Microsoft Windows

Overheard: Microsoft Hyper-V will bring the small guy to virtualization fold

I believe that one real area of opportunity for Hyper-V is in bringing small businesses into the world of virtualization. Charles King, as quoted in Hyper-V won’t sail past VMware on price alone, users say

Overheard: Microsoft gets a “D” in SOA

Just what the world needs…yet another programming language. As soon as you say it’s aimed at non-developers, “real” developers will avoid it like the plague. And without “real” developer support, it’s dead in the water. Fred Fredrickson, responding to Mary Jo Foley’s blog post Microsoft declares its modeling love with a new language, ‘D’

Overheard: It’s official — IBM Roadrunner is world’s fastest computer

Perhaps surprisingly, more than 5 million PlayStation 3 owners in the U.S. have first-hand knowledge of at least one of the processors that carried the Roadrunner to victory. Walaika Haskins, IBM Roadrunner Meep-Meeps to Top of Supercomputer Rankings

The IBM supercomputer is powered by 12,240 IBM PowerXCell 8i Cell chips similar to those found in the gaming console. The system’s 6,562 AMD Opteron dual-core processors handle the basic compute functions, leaving the Cell chips available to deal with the heavy lifting necessary for the math-intensive calculations in which the processors specialize.

Overheard: Is Firefox 3 really ready for prime time?

It’s clearly come a long way, but with all the download hype, is Mozilla pushing out a not-quite solid product just for a publicity stunt? Fahmida Y. Rashid, Firefox 3 on Linux: Questions about Stability

Today is Download Day 2008 for Firefox 3. Mozilla is attempting to set a Guinness Book of World Records for the largest number of software downloads within a 24-hour period. I sort of want to join in the fun - but I just can’t risk it today — too many fires already.

Overheard: Why Bill Gates is like Mr. Burns

One unfortunate habit Bill Gates has is constantly bringing his finger tips together high across his chest while speaking. Often this leads to his hands being locked together somewhere across his chest. This gesture makes him seem uncomfortable and is a gesture reminiscent of The Simpsons’ Mr. Burns. Garr Reynolds,  Gates, Jobs, & the Zen aesthetic

Garr Reynolds does an excellent job explaining PowerPoint Zen by comparing the presentation styles of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.

Overheard: India faces “employability” problem

Recent statistics show that the job opportunities in India have outnumbered the available hands. The problem is more of “Employability” rather than employment.   vidyai, The Soft Skills Training – Where it begins!!

Overheard: Visual Studio Express — Hello World

The reason we’re able to offer Express for free and even let developers build commercial applications with Express is because we limit 3rd party extensibility of Express, specifically by removing support macros, add-ins, and VSIP packages. Dan Fernandez, Visual Studio Express and TestDriven.NET

Microsoft wasn’t happy when developers began to extend what was freely given to them. Dan’s post above could have been called “We give you an inch and you take a mile.”

—–

On another totally unrelated Dan Fernandez note:

Wow! He’s blonde in this interview. I’m a big Dan Fernandez fan — but I had a hard time watching this video because I kept thinking “why did you bleach your hair?”

In spite of my hair distraction, I liked the interview. Dan is a great evangelist for Visual Studio Express. He’s able to capture and convey that feeling of accomplishment we all felt when we made those magical words “Hello World” appeared on the monitor. He’s not a snob. He appreciates the hobbyist, the hacker and the curious.

Ok…I can’t resist.

Q: What do you call a swimming pool full of blonde Visual Studio Express evangelists?
A: Frosted Flakes.

Overheard: Memristor is the missing link of integrated circuitry

Electronic theorists have been using the wrong pair of variables all these years–voltage and charge. The missing part of electronic theory was that the fundamental pair of variables is flux and charge. Leon Chua as quoted in ‘Missing link’ memristor created: Rewrite the textbooks?

Overheard: Live Mesh — your Briefcase in the cloud

To put it really simply: the promise of the Mesh is that you won’t have to care where you are or which device you’re using - your data will always be there. You’ll only have to care about which data you want to share with whom. Stan Schroeder, Live Mesh - The Version You Can Understand

I got my invitation for Live Mesh about two weeks ago. The toughest part was finding someone to play with — to share documents and other content with. Once I dug in, I realized “Hey, this is nothing new!” About ten years ago, there was a very handy web-based app called Briefcase that sort of did the same thing. It was much clunkier, but the idea was there.

Briefcase was a very valuable tool when I was training and moving from building to building. I could keep everything I need on the Web, get to a new building and download what I needed for a particular workshop. I could post all my bookmarks, PowerPoint presentations, handouts…whatever. I could make things in my briefcase public, keep them private or share them with specific users.

Sometimes lately, when I’m writing about new technology, I feel like I’m in some strange time warp. Everything new is just updated old.

Overheard: Biometric verification, the Lunch Lady, and Big Momma

“Never again will a student hold up a lunch line to search for his/her ID card, fear peer pressure for being on a Free or Reduced meal plan, or have someone else charge a meal on their account.” Advertisement for Sagem Morpho biometric scanner

Parents and educators concerned about the childhood obesity epidemic now have a new
ally that’s helping them apply tough love in the school cafeteria: fingerprint biometric
readers linked to point-of-sale (POS) systems and home internet connections that help them
monitor and restrict kids’ unhealthy lunch purchases.

Ok, this is kind of creepy. I can picture parent’s I’ve known really doing this. What’s next? Video monitors so you can check from work and make sure your kid isn’t trading with someone else? It’ll be interesting to see how this next generation figures out how to set parental boundries.