Archives
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Richard Tallent Thinks Americans Aren't Smart Enough Anymore
In response to my comments on offshoring, Richard Tallent writes:
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Dell Nixes Indian Customer Support
Thanks to Patrick for the link.
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IT Offshoring
“Catherine Mann of the Institute for International Economics makes the case in favor of offshoring: High-tech hardware would have been 20% more expensive in the 1990s if not for offshoring. This spurred investment in more high-tech gear, boosting productivity and freeing up cash to plow into still more innovation. Plus, for every dollar spent on offshoring, the U.S. gets back $1.12 (and the global economy reaps another 33 cents), says a report from McKinsey consultants. Think about it: As more workers in India land higher-paying jobs, they can afford to buy more U.S. products, from processor chips to Hollywood films. By spreading the wealth, offshoring makes life a little better in some of the poorest regions of the world. “ [1]
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Microsoft
This is a pretty interesting Slashdotted piece about tracking information embedded in some of Microsoft's PR documents. At the very least, it gives you an appreciation for the editing process that Microsoft goes through, which strips out stuff like ad hom. attacks before they make it to the press
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To GAC or not to GAC?
Chris and Ted are going back and forth on whether to use the GAC. Chris' conclusion is:
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AOL Gives Away Spammer's Porsche
This Porsche Boxer S was seized from a spammer as part of his settlement with AOL. AOL is going to be giving it away to a lucky AOL subscriber as payback.
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Street Climb
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IronPython .2 and Paper
Iron Python .2 is out, and this time there is a paper to go along with it. No comparisons to Jython in this one, but still interesting stuff.
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Flex Released, but It's Not a Flash Killer
“Flex presentation server pricing starts at $12,000 for two CPUs and includes annual maintenance. Special pricing is available for ISVs and discounts are available to government and educational organizations in certain regions.” [1]
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Bush: Broadband for All Americans by 2007
“ALBUQUERQUE - Reaching back to revive an idea promoted by the man he beat for the White House, President Bush urged Friday that affordable high-speed Internet access be available to all Americans by 2007, saying it was essential to the nation’s economic growth.” [1]
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DOJ and US Lawmakers on EU's Decision and My 2 Cents As Well
”The European Commission's order for Microsoft Corp. to ship a version of Windows without the Windows Media Player could stifle innovation and help Microsoft's rivals instead of promoting fair competition, the U.S. Department of Justice's antitrust chief said Wednesday..."The U.S. experience tells us that the best antitrust remedies eliminate impediments to the healthy functioning of competitive markets without hindering successful competitors or imposing burdens on third parties, which may result from the EC's remedy," [1]
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Watch BillG's VSLive 2004 Keynote
Fawcette is covering VSLive SF. There should be a video of the keynote later today up on the site at:
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Make Your Icons Spiffy With Image Overlays
In Windows, it is very common to see an icon that has an image overlayed on top of it to designate something special. For example, when you create a shortcut to another location, you get that nice white box with the curvy arrow that says to you “this is just a shortcut, not an actual document.” On the web, this type of thing can also be very useful in your UI, but achiving the effect with Javascript or layers can be a pain. In our CMS UI, we needed a way to designate which documents in lists were merely shortcuts or overlay different status info on top of icons. If you run into a case like this, here is some code to get you started (note, you probably want to add caching, etc. to this):
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Laszlo's New Pricing
Laszlo has announced their low end version pricing. The low end version is limitted to deployment on single processor machines and costs $1,999. Personally, I think they would make a lot more money if that was the price for the Enterprise version. How do they expect to compete against Flash when their lowest end version is five times as expensive and their product doesn't even include any real tool support? [1]
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Has AOP Arrived?
“IBM plans to bring a software development technique that has been the subject of theoretical work for years to commercial products this year and next.
Daniel Sabbah, IBM's vice president of software group strategy and development, on Wednesday plans to detail the company's use of the technique, called aspect orientation, at the Aspect-Oriented Software Development conference in Lancaster, England. Sabbah also will declare that the technology is reliable enough for commercial use, according to IBM.“ [1]
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Getting Up and Running on VSIP
One of the very cool tools we are working on here at the office is an ASP.NET based defect tracking system (we actually use it in house already and it is really helping us manage defects effectively as we push to get our CMS out the door). We have some very cool things going on with the system (like integration with NUnit to automatically keep bugs in sync if you use TDD). From the start, I've always thought it would be nice to have bugs show up in the IDE just like compiler errors. After all, runtime errors (like unhandled exceptions) are just as bad to have strewn around your code as compile time errors and a little visual notification would be nice. So, when I heard the VSIP extras were finally here, I rushed out and downloaded a copy. I quickly filled out the sign-up form and 30 seconds later I was downloading the install.
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Writing Truely Generic Code in C#
Bruce Eckles continues his great rant on “weak typing.” What seems to be missed by this discussion is that you can actually write generic code in C# without too much difficulty. Delegates provide us a very nice interface independant way to make method calls. For example:
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Get Those Cool Microsoft Diagram Icons For Visio
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Why is Windows Priced So Low
I found this article quite interesting:
“At the time of the Justice Department's landmark antitrust case against Microsoft, the software maker was selling its Windows operating system to computer manufacturers for an extremely low price given the company's dominance in the market.
At the same time, it was charging significantly more for its Microsoft Office application suite. Given that both products had comparable market shares, why did Microsoft charge only about $60 for Windows--its "base" product--instead of the $1,800 that many estimate it could have demanded, and why did it choose to price Office--the "complementary" good--at nearly four times as much?
The question was key during the trial for understanding Microsoft's competitive position. Never answered to the satisfaction of many observers, the query launched Brian Viard, assistant professor of strategic management at Stanford, and Nicholas Economides, professor of economics at New York University's Stern School of Business and executive director of the Net Institute, to look for an answer. ” [1]
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Great Opensource Photo Shop Alternative
GIMP 2.0 is about to be released. You can download a windows installer here. I've been using GIMP for ages now and I have to say it is very cool. I see little reason to spend $700 per dev on a copy of Photoshop for misc. icon editing / image conversion, etc. GIMP beats the hell out of Paint for that type of thing (it can actually do just about everything Photoshop can) and the zero dollar price tag sure is nice.
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Java Guys Can't Beat VS.NET
I was listening to a panel discussion entitled “The Future of J2EE Panel, from TheServerSide Java Symposium 2003“ over on www.theserverside.com in which some big Java players (guys from Sun and BEA for example) were discussing the state of the industry and where they saw J2EE heading. What I found extremely suprising was the universal acceptance of defeat versus VS.NET. The belief across the board was that there is no way any J2EE tool vender could ever provide the same quality in their development environments that Microsoft has provided with VS.NET.
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Toward a Generic XML Content Indexing System
While building our CMS, one of the challenges we faced was indexing XML content. The content input into the CMS can be in any arbitrary XML format, such as:
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Miguel (Mono Fame) On MS and Sun Patent Issues
Responding to concerns raised by Havoc's article, Miguel posts on the Ximian forums (emphasis mine):
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The Linux Mucky Mucks are Crapping Their Pants
Rick Kitts points to this amazing article by Havoc Pennington (a big GNOME hot shot who works for Red Hat). Looks like a lot of issues are finally starting to rear their ugly heads, and it has a lot of people worried. Rick's summary:
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.NET Weblogs Archive Goes Mobile!
When working away from my internet connection, or sitting around in the airport somwhere, one of the things I miss most is my daily blog dose. I got tired of having to miss out on all the action when I am away (or having to pay $15 just to log on to the wireless network at the airport just to read some blog posts while I am waiting for my flight), so last night I whipped up a mobile edition of the .NET weblogs archive. Add this baby to the favorites on your cell and you can get your daily blog dose from anywhere:
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Should MS Include the Longhorn SDK with the OS?
Lorie Pearce wants to know if Microsoft should include the massive Longhorn SDK with the OS. My answer: “Forget bundling it. This is Longhorn. Make a freakin smart client app.” Seriously, why the hell would I want 2 GB of docs that will soon be out of date and whose search capabilities blow. Who even uses search on the current SDK docs? About all I use is F1 if I want to look up method docs real quick, but the vast majority of the time I use Google for answers.
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Fixing Microsoft's Bugs: Url Rewriting
Yet another day, yet another ASP.NET flaw to work around. If you've ever attempted url rewriting with the .NET framework, two things will quickly become apparent:
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Whidbey Slips, Falls, and Breaks a Hip
Great post from Christian Romney:
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To MS: Listen to your Customers
Frans and Martin both think this Yukon and Whidbey delay is crap (as does the overwhelming majority of the people that are commenting on their blogs). I agree. MS has been hyping Whidbey, ObjectSpaces, ASP.NET 2.0, etc. for long enough, and now they are telling us that .NET 2.0 won't even come out until the time when we were originally scheduled to recieve .NET 3.0 (Longhorn version). All you MS bloggers out there, NO ONE REALLY WANTS YUKON AND VS.NET INTEGRATION! We want Whitehorse. We want ObjectSpaces. We want ASP.NET 2.0. We want Generics. Save Yukon integration for a minor release in 2005 (like VS.NET 2003).
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Java Generics are Not that Generic
For example something like this:
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Unconventional Ways To Avoid SQL Recursion
Ken Robertson asks, “Which is better recursion or temp tables?” I would suggest that you don't have to do either. Given Ken's case (calculating the number of nodes in a tree structure for displaying image counts), it is likely that this query is going to run quite often, which means that you don't want to lock up your server to preform recursive operations every time a node is requested. One option is to cache the data somewhere, which is a pretty good option in some cases, but in this case, we want real time results. An unconventional way to avoid this breaks normalization rules slightly, but probably offers the best overall solution compared to some of the more complex ways you can do this (not to mention that it is a heck of a lot easier to code than the alternatives). Add a "path" column to each node. Now, when you run your queries, you can do something like this:
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Classic Security Mistake
Jeff mentions that MSN fell victim to a classic security mistake wherein a user's authentication credentials are checked on one page, then they are redirected to a new page, which doesn't check credentials (assuming that the user was redirected from the page that did), which allows a sly user to do all sorts of nasty things. This is a huge mistake that tons of application makes and the funny part about it is that the mistake is not rooted in the authentication checking done by the ASPX pages at all as you might assume. The problem is that the application's business logic layer let the request through, even though it was clearly invalid. If the people who coded this part of the MSN APIs had taken the time to code a proper business logic layer, it would have said something like this:
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Macromedia and the CLR
You might find the following comments by Macromedia folks to be quite interesting:
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Macromedia Needs To Get It's .NET Act Together
“Andrew Stopford wants to see Macromedia enhance support for .NET and, personally, I couldn't agree more. I believe there are many .NET / Flash / ColdFusion developers out there that would agree with this statement too. While Flash Remoting may support ASP.NET the implementation is terrible-- thanks to FlashORB there now is an alternative. ColdFusion and .NET can only work together in two ways: COM or WebServices. I don't need to get into the merits, and evils, of either approach. FLEX, being still in beta for J2EE systems, is not even conceivably on the horizon for the CLR anytime soon and this really is a shame.
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New Longhorn Concept Video
The third Longhorn concept video is up here:
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Laszlo vs. Flex
There is a pretty interesting post on the Laszlo message boards comparing Laszlo to Flex. Again, the Laszlo guys confirm that they are porting Laszlo to other platforms (Longhorn/CLR is a good bet). Of course, at 20k+ for a server license, the price isn't exactly enticing for the average developer, but the Laszlo guys say that we should hear about some new low price options for smaller shops within the next few weeks.
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FreeTextBox 2.0 Released
Pascal reports along with Scott that FreeTextBox 2.0 is out, and it includes Mozilla support! They are charing $50 for the source now, if you want to have access to it, but the component itself is still free (and, I might add, $50 for the component would still be a steal, this thing is hot). Highly recommended.
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Passport is Rediculous
Mike Sax and Chris Kinsman think Passport pricing is lame. This isn't the first time a blogger has commented on this, and once again, I'm going to have to agree. I would use Passport for authentication all the time if it didn't cost $10,000+ to get up and running. What the hell were they thinking? I can implement my own single sign on service in a few hours, why in the world would I pay 10k+ to use someone else's? Like it is really a plus that my customers can seamlessly sign into their hotmail account from my web site. Give me a break.
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CNet on Central
There's a big article on CNet about Macromedia Central failing. A few quotes from me in there.