State of the Art in Web Development
Five years ago, I wrote for Internet World magazine a feature story on the State of the Art in Web Development. I checked back on that article with some trepidation, because the one thing constant in IT commentary is how embarrassingly wrong one can be – especially over time. What I Got Write ..uhh Right […]
Time to Consider OpenOffice
Now is the time to seriously consider using OpenOffice as an integral part of your desktop operations. There are 3 strong reasons for this. We start with Reason 1 in the screenshot below: This is a screenshot of the new Base desktop database module in which is head and shoulders better than the Access module […]
Open Source Grab
Oracle is rumored to be making several Open Source grabs – Zend Technologies for PHP, Sleppycat Software for an embedded database with good XML capabilities and JBOSS for an application server suite with some good SOA and advanced Aspect programming technology. Well Oracle has done one of the 3 acquisitions by buying Sleepy Cat software […]
Get The Flaps – Revisited
Infoworld reports on the Valentines day gift to IT shops that has been delivered by some Open Source players on the question of Linux versus Windows. The report makes compelling reading here and here. The bottom line is that just on administrative tasks Linux has a distinct advanatge. This is the area which Windows people […]
The End is Near II
Jon Udell and I have agreed to diagree . But the End is Near. Jons articles and insights at Infoworld are, along with Ephraim Schwartz and Tom Yager, the primary reason I return to the website for IT information. Jon has been doing a series of articles on browsers, GUI, and he calls it orchestration. […]
The End Is Near …
The End Is Near … I have signs and proofs for all you Disbelievers: –Borland exits from the IDE marketplace giving up on $60-120 million of potential business value. –IBM gives away free DB2 Express loaded with features and runtime besting/matching Oracle, Microsoft, MySQL etc. –Open Source is yet again leading innovation, this time in […]
eBay Spam
EBay Spam and Phishing attacks are continuing to flood my email, about 2-3 per day and of course and equal number from PayPal. Now I know these are not legitimate because I have not signed up for service at either company (is it possible for someone to do so by proxy – they have my […]
Windows Rot II
eWeeks David Coursey has brought up the topic of Windows Rot which we have covered here. When speaking of Windows Rot, David is referring to the fact that over time Windows gets slower and slower. And this is not because the CPU is slowing down but rather because the Registry and other parts of the […]
DB2 Out in Front
There is another good article at RegDeveloper about DB2 and how IBM is matching Microsoft (and of course Oracle and MySQL as well) by offering a very hefty Express edition of DB2 for free. We will be adding more DB2 in our SQL tutorials in the coming months. But for now take a look here […]
Windows Rot…
David Coursey has a piece ostensibly about when Windows Vista will ship and the role that Jim Allchin will play in making that come about. This year for Christmas and because the Guys and Gals at 1 Microsoft Way will want to win wong for the Grifter … uhhh Gipper. – so this year for […]
Quietly Moving Ahead …
It is like the annual Ground Hog day ritual. We are waiting another year for the update to Internet Explorer promised by Bill Gates nearly a year ago. And now the date looks like the second half of 2006. I think that means late November if the hold up over the Christmas Holidays on a […]
Bit of a Bloody Bloke
Weee bit of a Bloody Bloke we have here in Gavin Clarke. Puttin his ol NetBeans on the stool and shattin away. But suppose hees axtuallee tried it ? …. Not likee. In Java Net Beans has been in front of Eclipse which dissipated its initial lead by trying to be the Visual Studio for […]
Hell for a developer is …
I have been tracking some of the project management trends and things to be avoided in development here and here; but the following story on the British National Health Program is absolutely must reading for anyone doing development work where the scale is massive and the risks are great – yeah the kind of projects […]
Web Services : Take 2
We have always been a doubter about some of the more ambitious Web Service proposals and standards. We have tended to urge caution because of three major factors: 1)The complexity of n-tier heterogeneous systems even without Web Services is not well optimized if even understood. We have been arguing that at all three layers of […]
High Performance GUI III
One of the technologies beyond the direct to screen laser wand that I have been following is speech recognition. In mobile telephones and a lot of consumer devices this has a great deal of attraction. And the speech recognition device does not have to command the whole of a language. Running a desktop can be […]
High Performance GUI II
I decided to return to the question of High Performance GUI and look more carefully at the idea of making a light/laser wand or mouse. This requires a bit of a transformation in thinking – the screen becomes not just a passive display but active responder as well to light wand signals applied directly to […]
High Performance GUI
Infoworlds Jon Udell raises the question of why high performance GUIs have not emerged. He bemoans the fact that computing is stuck in the KVM-keyboard-video-mouse mode of operation. That is certainly true but I have a lot of friends and colleagues that have broken out of that paradigm with touch screens, gestures, speech commands, light […]
Infoworlds Technology of 2006 Awards
Infoworlds Technology of 2006 Awards have one glaring error – SQL Server 2005. There are serious shortcomings in availability, performance, interoperability plus large new learning curves that would cast this elevation into serious doubt. Finally there are some critical issues on pricing. This is a good product but substantially overrated in some key areas. See […]
Repositories: Bottoms Up
Say the word Repository, especially Enterprise Wide, and most IT minds quickly do a word game and you have “Suppository”. And an apt picture of the many excellent tools that have gotten shipwrecked in this field. Think Unisys, Platinum, Microsoft, and IBM for major names in reverse alphabetical order – and roughy effort and technical […]
Tom Yagers Reality Check
Infoworlds Tom Yager has given in his Ahead of the Curve column in InfoWorlds January 16th 2006 issue his tacit blessing to “it runs best in Windows”. Tom calls it “better together” and cites the triumvirate of Windows Server2003, Visual Studio 2005, and SQL Server 2005 as candidates for running better together. He does acknowledge […]
Appletel:Laughing Stock First Strike
Apples new Macbook has one virtue: it is earlier than most analysts expected and one great vice: its pricing is laughable. Ostensibly Apple converted over to Intel chips to bring the company into better price/performance ratios relative to Microsoft PCs. But Steve Jobs must be so absorbed in the negotiations with Disney that he has […]
Unstructured Data to Structured Information
The IT industry is making a transition from unstructured data to structured information. IT organizations are working on bringing more forms of data into the information fold while integrating information better through portals and content management systems. Zach Wahl from the Project Performance Corporation delineated the nature of the problem at a recent DCI Conference […]
The Grand Deception:The Accomplices
In order to commit a protracted crime of deceit you have to have some accomplices, people that explicitly aid and abate the fraudulence and fleecing or that turn a blind eye. This has been the case in the IT industry. But before we get to the crime we have to get to the promises. I […]
Bubbleshare
Here is an example of AJAX technology and some of its varied benefits. If this works – I will consider Bubbleshare a more worthy competitor to Yahoos fabulous photo sharing Web site Flickr.com. This album is powered by BubbleShare – Add to my blog www.flickr.com More of PhotoJacks photos By the way, both versions use […]
Billing the Cat: A Busted Business Model
In the commentary I have received to date on the Grand Deception:the Accomplices – most have been centered on “Not Us” or “you pathetic Microsoft hater … you dont know whats good …”. It is the latter point I would like to beg to differ on. If readers care to take a look at the […]
Information Ethics
It is Friday the thirteenth of 2006, what better day to consider the topic of Information, its trade-offs and therefore ethics. I have previously discussed the Seven Dimensions of Information that drive all IT development. But of course stopping at seven was simply cropping – the nature of information is that it has truly many/multiple […]
Sun Ultra 20 Workstation: The Extras
I have just finished writing a review of the Sun Ultra 20 worktation for Linux Magazine, a $30 a month, 64bit machine with plenty of horsepower plus a boat load of hardware and software (and after 36 months you own the hardware and software lock, stock and barrel). It is a bit short on memory […]
the Register/CERTS: Microsoft 812 Security Reports, Linux 2328
Here is a classic case of bad reporting on CERT Security data not surprisingly by theRegister, the British IT equivalent of Jon Stewarts irreverent TV News Spoof Show- The Daily Report (see here the most recent hot water theRegister has managed to scald themselves in). Now to the quick business of setting the record straight. […]
CES 2006: U3
U3 is just a USB stick with a difference – the difference ? It allows Windows PC users to run their programs completely from the USB disk drive – no dependence whatsoever on the Windows registry, temporary files, and workspaces. All the transactions and data stay on the USB device. So users can get, share […]
CES 2006: They Guessed Very Close
One of the innovations I have been patiently waiting for in the PDA/mobilephone/small notebook marketplace is for some hardware and/or software combination that allows users to talk or tape or OCR interact with their PDA – and the PDA would be smart enough to pick up what was said. Not perfectly; but good enough so […]
Shifting Alliances
2006 is going to be an Inflection Point year. The Shifting Alliances in the IT industry are shooting off like the spirals and chicken bone traces of sub atomic particles in a cloud chamber(what a flash of hyperbole – and thats another curve to be seen in muon decay). Intel closing down “Intel Inside” and […]
LAMM Leads the Way ?
Dana Epp has posted a counter to AJAX as the preferred development stack for SAAS-Software as a Service implementations. This is LAMM and it is an interesting variation on the LAMP-Linux Apache MySQL PHP/PythonPerl) solution. Replace PHP/Python and Perl with Novells Mono and get cross platform perfomance with C# speed. And given Doug Bagleys benchmarks, […]
WMF: Switch to Firefox
As a writer and consultant I get called by friends and acquaintances to help solve software problems. With the recent WMF scare and the very poor response from Microsoft, I am getting the usual security problem spike 2-5 calls calls or emails a day . But now I am filtering those requests. The first question […]
WMF – What? Microsoft Fumbles Security Again
Larry Seltzer writes for Microsoft .. uhh, for eWeek about Security. These days more than half his columns have Microsoft security problem content. But heretofore, Larry has been delivering fairly upbeat stories on Redmond. Larry has been saying (and others too see here and here), remarkably like Microsoft PR itself, that Microsoft Security has improved, […]
2006 Trends: Microsofts Top Ten Hurdles
Directions on Microsoft has published its list of top ten hurdles for Microsoft in 2006. Here they are in the order they were published with our added commentary: • 1-Explain to corporate customers why they should buy Windows Vista without waiting to purchase new hardware first. a)Explain to ISVs why they should make the investments […]
The Bagley Language Benchmarks
Doug Bagley has done programmers a great service by developing and displaying in very readable format a series of 25 benchmark tests of at least 40 languages. This should be taken like the TPC set of benchmarks – not absolutely unequivocal about performance; but clearly indicative of relative performances. Programming language benchmarking is very difficult […]
Quality is Now Job 1
Peter Coffee has an article proclaiming that Quality is Now Job 1 for ISVs. Here is part of the account: Quality, not time, has become the critical unit of measure in software development. Microsoft Corp. became a poster child for that doctrine when it announced Nov. 29 that it would start releasing Vista previews based […]
Microsoft : Redefining Test Standards
Microsoft in the world of development takes on the role of being the trendsetter – after all who could do software any better ?? This pride, cockiness or hubris extends to setting standards. Who could know better on what development standards should be – even when Microsoft is the late adopter. Such is the case […]
Gartner: Premature BI Consolidation Call
This year will be pivotal in BI as the BI pureplay vendors are under fierce attack led by Microsofts giveaway pricing. But lets not don rose colored glasses – Oracle, IBM, Sybase and everybody else is out to make Gartners call for consolidation in BI a reality … and maybe a bit prematurely. As I […]
2006 Trends: Portals and SOA
Portals and SOA are a mutual admiration society and they will be really taking off in 2006. Why? It will happen simply because of the emergence of portals as an effective means of delivering content to customers for a wide range of enterprise vendors from BI-Business Intelligence (the pioneers in portal usage) through Enterprise Content […]
BusinessObjects Strikes Back
I have been watching the pureplay BI vendors squeam, squirm and squishly say the same lines as at least two dozen other firms that faced the Redmond fiercely low bundled-pricing firing squad: “Gosh darn, we welcome Microsofts low, low, temporarily well below amortized productions costs and industry standard pricing, it affirms the market and we […]
Web 2.0: More than AJAX
Some have been arguing that Web 2.0 is little more than AJAX. But if you attended the conference or check the Wiki on Web 2.0 ,there is certainly a broader scope including some intimations of what Web 3.0 brings. But despite these reservations there can be no doubt that a watershed has been reached in […]
WaSP Report: Update on IE Shenanigans ?
We promised to keep an open eye on the Web Standards Project. This is an independent group of Web developers who “fight for standards that reduce the cost and complexity of development while increasing the accessibility and long-term viability of any site published on the Web. We work with browser companies, authoring tool makers, and […]
Blast from the Past:CASE circa 1987
CASE-Computer Aided Software Engineering has been one of the silver bullets. Lets look at the point slides from a presentation from late 1987 and see what can be learned relative to contemporary : UpperCASE for Planning & Analysis -Strategy Formulation Templates -Business Area Analysis Diagrams -Responsibility Matrix generators -Process Simulation – GPSS, SIMAN, Dynamo, Flowcharter, […]
Portals as Consciousness Programming
Portals are becoming quite sophisticated evolving into a style of consciousness programming. Bear with me for a moment. Most programming has been dictatorial or simple conversational. I can remember writing batch programs for Burroughs and IBM systems that basically said: do this do that do the other thing -save work till here do some more […]
Open Source Innovation
Steve Hamm has an interesting article at Business Week on new innovation within Open Source. He implies that innovation has been a missing ingredient in ensuring Open Sources wider adoption. Steve goes on to cite the cases of Zimbra-eMail Server, Flock-social browser, and Scalix-another eMail server as examples of a recent flowering of innovation within […]
e-Health: The Problem
The Health Care industry in the US has major problems. Its cost have been rising at 11% rate or higher for the past 10 years, more than 4 times the rate of inflation.. Yet more than40% of US citizens have no health insurance. Major US companies such as GM and even IBM are having to […]
Trend 2006: Hardware Assisted Virtualization Etc.
Our next major trend for IT in 2006, is the assist in chip hardware that will be afforded to server software. Chips are now using multi-core designs to boost performance. rather than creating one great big monster chip, chipmakers are making clones or cores of the basic chip design on the same die. So in […]
IT Waves of Change
The Industry Cools Down Ephraim Schwartz is playing darts again – putting the right bulls-eye on the Nicholas Carr proposition. No – not the alarmist “IT Does Not Matter” notion but rather that the IT industry is cooling down. Or more pointedly consolidating. This differs from Carrs message in two respects. Carr was saying in […]
Food for Developers, Developers, Developers
Some comparison shopping on development tools availability and cost Cost of using IBMs Developer Works = connect time, available software=most Cost of DVD with latest IBM development software with no time outs = 0 Time limits on software = 0, updates=must download, limits to deployment =yes Cost of using Microsofts Technet Plus = $559US/year rises […]