Adobe announcement Adobe Accelerates Shift to the Cloud includes a death sentence on standalone channel applications of Creative Suite. CS 6 is the end of the line. This strategy is good for Adobe but it is not good for users. Continue reading
Adobe announcement Adobe Accelerates Shift to the Cloud includes a death sentence on standalone channel applications of Creative Suite. CS 6 is the end of the line. This strategy is good for Adobe but it is not good for users. Continue reading
Ars Technica report on West Virginia overspending on Cisco routers while fascinating misplaces much of its blame on Cisco for selling unnecessary equipment to the state. It is misplaced because the state government of West Virginia failed to properly assess its needs for the technology.
While the state auditor states “Cisco representatives showed a wanton indifference to the interests of the public in recommending using $24 million of public funds to purchase 1,164 Cisco model 3945 branch routers,” where is the statement that the employees of the State of West Virginia showed both incompetence and negligence in its governance of the project and accountability in spending? Continue reading
Because it needs to be reposted, here is a list of the Seven Deadly Sins of Software Executives. This orginated from a 2005 Edge Forum – Deadly Sins that Can Kill Your Software Company, but polished and modified by me:
I recently visited an AT&T store to upgrade a phone. All the AT&T employees on the floor were using iPads to manage orders and service agreements with customers. This didn’t seem so strange to me. Using portable POS devices is nothing new after all. But what struck me is how awkward and slow the experience was. Continue reading
By way of reporting by Electronista, Judge Richard Posner writes in his blog entry Do patent and copyright law restrict competition and creativity excessively? Posner about how the software industry has completely overreached itself in software patents. I cannot agree more. As we’ve seen in the Apple vs Samsung trial, patents are granted for non-innovations, such as a bouncing effect when one reaches the bottom of a list on a smart phone.
Apple makes for a convenient poster child for this, but they are not alone. Most of these “innovations” are modest tweaks of the work done by others, and the only thing they do is buy time for the company that patents them first, until the time comes that those patents will get tossed. But time is all they need – time to keep other companies from implementing them. This doesn’t even equate to standing on the shoulders of giants.
Yeah, I get spam. I get a lot of it. I do the basics, not posting my email address on public forums and the like. People can find me though, for the most part. I am on the social networking sites. Also, there are plenty of records in existence that have my name associated with them. There are plenty of people who are much more obsessed with their privacy – I’m talking about the ones you hear about, that want to participate in the Internet. If you stayed off the grid and never got onto the Internet – then its irrelevant because you aren’t reading my blog. Continue reading
Some member over on Japan Intercultural Communication posted an article about Microaggression in Japan, based on this Psychology Today article Racial Microaggressions in Everyday Life. I have a hard time accepting that he behaviors the author describes are collective examples of anything – a mix of perceived, subjective slights and unrelated behaviors. Please convince me if I am wrong here.
There are people I know in other industries – more traditional and commoditized ones – that tell me just how bug nuts crazy software and web services industries are, by comparison. But we have nothing on the motion picture and entertainment industries. The motion picture industry seems to be able to repackage the same products again and again in ways that the software industry can only dream about. One thing that really mystifies me are films and subtitling. For example – consider the releases of the television series LOST. When individual seasons were released in Region 1, they included English subtitles. The Complete Series on DVD includes French subtitles. The Complete Series on Blu Ray include French and Spanish subtitles. What happened to English subtitles on the Complete Editions? Why would you exclude Spanish on individual season releases when Spanish is spoken so widely in the countries covered under Region 1? Continue reading