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My new book, Building Business Intelligence Applications with .NET is available in finer bookstores everywhere. Slake your thirst for knowledge.
I guess my basic question is why the heck would you want to pony up for a baseball ticket if you are going to be looking at your PDA the whole time? You definitely would not want to do this along the 3rd baseline with a right-handed hitter at the plate.
You can also add Roanoke, VA to San Jose as cities with downtown WiFi access ;-)
Interesting article on cable bundling from the Washington Post today. Sign me up for HBO, ESPN and The History Channel, please.
And how, exactly, would we pay for it?
The LA Times has a story about a small town in far southwestern Virginia that is losing their biggest employer, a Travelocity call center, to Indian offshoring. It is a sad story. They mention in the article that the Indian employees who will replace then will get about 25% of the $8 they are paying in Virginia. With a staff of about 250, assuming they all work about 2000 hours a year, that would save about $3M per annum in wages. If you were a Travelocity shareholder (or answerable to them), what would you do?
This is a good deal for MSDN subscribers. I think I'll sign up and make my web log locational. I have no idea what that means, but it sounds like fun.
TechWeb has a longish article on the increasing orientation of development tools towards business process orientation (BPO). Val and I were having a conversation along these lines the other day - it's a good thing that the tools are getting better and that you don't have to spend so much effort on the plumbing. However, there is still a pretty big divide between the understanding of a business process and enabling that process in code (whether old-school C++ or one of the new business process modeling tools like BizTalk). That is still tough and where the big bucks are made - modeling the processes in a comprehensive and realistic way.
Although it does smack of late-90s bubble, the emerging WiMax standard looks interesting. Unlike WiFi, it looks like there might be a way for providers to actually make money at this. There are plenty of places that are underserved by broadband and this could be a way to achive broader distribution. If the technology is reliable and the cost low enough, it could really take off or at least provide some competition for existing broadband access technologies.
Does this move by China to back their own companies in the face of foreign competition really surprise anyone? The Chinese have proven to be mercantilist to the core and show no signs of backing off when it comes to the information economy. Is it a threat to MSFT? I don't know. Look at this project sponsored by the Chinese government and come to your own conclusions.
Tom Rizzo has an article on MSDN describing the basics of WinFS, the new filesystem in the someday-to-be-released Longhorn. I haven't seen it firsthand yet, but from Tom's description it sounds very interesting. Why have a seperate DB at all if the filesystem can find, relate and act on the data?
In a recent CNet editorial, Charles Cooper makes the point that it is still just too hard to use computers.
I'd have to agree with this - things need to just work. One of the beauties of software is that it is infinitely malleable in that you can build just about anything. The problem is making it work unobtrusively. Strides have been made, but we still aren't where we need to be in the software business. I don't think we will get there in the PC era - the interface is just too artificial. Maybe the next big thing in computing (wearable? implanted?) has a better shot.
The recent announcement that Yukon would be delayed wasn't really surprising. The reasons given for the delay (make the product more solid, basically) are good. But, the delay has a high cost.
I think the biggest downside of this decision does not accrue to Microsoft, but to the software developers and resellers who support SQL Server's success. It might not be a big deal to Microsoft to delay the ship date a year since they are sitting on $52 billion in cash, but that kind of delay is deadly for small ISVs. I wouldn't be surprised if this delay causes more than a few to take a look at their open source options. This could have long term implications for the future growth of SQL Server.
AMR has released a new study that says that open source databases are going to be big. I wish I got paid for answering obvious questions.
A friend forwarded a link to the Prevalayer project. Although it has been out there a while, I hadn't run across it before.
Basically, it offers a system for transparent persistence of objects in a variety of OO languages. I tried the C# flavour called Bamboo on a few simple cases and it worked as advertised. For me at least, it is a solution in search of a problem, but it is a very cool solution.