Here is a cache of the page that they took down.
I have a Dell 24″ display right now. Overall, it is nice, but I need something even bigger. I regularly run out of room on even it. I think the combination of the two will be just right 
I hope Apple finally release a tablet. That would be nice and compelling.
Recently, I attended a BayCHI talk on the new direction in UI done by the Office 12 team (more on that in another post).
We had a debate as to why Microsoft would take such risks with Office here and now. I was on the side of, “this is a big risk, they didn’t have to take it… this was smart.” MarkJ and others were on the side of, “Ah, they are a monopoly, and people already bought it… they can do whatever they want”
I think I’m right, of course :-), but the reason is simple. History. Historically, when people have a monopoly or solid position, the incumbent managers do not take risks with their cash cow. In fact there have been many Harvard B school studies and books that document this. The one that comes to mind is “The Innovators Dilemma”.
I think Microsoft changed because they saw the writing on the wall and wanted to put a lot more distance between themselves and everybody else. They could have made incremental changes, again, and still pulled off a release of Office 12. There would have been very little damage to their revenue. They decided to take a huge risk, and I think they will reap many rewards for this.
What do you think?
One of the beta sites has screenshots of the latest Vista build.
It’s not too difficult to see that they cut out a lot (As predicted by Joseph). It’s just nicer chrome over a more polished drawing engine… but the kernel is essentially the same. This OS will have an impact only when it is the default OS that a Dell ships with next year. Most people will probably wait for SP1. It will be interesting to see the adoption rate once this goes out. I’ll get it on a new computer about 1 year from now, if they get it right.
Anyways, we did install a beta build of Vista here at work. It’s definitely a beta, and it was usable, but it definitely didn’t blow me away to the point of “man, I have to have this”. I think the machine was already wiped for another employee to use.
What do you get when you have a National Geographic photographer go out in the woods and they limit themselves to only one shot a day… some neat photos, that’s what.
Check out this site
Go down to ‘GALLERY’ and then choose ‘CHASED BY THE LIGHT’
Jack has a great video with a jet on his blog post. (3.5 minutes long)
Ok, sun is definitely on the ropes and I don’t see myself buying any of their stuff.
Still, this new UltraSPARC / Niagara processor is a refreshing new architecture choice that is actually shipping.
It is cool to see this new processor come out. I really like a real-world example of an architecture or idea. The fact that this chip can handle so many threads should give it some serious performance benchmarks. After looking at their white-papers and initial benchmarks, this is confirmed. I think they have a very compelling product for the data center. They have low power, hardware for SSL acceleration, and the ability to provide much better cpu efficiency per memory cycle. I wonder if people realize that this will accelerate non-threaded applications like Apache. They mention ‘threads’ everywhere, but I doubt that the vast majority of their customer base will realize that an Apache process is just a thread to the kernel. Given that Apache pre-forks a bunch of processes, this processor should be capable of running 8 processes easily (and deliver the appearance of running 32 at the same time).
Also, it is interesting to note that a lot of the earlier processors in the 70’s used hardware for switching thread states. For example, the computers at Xerox PARC had the ability to switch to a mouse task very easily when displaying the UI.
Again, it is hard to compete against cheaper crap in that market. People will install a cheapo 1U linux box and see web pages pop-up and be happy. The question is really: who is their market? For $3000, you can get a box that can easily compete with an x86 running dual Xeons.
Today, the buzz on the net is still Ajax.
Just today, I was remembering a time about 4 years ago (around the time, my last child, KK, was born), I was working on a contract project as a Perl/Java guy. I remember back then playing with this web site that had a an open-source version/demo of the KnowNow stuff. Essentially, the browser used Javascript and a hidden iframe to do a neat dynamic dropdown menu. For example, you could pick a car manufacturer, and then the other drop down would get filled with the models for that manufacturer. The neat trick was that the second drop down didn’t have any data until the server sent back the list based on your first choice. This is my first experience with early Ajax.
Now, that was four years ago and it felt like a demo. There was that, ‘this is neat’ feel, but it would only work on IE. It definitely wasn’t smooth, either. It would be a risky proposition to use that technology in a web app back in those days. It wasn’t until the Google suggest demo was out that this stuff was ready to blow people away. Nowadays, both Firefox and IE can pull this stuff off, so you aren’t limiting yourself.
The lesson… stick with it! These technologies eventually find their place, so play with them while they are new.
