I'm hardly an expert, but I'm teaching my daughter to play golf. We are hitting an "Executive" (i.e., all par 3 and par 4 holes) course tomorrow morning (early - it's going to be hot again). She's just getting started; I bought her a set of clubs last month. I'm playing Best Ball with her - it keeps the frustration level down, and it also has some of her shots counting (I throw plenty into the woods :) ).
Looks like my post on YouTube was timely - they've been sued for copyright infringement.
I find this highly amusing. Go read this comment Amanda Chapel left (did I hit a nerve, or what?). Then, head over to her bio:
I have 15 plus years experience in marketing communications. I am a former vice president in the Consumer Marketing Group at Weber Shandwick, one of the world’s largest PR firms. Prior to Shandwick, I spent about 10 years bouncing around various top agencies. This includes senior posts at Cone Communications in Boston and Porter Novelli in Chicago. I cut my teeth at Saatchi & Saatchi Advertising in London.
With that "screw the customers" mindset, I'm sure she must be heck on wheels with PR events. Not necessarily the sort you want, mind you...
Technorati Tags: marketing, management, advertising
Does Nick Carr purposely misread things, or does he really miss the obvious? He calls Jeff Jarvis on the carpet for this post, which is a response to the equally clueless Amanda Chapel. Here's what Jeff wrote:
Chapel is disgusted by the whole Dell Hell affair and because of it she calls what I write the Communist Blogifesto and calls me “some malignant corporate subversive” (which, I suppose, beats “worm“).
Which is a response to this:
Jeff, you’ve crossed a line. You’re no longer a Newmark-like dis-intermediary hero set out to circumvent your former media bosses and radically improve a business. You are now sounding like some malignant corporate subversive. Listen to yourself: “behind me a mob with pitch forks and torches storming castle Dell;” “we are the bosses now;” “companies have the opportunity to hand over control to customers.” That’s not inspiring a "conversation" comrade; you’re yelling “fire” in a crowded peasant theatre.
Oh please. It's nothing like that at all. What Amanda seems to be upset about is simple: us "little people" don't have to take a complete lack of customer service lying down anymore. There's at least a possibility that we'll be heard now - and in the case of Dell, Jarvis was hardly the only one receiving sub-standard service (something Dell finally figured out).
Hey Amanda: Here's a clue (you certainly need one) - it's no longer safe to provide crappy service. A decade ago, you could get away with it. Now you can't. It's that simple. If you don't like that, then I'd guess that you don't much like this thing called "work". The proof that she doesn't get it - this:
As it relates to Dell, you think Michael Dell gives a shit about you. He doesn’t. He reports to the bank. He cares about Wall Street. I, the stockholder, am his main concern.
Well - here's the thing: when the management chain stops caring about the customer, then eventually, the shareholders feel the pinch in lower share value. Lower sales tend to lead to that. Amanda seems to think that there's no connection between the shareholders and the customers. What Jarvis is doing is pointing out that in fact - there is. To this, Amanda sticks her fingers in her ears and chants "la la la".
Meanwhile, Nick Carr, ever ready to get the simple stuff deeply wrong, praises the prancing idiot and shouts at the person making a reasonable point.
Technorati Tags: PR, management
Well, it makes sense for there to be a power overload on a day like this, but that doesn't make it any more pleasant. I'm doing this via the joys of dialup:
I didn't want to work today anyway :)
We saw "Pirates of the Caribbean" yesterday afternoon, and it was a classic summer "popcorn" movie - entertaining, fun, and worth seeing. The only downside is that it's an obvious bridge movie - but we knew that already. Just watching Depp play Jack Sparrow is worth the price of admission.
Our partner Georg Heeg has put together an interesting little package in the public store repository - you can show existing smalltalk code in a pseudo-C syntax. It's read-only (i.e., you can't write code in it) - but possibly interesting for newbies. Load it in, and have a look at the new tab that appears in the browser when you select a method. Here's an example - first, Smalltalk code:
cstDelete "delete Item on server" | destination | destination := self getDeleteURL. self validatePost ifFalse: [^self message: (UserMessage defaultString: 'You did not enter a username and/or password' key: #postingToolUserValidationMessage2) asString]. ^self postDeleteTo: destination
And the matching C-like stuff:
ANY cstDelete (void)
/*delete Item on server*/
{
ANY destination;
destination = self -> getDeleteURL();
self -> validatePost() -> ifFalse:(((void) {
return self -> message:(UserMessage -> defaultString:key:("You did not enter a username and/or password", S"postingToolUserValidationMessage2") -> asString())});
return self -> postDeleteTo:(destination)}
We've reached that glorious time of year in Maryland where the great outdoors is a steamer:
Yeah, that looks like fun to go out in :)
Scoble points out that there's a huge measurement problem for podcasting:
Speaking of which, I wish I had better metrics at PodTech.net. I wish I knew how many listeners we REALLY have. Or, whether the people who download a file actually listen to it. Or, whether they listen to the whole file, or just part of it.
Podcasting and video podcasting won’t be taken seriously as businesses until we figure this stuff out. Advertisers want proof that their money is spent well.
I'd say that it's a general web problem - heck, I'd say that it's been a general TV and radio issue for awhile too. Advertisers trust the Nielson ratings, but how good are they, really? I have no idea, and I doubt that you do, either. "Everyone" decided to trust them, and that was that.
The web makes that kind of rating system difficult - heck, the proliferation of cables services made that difficult for TV. The theory is, you can find a (relatively small) segment of representative viewers, and translate their habits to the entire market. That's very different than measuring sales - at the end of the month, Frito-Lay (to take an example) knows exactly how many bags of what they've sold (and where). We have nothing like that. I listen to podcasts while jogging now, and I have a pretty low "bored now" threshold. I've bailed on more than one podcast, and I'm sure others have as well.
It's worse than that though. In the old days, there were a handful of TV choices - so if you polled a decent sample as to what they watched, it translated up pretty well. TV has gone narrowcast now - I have over 500 channels now, and what we watch is all over the map (the DVRs only make it more fragmentary). The web started out as a narrowcast service, and it's getting more and more that way all the time. I don't even know that we can get reliable numbers that mean much.
Technorati Tags: marketing, advertising
Now here's a good day in baseball:
Mariano Rivera earned his 400th career save in a win that put the Yankees a half-game behind the first-place Boston Red Sox in the American League East.
The A’s took the series from Boston and left the Red Sox with a half-game lead over the Yankees in the American League East.
It's all tied up in the loss column, and the White Sox look vulnerable on the wild card. Things are looking up!
I've seen other people comment on this, but I'm wondering too: how is YouTube staying afloat? Yes, I know that NBC is running video there, and paying for it. I also know that Disney bought time on it a few days ago for the launch of "Pirates of the Caribbean". However, they face some real problems:
Are they doing something to bring in revenue that I'm missing?
In another useful escape from reality, I'm off to see "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest". Don't blow any holes in reality while I'm gone :)
In a world on the brink of who knows what, at least I can look to baseball for some solace - the Yankees are winning again:
It might be a coincidence, but since Torre gathered his players in the visiting clubhouse at Jacobs Field on July 5, the Yankees have won six of seven and averaged seven runs a game.
They are steadily gaining ground in the race for a playoff spot, and yesterday they thumped the Chicago White Sox, 14-3, at Yankee Stadium. The Yankees trailed Boston by a game and a half in the American League East after the Red Sox beat Oakland last night.
The three runs scored against them is more relevant than the 14 for; it means that there's some actual pitching going on. If that holds up, they might just well end up on top of the eastern division at the end of the season.
I usually like the History Channel, but this evening we stumbled across something really odd. Here, a screen capture will explain the problem:
For those of you who aren't movie buffs, that's "The Road Warrior". I visited Australia a few years back, and I can state for the record that I was never chased by a wild gang of gasoline craving whack jobs. Did I miss something?
Technorati Tags: stupidity
Scoble talks about speaking engagements, and whether they should be free or not:
Molly Holtzschlag (famous XHTML and Web development expert) writes that she will not speak for food anymore. I’m quickly arriving to the same conclusion. Speaking is fun and all (and good for your career -- one speech I did at a Silicon Valley user group back in the mid 1990s got me a $10,000 raise. So far that one speech has made me about $100,000).
As with most things, there's no hard line here. It all depends on what kind of situation you and your company/product are in. You may well need the exposure more than you need the cash. For some people and firms, that's not the case - and if they don't really need the exposure, then it makes sense to look for their time to be compensated. If you do need the exposure? Then the engagement itself may be pay enough. It boils down to being a management/PR decision.
Technorati Tags: management, marketing, speaking
Mark Cuban has some thoughts on the future of TV over the internet, and they aren't positive. Here's a line that will throw the net neutrality crowd into a tizzy:
But wait there’s more. You still have to pay for that bandwidth somewhere. Yes peer to peer helps save bandwidth at the originating end. But it doesnt help at the destination end. 100 peers on a network segment will still use the same amount of bandwidth on that segment as 1 destination with no peers. 10gbs of programming still has to find its way to the destination. So clogged pipes in that last mile are going to clog further as more content is delivered is delivered at higher bit rates. Which in turn mean that fewer broadband bits can be delivered at busy times to last mile users. Net Neutrality will pretty much guarantee that this is a problem forever and ever.
Beyond my worries over a net nanny coming along for the ride with network neutrality, there's the problem Cuban gets at above: regulation guaranteeing neutrality will end up freezing current technology in place. Anyone think that what we have no is "good enough"?
With the addition of some internal blogs here at Cincom, there's been a real desire to make posting easier. So I've been delving into TinyMCE some more, and upgrading my usage of it. Here's a screen shot of the online posting form I use:
That's a shrunken picture, but you can see the HTML controls on the text area. The new addition is an image button, which goes along with the file upload servlet. This makes it possible for Silt bloggers to upload files without using a blog posting tool - something I know presents something of a barrier to entry.
Now, it happens to be the case that TinyMCE supports "paste from Word", preserving markup. I'll be looking at adding that too.
| Platform | BottomFeeder Downloads |
| Windows | 485 |
| Mac X | 346 |
| Update | 216 |
| Linux x86 | 129 |
| Mac 8/9 | 112 |
| CE ARM | 96 |
| HPUX | 28 |
| Solaris | 17 |
| AIX | 17 |
| Linux Sparc | 12 |
| Windows98/ME | 11 |
| Sources | 7 |
| Linux PPC | 3 |
| SGI | 2 |
| CE x86 | 1 |
Off to the HTML page accesses for the week:
| Tool | Percentage of Accesses |
| Mozilla | 59.4% |
| Internet Explorer | 27.6% |
| Planet Smalltalk | 4.9% |
| MSN Bot | 2.7% |
| Opera | 2.1% |
| Other | 2.3% |
| Megite | 1% |
That's about normal distribution-wise. The good news - overall pageviews are still rising. Finally, the RSS/Atom hits:
| Tool | Percentage of Accesses |
| BottomFeeder | 17.4% |
| Mozilla | 17.1% |
| Other | 12.8% |
| BlogLines | 9.3% |
| Net News Wire | 8% |
| Internet Explorer | 6.5% |
| Safari RSS | 5.5% |
| NewsGator | 4.5% |
| Google Feed Fetcher | 3.8% |
| BlogSearch | 1.9% |
| SharpReader | 1.7% |
| Planet Smalltalk | 1.7% |
| RSS Bandit | 1.3% |
| MSN Bot | 1.2% |
| RSS 2 Email | 1.2% |
| JetBrains | 1.1% |
| Liferea | 1% |
| Java | 1% |
| Opera | 1% |
| Feed Reader | 1% |
| Lilina | 1% |
I'm going to have to go into detail about that "other" category at some point...
Gordon Weakliem calls me out on the GUID usage here:
RSS 2.0, RSS 1.0, and Atom all provide a way to handle post identity: the <guid> element, the rdf:about attribute, and the <atom:id> elements, respectively. Unfortunately, not everyone provides this metadata, or does it incorrectly: for instance, CNN doesn't give you GUIDs , the Cincom weblogs just use big integers (these look like they might be dates, but I'm not sure), and PHP.NET is re-using the rdf:about attribute on different posts. The problems, from last to first: if you identify posts by GUID, re-using a GUID amounts to modifying a post, though that doesn't seem to be the intent in this case. Using big integers is poor practice, because an integer isn't a GUID. Recall that the GU part stands for globally unique : if you use integers as GUIDs, you're just hoping that there won't be a collision, especially if your protocol is to increment a counter with each new post.
Yeah, I know I should be using the full post link for the ID instead of the number. In my case, the ID is only unique within a given blog, not necessarily across all blogs on the site. The number is a timestamp, so it's a pretty sure bet that it'll be unique within a given blog. If I had it to do over again, I'd do it differently. I just don't know that I want to flash every subscriber with faux new posts. I probably should at some point.
Real Tech News reports on a really stupid idea out of the UK: elimination of standby mode for electronics:
Basically in an effort to save energy, the British government is planning to outlaw the standby mode in most home and office electronics - arguing that they eat up about 8% of all energy costs each year. This means that every TV set, home computer, office printer, and so on will not longer have a standby mode but will only offer on and off.
Hmm. I suspect that standby mode saves power on balance - people forget to turn things off, and their devices sleep, consuming less power. Most people will probably just leave things on so as to not get delayed by lengthy startups (especially computers). I wonder if they included laptops in that - the original story doesn't make it clear.
James Governor goes into more depth on the Gartner Cease and Desist thing. Here's what Gartner's letter says:
Recently, the following blog post from July 4, 2006 came to my attention: http://www.redmonk.com/jgovernor/index.html. In it, you link directly to the following report: http://mediaproducts.gartner.com/reprints/sas/vol2/article1/article1.html. This report is a reprint which a vendor has purchased for its own use. Therefore, your link constitutes an unauthorized use, and it must be removed immediately.
I tried the link - it's accessible, not behind a paywall or anything like that. If a vendor purchased that from Gartner, then the vendor ought to ask for their money back - it's publicly available information.
Troy in a tie. Next, someone will show me two Windows boxes with file shares that "just work"...
Well, that's how most feed readers work, and it's just plain wrong. Your software should, instead, find the new stuff since the last time you looked and show you that first.
The first aggregator, the one I wrote in 1999, did. And so did the one that's in Radio UserLand, and so does the NewsRiver aggregator that's built into the OPML Editor. Until yesterday these were the only aggregators that worked this way. (To be fair there are developers who say theirs do, but I've never seen one that actually does.)
Hmm. Every news aggregator I know of does this - the only thing that differs is the mechanism. In BottomFeeder, there's a toolbar button that will show only the new stuff, in either 2 pane or 3 pane mode (I've got users in both camps). There are similar features in every tool I've seen or had described to me. I understand that he likes newspaper mode, but the reality is, people's tastes differ on this.
Technorati Tags: rss
Dell is starting to understand the new state of communications: they are starting to address some of the widely reported issues, like customer support. Check out this post, which goes into lengthy detail about the problems.
That's what communications is all about
Technorati Tags: marketing, management
I've just ordered a digital voice recorder - my plan is to use it to interview some Smalltalkers at upcoming events (ESUG in particular), and post them as podcasts. I'll experiment on my own before then :)
Technorati Tags: podcast
Steve Rubel notes that Wikipedia has made page revisions available via RSS. Very cool, if you are tracking changes to a page of interest to you. He gives the feed for the Podcasting page as an example.
I'll give Tom Yager this - when he's wrong, it's not by a little bit. He famously predicted that Apple would not move to the x86 (and then whitewashed the page). Today, Yager is spouting utter nonsense. First, this:
Where do things stand now? Fearless C, C++, and Objective-C developers have tools of their dreams that let them dig deeper than ever before into system, OS, and CPU internals. Optimization, at which .Net and Java can only play, is hot as compilers -- including the free GNU Compiler Collection -- evolve from heuristic to automated empirical optimization. Development tools watch your application run and then retune it based on observed behavior.
Hmm - I guess the HotSpot technology is something he missed. In a fully dynamic system (Smalltalk is where that tech came from), an optimizing JIT can make the code better as it runs, not just once - and retain full portability. Kind of nice when you want to have the same runtime shared between Windows, Mac, and Linux. Next, he just runs right off the rails:
Here’s a native code prediction that’s way under your radar: We’ll see more use of assembly language. When developers dare to handcraft architecture-dependent code, the performance of an application or a tweaked open-source OS can take off. Mac users know how far a simple change can take you; a lot of applications you wouldn’t think of as math-intensive go stratospheric when they’re enhanced for PowerPC’s AltiVec vector math accelerator. Developers coding for new, controlled deployments can afford to set high requirements that include a 64-bit CPU, OS, and drivers. And if you know you’re coding for Opteron and you’re ready to write to that architecture, baby, life is a highway.
Umm yeah Tom - I won't hold my breath waiting for that army of Assembly jockeys. Here's the thing - developer time costs real money, while CPU time is getting increasingly cheaper. Most development (yes, I know there are plenty of exceptions) do not need low level tweaks to be performant; better table design and cleaner SQL is usually a far bigger problem.
I'm not sure which part of the IT industry Yager is watching, but I'd guess that the color of the sky is different there. Here's a link to a post that shows some of Yager's other greatest hits.
Yesterday, I took a swipe at Java, saying that the complexity of the language itself leads to enterprisey results. Today, I see that Gordon Weakliem has turned up a hilarious piece of contributing evidence:
Java in a Nutshell: 1264 pages.
I'll quote Matt Croyden, who has this to say about it:
With apologies to Jeff Foxworthy, your programming language just might be complicated when you have trouble telling the difference between its Nutshell book and a telephone book.
Technorati Tags: java
PR Opinions doesn't like this post on Edelman's blog - here's what Edelman had to say:
An account person from GCI (one of Edelman's competitors) has unleashed a gratuitous attack on Jeff Jarvis, the widely-read blogger, in a comment on Jarvis' blog.
To which PR Opinions says:
This post leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
When a respected PR practitioner, who I have acknolwedged has in many respects been leading the way in online communication (as far as the large agency set go in any respect), takes time to write a pontificating post that takes a swipe at a competitor, I think it smells bad.
I have to disagree. It's fair to point out the bad behavior in your community - it's the business equivalent of expressing disapproval over the behavior of someone else's kids.
Technorati Tags: marketing
Scoble makes a good point about internal mail:
I left more than a gig of email at Microsoft. And that was after deleting all the crud out of it. What knowledge was in there? Tons of stuff about Channel 9 that would have been awesome for someone to use to learn about how things get onto Channel 9 and how it evolved. Gone. Deleted.
When an employee leaves, the silo that was their email is just gone. You'll never be able to capture all of that, but internal blogs and/or wikis could help. There are problems with that approach, of course - not everyone is going to be willing to do their information management that way. I suspect that it's something that ought to be looked at though.
We watched the first episode of "Nightmares and Dreamscapes" tonight, and it was a spooky episode. I only have one nit, and it's this: the episode owed very little to Stephen King's imagination, and an awful lot to H.P. Lovecraft's. Watch it, and you'll see what I mean.
Gordon Weakliem points to Charles Miller, who has run into the infamous hotel 301 problem - Charles says:
On a recent trip to the USA, Scott stayed in a hotel with a ‘net connection. The connection was one of those with an arbitrary web-based registration that made sure you’d agreed to their ass-covering terms of service. Until you had agreed, the hotel’s proxy would redirect any HTTP connection to the registration page… using the 301 status code.
Within a few seconds of plugging in the ethernet cable, all of Scott’s RSS subscriptions had been silently replaced with the hotel’s registration page URL. All the original feed URLs were lost.
Considering this, Gordon writes:
Lots of aggregator developers have been burned by the hotel proxy problem. The problem is that as a developer who read the spec, you tend to think that other developers did the same. The interesting thing is what to do with the 301. So you ask the user if they want to accept the redirect. Does the user even understand what that means? Let's see, "Some server is saying that the resource at http://example.com/rss.xml has moved to dumbhotelproxy.com. Do you want to change your subscription?" Considering the amount of effort people are putting into making it easy to subscribe to an RSS feed (because the users don't know what to do with XML, or the orange XML button), I have no idea how to pose that question such that the user might actually do the right thing.
I ran across this one myself over 2 years ago with BottomFeeder (thank goodness I back up feeds at startup!). I stay in hotels that have 12 or 24 hour subscriptions often enough that I wanted a permanent solution to this problem, so I came up with one:
Here's the code I use to make that call:
httpRedirectEvent: anUrl
"we got a redirect - check to see if we have more than one this
cycle that went the same place. If so, assume that we have a proxy
of some sort, and revert it all back"
self redirects add: anUrl.
(self redirects occurrencesOf: anUrl) > self tooManyRedirects
ifTrue: [self resetOriginalsAndStopUpdates: anUrl.
self redirects: OrderedCollection new].
Each redirect generates an event, which ends up in that method. You can see how it works, and it's saved me from this problem more than once. Now, how easy do other frameworks make it for you to do this sort of thing? I have no idea. It was a few minutes work to solve it in Smalltalk though
Technorati Tags: smalltalk, rss, aggregators, development
I've pushed BottomFeeder 4.2 out the door - it's been stable for quite awhile now, but I have moved up to VW 7.4.1 as the base instead of 7.3 (the previous release). Moving to 7.4.1 gets me NTLM proxy support for free, which is great - especially since Cincom uses NTLM internally :) Here's the change log:
Changes from version 4.1
If you use 4.1, you'll need to replace your runtime. No need to reinstall - just replace the image or executable, and delete everything in the "app" directory. You can also blow away the files Blog-Tools.pcl and IRC-BottomFeeder-Plugin.pcl from the "plugins" directory.
Nick Carr seems to think that "professional" writers are essential to a healthy ad-space on the web:
By contrast, there's plenty of supply available for banner ads. The problem here is that advertisers don't much like the space that's available, particularly the space that's near user-generated content: "The complex task of spreading media spending across thousands of small Web sites, many with different ad formats, means that advertisers tend to return to heavily trafficked sites, where supply is at a premium. Even on the big portals, marketers are leery of having their ads placed near consumer-generated content that might be objectionable."
The upshot? Expect higher prices and slower growth in online advertising until supply catches up with demand. As ever, good content is king, and the flood of amateur content doesn't appear to meet advertisers' definition of "good." Maybe professionals aren't so dispensable after all.
I've got a news flash for Carr: mass media just isn't coming to the web. You and Fortune magazine are going to have to adjust to the real world, and realize that narrow-casting is the future.
Meanwhile, advertisers are going to have to do something they aren't used to: work. They are going to have to start figuring out where their target audience is, and start delivering information that people actually want, instead of mindless pap that we desperately want to skip over. More "professionals" is exactly what we don't need.
Technorati Tags: advertising, marketing, PR
Our engineers are having an internal Camp Smalltalk out in Santa Clara this week - my daughter has a performance for her drama camp, so I couldn't attend. Suzanne has been out there, so I have some pics. Here's a team shot from a dinner at the Fish Market:
There's a lot of work going on too - with a geographically distributed team, these kinds of get togethers are a good idea to have from time to time. From left to right, that's Vassili Bykov, John Sarkela, Andreas Hiltner, and Steve Dahl:
Here's one more work shot, taken in the conference room at the SC office.
Word is, the sessions are going well, and lots of good work is getting done.
RocketBoom is back, and I'll give them credit - they are handling the host change with a decent sense of humor.
The various leaks about the new host were right - it is Joanne Colan. What will be interesting to watch is whether RB purposely tries to break dependence on a single host by bringing in more than one.
Technorati Tags: vlog
Marc Gunther of Fortune decries the "loss" of mass media:
I think the explosion of choice has left us poorer in at least two arenas. The first is journalism. (Yes, as a Fortune writer, I've got a stake in the health of the mainstream media, which bloggers call the MSM.) The network evening newscasts, big-city newspapers and the national news magazines once had the money, access, skills, commitment and power to deliver lots of original reporting and put important issues on the national agenda. Today, they are all diminished.
Those evening newscasts were never that good (yes, I include Cronkite in that). "Everyone" watched them because there were three main choices (plus a handful of independent stations) in most areas. I gre up outside of New York City - in that media mecca, we were able to get 7 stations. When I went to college near Albany NY, we were getting 3 or 4. It's not that people liked having the limited choices; that was what we had.
It's a narrow-casting world, and there's no going back
I haven't been following the EU anti-trust thing with Microsoft very closely, but it's been pretty hard to miss of late. Here's a CNet piece on it:
After years of investigation, the Commission found in 2004 that Microsoft used near-monopoly power from its Windows operating system to harm competitors making work group servers, which run printing and sign-on services in offices.
The Commission ordered Microsoft to give rivals the information needed so their work group servers could compete on a level playing field with Microsoft's own. The company must help its rivals interconnect smoothly with Windows.
I wonder if any of the commissioners have actually used Windows, Linux, and Macs on a network. I have all three here, and oddly enough, the Mac and Linux boxes (and this is an ancient Linux - Redhat 7!) do a better job with Windows networking than the XP boxes do. I have XP on my latop, and my wife has 2 XP boxes in the living room. The three boxes can only intermittently see shared drives and printers - I've never really understood why. The Mac - it always sees everything without a problem. Ditto the Linux box.
Given the way Windows networking *cough* works *cough*, maybe Microsoft's real problem is that they need to share the information with themselves.
Technorati Tags: windows
Valleywag calls BS on the latest from RocketBoom, noting that just before yesterday's "we were very dependent on Amanda" line, Andrew Baron had posted a "but I did just about everything" missive.
What it boils down to is this: before this happened, Andrew didn't realize that his bus count was 1. Now he does.
Update: There's a new update on rocketboom.com. Supposedly, they'll be back this afternoon.
Technorati Tags: vlog, management
Looks like Sony finally figured out that single country advertising is increasingly becoming a thing of the past - they've pulled the "white is coming" PSP ad from the Netherlands:
Sony said that the Netherlands campaign intended to highlight the color contrast between the existing black PSP and the new ceramic white PSP. Instead, the ad campaign riled California Assemblyman Leland Yee, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and a youth civil rights education project called Sojourn to the Past. Those critics condemned Sony’s use of the racially charged photo to sell a product and said it recalled an age and time when black people were portrayed in minstrel shows.
I mentioned at the time that this ad campaign was ill advised - at best. It's pretty much the same mistake Ted Neward made in in O/R analogy post: an ancillary point rose up and became the story, overwhelming the desired point.
Technorati Tags: advertising, marketing, management
It seems that complexity is not its own reward: industry analysts are noticing that Java gets in the way when you're developing loosely coupled "service oriented" applications. Here's Richard Monson-Haefel on the problem:
Even with the simplification of enterprise APIs in Java EE 5, the "platform has grown too complex to be workable for enterprise developers." However, a later statement is that "JEE5's failure to address complexity is a harbinger of the Java EE platforms' fall from dominance in the enterprise development platform arena." The implication is that the complexity is in the wrong place, not addressing actual problems, but existing in development and deployment.
SOA emphasizes interoperability more than cross-platform deployment, and the analysts say that Java EE is ill-suited for this (despite the existence of efforts such as Project Tango to directly address this.)
I think I've been saying that for awhile; it's nice to see other people catching up with the obvious. When you get buried in language complexity issues (generics, anyone?), then actually solving business problems gets to be troublesome. Doing loosely coupled services is going to be a lot easier in languages like Smalltalk, Ruby, Python, and even Perl. Of course, the Enterprisey types are already in full defense mode - from the same page:
In other words, most applications don't need a service model, and wouldn't benefit from one. As a result, catering to a service model would be a waste of resources and time. One architect from a Fortune 100, dismissed the report, saying that it's "an analysts group's cry for attention by trolling."
Note the courageous "standing behind his words" thing :) Let the architects man the barricades - I'll be over here, being productive.
Rob Fahrni wields the reality stick on the Digg crowd, who think that the end of Win 98/ME support could boost desktop Linux:
I cannot see people that know how to turn on the computer, login, and double-click on the IE logo switching to an OS that's still geared toward complete gear heads. They'll run to a Mac before switching to Linux. I know, I know, BASH rulz! Of course that opinion and $4.50 will get you a quad-grande-vanilla-mocha at Starbucks.
That's about the size of it.
Andrew Baron explains the problems they are having getting RocketBoom back up - regardless of what happened between him and Amanda, it's clear that there was no plan in place for the "what if something happened to Amanda?" problem:
Producing Rocketboom every day is a challenge but nothing has ever been as challenging as what we are going through right now.
Rocketboom was obviously very dependent on Amanda's role. Since she left so suddenly, I have tried to get the episodes up and running as soon as possible, though I am not comfortable with the way they are going yet.
It's easy enough to recreate the same thing, the challenge here is to do the next.
There is a humorous short on the site now along with the explanation. This raises a broader issue for any outfit: What's your "bus count"? In other words, are there people on your team who - if they "got hit by a bus" - would bring things to an immediate halt? If so, then you have a problem that you better start addressing right now.
Technorati Tags: vlog, management
Here's the smart analyst (James Governor), trying to say something positive about the apparently dumb analysts. He's received a "cease and desist" letter for the unpardonable sin of - wait for it - linking to something on the Gartner site and praising it:
Last Thursday I received an email, strangely enough from Gartner's Vendor Relations department, asking me to remove a link from monkchips, because it apparently constituted "unauthorised use".
So wait a second. I can't post a URL to a Gartner site? What exactly would be the penalty for doing so?
I guess Gartner is into anti-marketing now...
Yesterday, RocketBoom was coming back today. Last night, their web page lost the "coming back soon" stuff and started displaying an error message - and that message is still there now (7:30 AM, EDT):
Generally speaking, that's not a good sign...
Technorati Tags: vlog
Scoble cuts through all the SEO nonsense and explains what should be obvious:
Without clicking anywhere find me a real human being. Not one made out of a stock photo agency.
You don’t need to look. There aren’t any. Not to mention that you can’t talk to a real human being. And I don’t see anything on those two pages that I’d like to link to. Which means they won’t get high search engine rankings no matter how many SEO firms they pay.
Which is like throwing money down the toilet. If you met THE PEOPLE behind these companies I think you’d be far more likely to listen to what they have to say. Or sell. And they ARE experts on their business. It’s a damn shame that they aren’t allowed to talk with us on their Web sites.
The context here is two website, here and here. The companies don't matter much - you could say the same thing for our (Cincom's) main website. The only way to directly communicate with us is via the blogs here, which is a large part of the reason I do this.
Most marketers are stuck in a broadcast mode of thinking - what they need to do is start engaging in the narrowcasting future.
Dare Obasanjo quote Debra Chrapaty (via Tim O'Reilly) on what's coming down the pike with "Web 2.0":
People talk about "cloud storage" but Debra points out that that means servers somewhere, hundreds of thousands of them, with good access to power, cooling, and bandwidth. She describes how her "strategic locations group" has a "heatmap" rating locations by their access to all these key limiting factors, and how they are locking up key locations and favorable power and bandwidth deals. And as in other areas of real estate, getting the good locations first can matter a lot. She points out, for example, that her cost of power at her Quincy, WA data center, soon to go online, is 1.9 cents per kwh, versus about 8 cents in CA. And she says, "I've learned that when you multiply a small number by a big number, the small number turns into a big number." Once Web 2.0 becomes the norm, the current demands are only a small foretaste of what's to come. For that matter, even server procurement is "not pretty" and there will be economies of scale that accrue to the big players. Her belief is that there's going to be a tipping point in Web 2.0 where the operational environment will be a key differentiator
There's a lot of truth in that, but at the same time, it depends. If your model is to handle a Digg/MySpace size audience, sure - that's a broadcast model (yes, I know that there's narrowcasting within that broadcast model). However, not everyone is after a huge audience - many people are after a niche audience right from the get go, and thus don't have huge scalability (or power) needs. If all you need is a handful of servers, location isn't going to be a huge problem. Based on what I see on the web right now, for every huge service like Windows Live, there are tons and tons of niche services that are going after a much, much smaller audience.
If this report on (yet another) Blu-Ray delay holds up, then Sony should just hoist the white flag. To quote McCoy: "It's dead, Jim".
The Cincom Smalltalk team is looking for a Senior Smalltalk Engineer - the person hired will work with the rest of the Cincom Smalltalk development staff. We are looking for someone in North America:
Sr. Software Engineer
Cincom, the world's most experienced software company, builds, sells, and supports software for customer experience management, data access and integration, process automation, manufacturing business solutions, and business communications as well as offers IT and contact center outsourcing.
Cincom Systems employs powerful, motivated individuals who possess Character, Competence, Commitment and make a habit of exceeding expectations.
Our successful candidate will have 4-6 years plus experience in the following areas:
- Bachelor's degree or higher
- Must have five to six years minimum experience in Smalltalk
- Some experience in VisualWorks
- Significant experience in Object Oriented design of application frameworks
- Experience using VisualWorks to build user interfaces
- Strong written communication skills and good planning skills
- Familiarity with the internals of VisualWorks tool set
- Visibility in the Smalltalk community
- Publicly available work done in VisualWorks, especially various tools enhancements
- Exposure to fundamentals of usability and UI design
If you are interested in becoming a member of our team, forward your resume and salary requirements to: employme@cincom.com. Please reference the Req. number 2800.
RESUMES ACCEPTED UNTIL POSITION IS FILLED
...an equal opportunity employer
Visit the page now, or send me an email.
The Cincom Smalltalk team is looking for a Field Application Engineer - the person hired will work closely with the Cincom Smalltalk customer base and new prospects. We are looking for someone in North America:
Field Application Engineer
Cincom, the world's most experienced software company, builds, sells, and supports software for customer experience management, data access and integration, process automation, manufacturing business solutions, and business communications as well as offers IT and contact center outsourcing.
Cincom Systems employs powerful, motivated individuals who possess Character, Competence, Commitment and make a habit of exceeding expectations.
Our successful candidate will have 6 - 8 years plus experience in the following areas:
- Bachelor's degree or higher
- Over six years experience with Smalltalk
- Provide detailed analysis to current customer to provide key technical information to Product Manager for product direction
- Through customer analysis discover services opportunities for upgrades, training and other revenue generating opportunities
- Provide specialist support during sales cycle to add credibility to product and close opportunities faster
- Assist with evaluation of add-ons and applications for potential product opportunities for Cincom and add-ons to core product
- Represent Cincom Smalltalk at industry trade events
- Assist with technical aspects of sales proposals
- Provide support when required during product implementations
- Able to commit to 50% travel
If you are interested in becoming a member of our team, forward your resume and salary requirements to: employme@cincom.com. Please reference the Req. number 2808.
RESUMES ACCEPTED UNTIL POSITION IS FILLED
...an equal opportunity employer
Visit the page now, or send me an email.
The Cincom Smalltalk team is looking for a Business Development Manager - the person hired will work closely with the Smalltalk management team to identify new business opportunities and partners. We are looking for someone in North America:
Business Development Manager
Cincom, the world's most experienced software company, builds, sells, and supports software for customer experience management, data access and integration, process automation, manufacturing business solutions, and business communications as well as offers IT and contact center outsourcing.
Cincom Systems employs powerful, motivated individuals who possess Character, Competence, Commitment and make a habit of exceeding expectations.
Our successful candidate will have 6 - 8 years plus experience in the following areas:
- Bachelor's degree or higher
- Over eight years experience with Smalltalk
- Must have experience in presenting Smalltalk message
- Experience as a Business Development Manager
- Research target markets and new industries to target
- Build up current partners and customer opportunities
- Work closely with Team to continually develop the message and UVP
- Develop metrics for qualification of sales leads
- Develop Business Case for overall product line and support in same for Partner organizations
- Assist sales support organization
- Identify key sales opportunities and either close or work with Star Team to close opportunities faster
- Ability to commit to 50% travel
If you are interested in becoming a member of our team, forward your resume and salary requirements to: employme@cincom.com. Please reference the Req. number 2807.
RESUMES ACCEPTED UNTIL POSITION IS FILLED
...an equal opportunity employer
Visit the page now, or send me an email.
It was widely reported last week that RocketBoom would be back today with a new host - and that's still what the announcement on their website says, as of 10:52 am this morning (EDT). Hmm...
Update: As of 2 pm EDT, they've added a blurb at the bottom of the page promising an episode today. We'll see...
Update: The latest announcement says that the launch is delayed until tomorrow (July 11).
Technorati Tags: media, rocketboom, vlog
What a shocker - a writer for the Washington Post posts that Wikipedia is prone to inaccurate information on new (and controversial) topics - like the death of Ken Lay (former CEO of Enron):
Lay's death on Wednesday illustrates the problem, as chronicled by the Reuters news service, which watched the Wikipedia article on Lay evolve with alarming speed and wildly inaccurate reporting.
He gives a few examples, which demonstrate the politically driven nature of this sort of article on Wikipedia.
I've covered this ground before in a fair bit of depth, most recently here. The bottom line: holding up Brittanica as a better alternative is nice, except for one thing: there won't be a Ken Lay entry in whatever is on your shelf. By the time I got around to looking at the article on Wikipedia (today), it seems to have settled down into a straight biopic.
Stories in the Post (or any newspaper) aren't always right the first time out either. It's not just bias; there's pressure to hit deadlines, and there's the all too common incidence of early information being bad. Over time, newspapers tend to add more and better coverage - which is a lot like what happens with Wikipedia.
Technorati Tags: news
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