind-set that meetings are real work.
Comment: I'm proud to say that we have our act together in terms of meetings...Yes we still can improve, especially in the on-tim category, but from the sins this article talks about we have our house in order...Kudos!!!
By Paul Krill: Web services Web services will enable software to integrate out of the box, leaving consultants to add value elsewhere, ZapThink said. The report also found a significant opportunity exists for consulting firms in the next five years to help companies implement service-oriented architectures. Total architectural and process consulting revenues are expected to surpass those from system integration by 2006. System integration revenue will decrease by more than 70 percent by 2010 while service-oriented business process consulting will increase twentyfold during that time period.
Comment: Somehow I find this intriguing, but it can't be true. APIs to a product are not something brand new and invented just yesterday. Webservices aren't going to change the whole equation. Did adding visual basic for applications lower the IT consulting work outthere or was it the opposite...There is still a learning curve, Webservices is no magic, you still need to learn an API. I think now that more things are possible and easier to do, I suggest we will do more with the same money.
Report: Web services to alter consulting | CNET News.com And since a large portion of the revenue generated by consulting companies is the result of systems-integration services, those companies will need to alter their business models to survive, according to Jason Bloomberg, the report's author. "Because Web services will enable tomorrow's software to integrate out of the box, consultants will have to add value somewhere else,"
Comment: What part of webservices I don't understand beats me. I don't see how webservices will erase integration from the map. Those products will not discover services automagically even if the drivers are leading us to believe it, and no they won't exactly do what is needed of them, so their output will need tweaking...It's not because MS has implemented VBA across all its apps, that IT less employees or consultants working for them developing apps. There are still SDK/API outthere waiting to be mastered and the same will go with WebServices. I guess we will do more with less, this I could buy, but it's so "cliche" and so not-sensational...
Weblogs and Discourse
Comment: Here is another one I need to read whenever I have more than 10minutes and Blogger stops acting up...I just can't believe sometimes how unreliable this whole infrastructure is...Today I can't edit my template it's gone, last time my three blogs got corrupted I had to update to blogger pro, again today I lost two posts this morning...Geez...I'm getting annoyed here...
InfoWorld: HP Thailand launches Linux laptop for $450: May 23, 2003: By : End-user Hardware Bryan Ma, senior research manager with IDC for the Asia-Pacific region, said that the PCs could pose a threat to Microsoft for two reasons. HP's decision to preload Linux, which can be distributed for free, allows customers to avoid the cost of a license for Microsoft's Windows operating system. Additionally, with the rampant amount of piracy in Thailand, users could easily purchase the low-cost PCs and install pirated Windows software on them. So are people buying it because it's cheap and they will pirate a windows on it, or are they gonna give Linux a whirl for real?
Siemens: India to head 3G applications development - Computerworld One hundred additional Indian engineers will join Siemens' 400-member team of software developers at the company's R&D center in Bangalore, India, the German electronics company said Wednesday in a statement. The center will assume global responsibility for developing applications, such as location-based services and multimedia messaging, to run over new third-generation (3G) networks based on Wideband Code Division Multiple Access (WCDMA) technology, Siemens said.
Comment: We're no longer talking about maintenance here. This is innovation ... but if I read on it seems to be to develop phones for India...but they conclude by saying research for phone hardware and software is in Shanghai... My friends we're not in Kansas anymore....
Sun tool targets Microsoft | CNET News.com
Comment: A couple of weeks back I saw a market share study for Java IDE and the clear leader is Borland, close second IBM with Eclipse and a third one I can't remember right now, but not Sun's Forte. Why don't they jsut throw resources at making a better eclipse. Eclipse has a strong foundation, it has a very strong momentum, no wonder why Borland is moving up the stack, they know IBM is breathing down their neck, and to top it off since they don't make money off of Forte anyhow I don't see anything wrong with my reasoning. What do they have to loose nothing, what do they have to gain making a real contender to dev-studio out there...So bottom line I'm curious as to what they're gonna come out with, but their track record in terms of IDE isn't stellar up until now....
Does IT matter anymore? | CNET News.com Being a naysayer about tech used to be a contrarian position, and now it's the conventional wisdom. But is it a correct reading of the future?
Comment: It's the second time I see a reference to this HBR article. I read some very interesting stuff in this paper over the years...I find it odd they would suggest to let others experience with technology and go at it when the technology is proven, but then your competition in theory could be seriously advantaged by such reasonning. Some experiences with new tech will be successful, and in those cases, watchout if you're the one always watching others trying...cause yes you might be the tech at a lesser cost, but you have no know-how, and this one is harder to come by, accelerating its integration/assimilation will cost $$$
UDDI Central - UDDICentral.com
Comment: WebServices for public consumption? anyway several links to resources...
FREE Grokster for p2p or person to person file sharing
Comment: Didn't know about this one just yet, just read about it because of puretune the spanish play just coming out...
SpamBayes Outlook Addin
Comment: Good Morning tech freaks... For those of you still looking for a spam answer, I keep hearing good things about SpamBayes Outlook Addin. It's math based and apparently it learns very quickly. It's also free!!! There is also cloudmark, that I used on a daily basis, and for the $$$ I think is well worth it.
[Simon Fell] Encouraging to see that the Google/Blogger people are working on a blogging API which doesn't assume that bloggers only use a stunted 7-bit version of their language... ... [Cook Computing] Its good to see someone taking this seriously at last.
Big time…The international web is growing much faster than the English writing one, let's get cranking.
HotWired has this neat piece about RSS. It’s an introduction but it points in several directions… a tidbit I like and I so believe in, we’re about to see things change on the internet and I think the author nails it…
[Hot Wired--Sharing your site with RSS] Well, all the "cool kids" are doing it Bloggers and technophiles, by and large, have been the main publishers and consumers of RSS for the past few years. These crafty folk are often the vanguard of larger Internet trends even if they are a small slice of the Web demographic as a whole.
RFC - TrackBack Alternative - drop.org
Comment: A co-worker of mine pointed me to this, I'll need to look further. It's basically a trackback alternative. I don't know what others think about it, but I haven't heard from it, and trackback seems to be moving along...
Watching tricky transitions at Borland and Handspring, CNET News.com's Charles Cooper says history suggests that midstream changes are long shots. But nothing is etched in concrete.[CNET News.com]
It$B!G(Js not all bad out there. The author does leave out the fact that Fuller was ready to throw in the towel with the Corel deal though. I guess it made Borland re-group and the boost it needed to go out and hunt.
[Scripting News] BlogShares is getting an XML-RPC interface. Nicely done!
Here you go with Technocrati we’re going somewhere. We just need to figure out where! I like this idea of digging the information and relations out of the blogosphere…Oh Man do I really need to start to understand this trackback stuff right away…
::Manageability::Thinking styles and software engineering
Comment: I had put this one for later, but a co-worker brouhgt it up to me and it's a good little personality test this thing...On top of that here at Macadamian to do a better job with our clients we've set to try to profile our clients a little more this fits on this topic...
SourceMonitor Version 1.3
Comment: Going over their site it sure isn't inspiring...Source Monitor readme though sure looks interesting enough to dig further...
Show Me DataDrill
Comment: Distributive Software seems to have something along the lines of giving software IT managers a metrics' dashboard. They offer minimal integration with tools, they assume the buyer will integrate it, with the concept of Extractor Kit. Interestingly familiar to us here at Macadamian.
[John Udell's weblog says:] Somehow Eric Promislow's
Amazing Baconizer escaped my attention until Eric mentioned it
to me recently. Eric was co-creator of OmniMark, an ahead-of-its-time XML-oriented programming
language, and is a senior developer at ActiveState. "The Baconizer,"
he says, "is where I go to play in your basic LABP world (I'm too lazy to
replace
There is
so much information out there, so much to do with it I can’t even begin
to wrap my mind around one thing…I’m getting worried I don’t
understand implications of Ebay, Google,
Amazon respective web Services and I’m missing an opportunity…
[ComputerWorld] The company, which has sued IBM for $1 billion in an intellectual property rights fight over Unix code in the Linux operating system, warned other companies that they could also be vulnerable to legal action.
SCO is playing against everybody here, and they sure don’t seem to mind. I like the theory they’re doing this because they want to put a gun on IBM for them to buy SCO out of its misery…
I never thought I'd find myself digging around in my Outlook message store, but Mark's SpamBayes addin -- which is written in Python -- turns out to be a great Python/MAPI tutorial. Borrowing heavily from his examples, I came up with a script to extract my Outlook mail to a bunch of files that I could feed to a standalone indexer. [Full story at O'Reilly Network]
This was a fun project that gave me a chance to explore three different technologies: the Lucene search engine, Jython, and Python's MAPI interface. As I learned this morning, my closing lament -- that the CPython/MAPI and Jython/Lucene halves of this project do not communicate directly -- is somewhat mitigated by the existence of Lupy ( 1, 2), a Python port of Lucene. But I think the general point still stands. Must every component be rewritten in every language? Let's not go there. […]
Have a look at Find it indexes your HD, outlook, and let you search the web, it’s very handy and FAST!!!
Eric Sink has a good piece on how to come up with a new business idea. To summarize he makes the following points:
- Avoiding competition altogether is usually not a good strategy for getting a business going. The big problem with avoiding competition is that you are also avoiding customers.
- Money is made by beating competition, not by avoiding it.
- Look for someone who is serving real customers but not doing it very well. Find a way to do it better.
- The best approach is to find a competitor who is "big and dumb".
- Choose a "big and smart" or "small and smart" partner.
- Choose a fragmented market, that is a market shared by a reasonably large number of players, all of whom are functioning profitably.
- In at least one important way, be different.
Okay, I've got to admit, he's building a .NET product, however he's redeemed by having his server product built using Java. Also, it's not too bad if at the same time he's taking revenue away from Microsoft.
This is a good read indeed…have a look…
Wired News: Tech Firms Eye Juicy Contracts The dinner bell hasn't rung yet. But technology companies of every breed are scrambling for a place at the trough. A $9 billion homeland security IT feast is set for the coming fiscal year. And after lean times gnawing on scrawny private-sector contracts, these firms can't wait to get their hands on new government fat.
Comment: Me thinks this is good as well...enough of bad news...the bottom of the barrel is here and it's up from now on... ;-) All right there is nothing wrong with some wishful thinking...
Windows Hardware, Driver Developers Gain Portal Microsoft Corp. this week is launching a Web portal for Windows hardware and driver developers aimed at bringing more consistency to PCs running the operating system.
Comment: Okay Where is the portal? I'm looking and looking for a link to this portal and niet, natta...Seriously how hard would it be to put the link in the article that talks about the announcement of the portal...
CRN : Breaking News : Microsoft Plans Win32 API Cleanup, XAML Scripts For Next-Gen Windows : 10:44 PM EST Mon., May 05, 2003 First, the software giant aims to slash the number of API calls in the Win32 API set from more than 70,000 to fewer than 10,000 to help developers better exploit the next-generation Windows shell, user interface (code-named Aero) and .Net framework components in Longhorn, according to sources familiar with the Longhorn plans.
Comment: Can you imagine 70000 APIs, just amazing how large this API has gotten over the years... Good thing they want to trim...
National Research Council, Institute for Information Technology Splash Page - Conseil national de recherches Canada, Institut de technologie de l'information, Page d'introduction
Comment: Our own little Institute for IT in Canada. Some interesting research areas like Software engineering and economics... It looks interesting.
Apple plants seed of iTunes for Windows | CNET News.com Apple Computer is developing a version of its jukebox software for Microsoft Windows-based PCs. According to a job posting on the company's Web site, it is looking for someone to design and build "Apple's newest Consumer Application, iTunes for Windows."
Comment: I'm glad to hear that I will not have to buy a mac to get to buy music online...There is some pent-up demand to buy things legally on the Windows side as well...
Goodbye Old Man Mountain
Comment: When we started Macadamian, we had this contract with Corel. One of their US offices was in Gilford NH. For the first couple months Claude and myself passed by the Old Man twice a week, every time looking for it... So long!
plone.org - Welcome to plone.org
Comment: What looks like to be a very decent content management system. Still investigating, like what is the ecosystem around it, are people developing for the system.
Technorati: Web Services for bloggers.
Comment: To know more about what is boing on in the blogosphere...
