Google-DoubleClick deal complaint filed (AP)
AP - A consumer group asked the Federal Trade Commission Friday to investigate and block Google Inc.'s proposed $3.1 billion purchase of online advertising firm DoubleClick Inc. unless the companies improve consumer privacy protections.
Things You May Have Missed 5-6-2007
Here are some things you may have missed from the week ending 5-7-2007 Jake from 10e20 sums it up here but the whole thing is worth a read 10 Helpful Hints for Creating Strong Web Site Content » 10e20 - Search, Design & Social There are no shortcuts to creating great content for your web site. Good stuff and eerily relevant 12 Important U. ... (Read on Source)
Queen visits Nasa Goddard base
The Queen visits a Nasa space centre on the final day of her six-day state tour of the eastern US.
Flickr Find: AT&T Store iPhone Display runs on Dell
... when run on a mac (what i develop on before uploading to linux, usually debian). so even though it is on a dell, i understand where they are coming ...
How To Prevent Upper Back Pain With A Proper Posture Posted By : Andy Lim
Upper back pain can be painful even though this condition is rare. Find out how by keeping a proper posture can help you to prevent upper back pain.
Your Date Drives What?! Part I
Cars.com interns Lindsay Bjerregaard and Alex Braun took to Chicago?s streets to find out what your car says about you to a potential date. The two questioned men and women on the street to find out what the other half thinks. Above is the video reaction of men to a variety of cars ? including a VW Jetta, Porsche Boxster and even a Ford truck ? and what they would think if their date pulled up in one. Ladies, if you?re offended, don?t worry; when we interviewed the women of Chicago, they dished it out as good or better. We?ll bring you that video tomorrow. As always, let us know what you would have said in the comments.
Intel: Desktops won't overpower servers
... for certain applications or tasks that cannot be handled by one machine, such as Web hosting and high-volume data churning. "The server farm is used for a very different application ...
Schiavi Home Builders Launches New Mobile Home Website
... Services of Scarborough, Maine provides managed web services, web hosting, site promotion, internet marketing, web design and application development to small to medium sized business and nonprofit organizations. Hall (hallme.com) ...
Microsoft Submits Two Licenses for OSI Approval
The Open Source Initiative will review the two Microsoft licenses to see if they qualify as open-source licenses.
Sublimity 'stronger than ever' says Carberry
Philip Carberry was reunited with Champion Hurdle winner Sublimity on Friday morning and reported the seven-year-old to be stronger than ever.
Architecture astronauts take over
It was seven years ago today when everybody was getting excited about Microsoft's bombastic announcement of Hailstorm, promising that "Hailstorm makes the technology in your life work together on your behalf and under your control."
What was it, really? The idea that the future operating system was on the net, on Microsoft's cloud, and you would log onto everything with Windows Passport and all your stuff would be up there. It turns out: nobody needed this place for all their stuff. And nobody trusted Microsoft with all their stuff. And Hailstorm went away.
I tried to coin a term for the kind of people who invented Hailstorm: architecture astronauts. "That's one sure tip-off to the fact that you're being assaulted by an Architecture Astronaut: the incredible amount of bombast; the heroic, utopian grandiloquence; the boastfulness; the complete lack of reality. And people buy it! The business press goes wild!"
The hallmark of an architecture astronaut is that they don't solve an actual problem... they solve something that appears to be the template of a lot of problems. Or at least, they try. Since 1988 many prominent architecture astronauts have been convinced that the biggest problem to solve is synchronization.
Follow the story, here. I started picking on one company that appeared to be particularly astronautish: Groove, which was trying to rebuild Lotus Notes (a giant synchronization machine) in a peer-to-peer fashion.
Groove had some early success selling secure networks to the military-industrial complex, but didn't make much of a ripple outside that niche. Their real success was in getting bought by Microsoft, which brought Groove's designer and chief architecture-astronaut Ray Ozzie to the role of "Chief Software Architect" at Microsoft, supposedly the technical guy that would keep inventing the future after BillG left so that Steve Ballmer would have some new territory on which to build his next illegal monopoly.
And now Ray Ozzie's big achievement arrives and what is it? (drumroll...) Microsoft Live Mesh. The future of everything. Microsoft is "moving into the cloud."
What's Microsoft Live Mesh?
Hmm, let's see.
"Imagine all your devices?PCs, and soon Macs and mobile phones?working together to give you anywhere access to the information you care about."
Wait a minute. Something smells fishy here. Isn't that exactly what Hailstorm was supposed to be? I smell an architecture astronaut.
And what is this Windows Live Mesh?
It's a way to synchronize files.
Jeez, we've had that forever. When did the first sync web sites start coming out? 1999? There were a million versions. xdrive, mydrive, idrive, youdrive, wealldrive for ice cream. Nobody cared then and nobody cares now, because synchronizing files is just not a killer application. I'm sorry. It seems like it should be. But it's not.
But Windows Live Mesh is not just a way to synchronize files. That's just the sample app. It's a whole goddamned architecture, with an API and developer tools and in insane diagram showing all the nifty layers of acronyms, and it seems like the chief astronauts at Microsoft literally expect this to be their gigantic platform in the sky which will take over when Windows becomes irrelevant on the desktop. And synchronizing files is supposed to be, like, the equivalent of Microsoft Write on Windows 1.0.
It's Groove, rewritten from scratch, one more time. Ray Ozzie just can't stop rewriting this damn app, again and again and again, and taking 5-7 years each time.
And the fact that customers never asked for this feature and none of the earlier versions really took off as huge platforms doesn't stop him.
How on earth does Microsoft continue to pour massive resources into building the same frigging synchronization platforms again and again? Damn, they just finished building something called Windows Live FolderShare and I haven't exactly noticed a stampede to that. I'll bet you've never even heard of it. The 3,398th web site that lets you upload and download files to a place on the Internet. I'm so excited I might just die.
I shouldn't really care. What Microsoft's shareholders want to waste their money building, instead of earning nice dividends from two or three fabulous monopolies, is no business of mine. I'm not a shareholder. It sort of bothers me, intellectually, that there are these people running around acting like they're building the next great thing who keep serving us the same exact TV dinner that I didn't want on Sunday night, and I didn't want it when you tried to serve it again Monday night, and you crunched it up and mixed in some cheese and I didn't eat that Tuesday night, and here it is Wednesday and you've rebuilt the whole goddamn TV dinner industry from the ground up and you're giving me 1955 salisbury steak that I just DON'T WANT. What is it going to take for you to get the message that customers don't want the things that architecture astronauts just love to build. The people? They love twitter. And flickr and delicious and picasa and tripit and ebay and a million other fun things, which they do want, and this so called synchronization problem is just not an actual problem, it's a fun programming exercise that you're doing because it's just hard enough to be interesting but not so hard that you can't figure it out.
Why I really care is that Microsoft is vacuuming up way too many programmers. Between Microsoft, with their shady recruiters making unethical exploding offers to unsuspecting college students, and Google (you're on my radar) paying untenable salaries to kids with more ultimate frisbee experience than Python, whose main job will be to play foosball in the googleplex and walk around trying to get someone...anyone...to come see the demo code they've just written with their "20% time," doing some kind of, let me guess, cloud-based synchronization... between Microsoft and Google the starting salary for a smart CS grad is inching dangerously close to six figures and these smart kids, the cream of our universities, are working on hopeless and useless architecture astronomy because these companies are like cancers, driven to grow at all cost, even though they can't think of a single useful thing to build for us, but they need another 3000-4000 comp sci grads next week. And dammit foosball doesn't play itself.
Not loving your job? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.
Microsoft Gets Ready to Talk Photography
Microsoft is hosting Pro Photo Summit 2008 this week, a two-day event that "brings together renowned professional photographers and industry leaders" in Redmond.
According to Microsoft's page for the Summit, said industry leaders will be discussing the biggest issues that are affecting the photography industry.
Keynote presentations will come from Microsoft CTO David Vaskevitch and nature photographer Frans Lanting.
Yahoo Board Seeks Redemption
The latest letter to shareholders from Yahoo's board of directors urging them to retain the current management, rather than tossing them aside in favor of the slate backed by Carl Icahn.
World's First Transplant Of Both Arms
The first transplant of complete arms has been accomplished after several years of preparatory work. The patient is doing well under the circumstances.
What Does Your User Agreement Say?
Linkedin recently released an update to their ?user agreement? which expands their authority to ?control? how people and businesses can use their network. The newly revised ?user agreement? basically states that Linkedin has at their discretion the authority to deem if a users behavior and/or use of ?their? network is considered ... (Read on Source)
Lenovo Launches Powerhouse Quad-Core ThinkPad (NewsFactor)
NewsFactor - Lenovo has launched its 17-inch ThinkPad W700, which it described as "the PC industry's highest-performance mobile workstation." The laptop has a built-in graphics tablet and will support the upcoming Intel mobile quad-core processor.
Poll: Do you understand CSS specificity?
CSS specificity is one of the aspects of CSS that can be very confusing at first, and hard to remember even after you understand it. The idea is that if...
50 Years Ago: Greatest Scientific Discovery is Science Itself
SEPTEMBER 1958THE CREATIVE PROCESS-- “The most remarkable discovery made by scientists is science itself. The discovery must be compared in importance with the invention of cave-painting and of writing. Like these earlier human creations, science is an attempt to control our surroundings by entering into them and understanding them ... (Read on Source)
JUST ASKING
WHICH reality-TV judge was absent from two of her top-rated shows because she had a bad reaction to Botox? Spies said the fashionista's face "swelled up like a cauliflower". . . WHICH stunning TV actress can't stand the Hollywood starlet who's...
Congrats to MIXX Award Winners - AmEx and BMW
Congratulations to all 2008 MIXX Award winners. We're proud to say FM had a hand in two campaigns honored by the judges this year. Check out the entire list here and see below for our winning campaigns. Special congrats to the Digitas and GSD&M teams. Great work! (Read on Source)
Asus F8Va
... media effectively. The F8Va also ships with a bundled HDTV tuner which, coupled with Windows Media Centre, turns this machine into a fully-fledged portable video recorder capable of recording live ...
Blogging: The Best Way To Increase Your Profits
Blogging these days has become a pride procession in today’s online business world. Blogging is used for way more things then it was used to. Before many people would use a blog to write down their da...
Review: Seagate's 1.5TB Barracuda Drive - quiet, sips power
Speed, quiet, and low power use add up to a good choice when you need more than a terabyte of storage space.
Tapping the Vortex for Green Energy Source
A new form of renewable energy aims to take advantage of the vibrations created when slow-moving water encounters a cylinder. The same vibrations help fish propel themselves faster than their muscles alone can manage, but they also damage oil rigs over time.
Blogs Better at Pushing Product?
New research finds that bloggers' links are gaining heft as trusted guides for finding useful content and product purchases.
What Is The Method of Thinking About Designing A New Website web design?
Latest product or service implementation Business Networking Graphic designing PR Management A live voice available for client/customer inquiries Sorting daily incoming mail inquiries Product packagin...
Tracking single molecules in living cells using nanotechnology
Previously unknown spectral properties of carbon nanotubes functionalized with DNA have been exploited to create nanotech sensors that can simultaneously detect several different substances, in real time, within living cells, to single molecule sensitivity. (Read on Source)
Star Wars Wii Mod Anyone?
What’s the color of your Wii? White right? Would you like it to be anything else? How about a custom Star Wars Wii mod? Would that help you perform better in games? The Wii above is available on eBay and it has a whooping $500 starting price. It also comes with a red LED Wiimote and [...]
HP Makes MediaSmart Mac Friendly (PC Magazine)
PC Magazine - Hewlett-Packard on Monday said it had extended the olive branch of compatibility to the Macintosh, via its Windows Home Server product line, the MediaSmart.
Technology start-ups find it harder to find buyers
Only six venture-backed start-ups went public last year, the fewest since 1977 and down from 86 in 2007, according to data released Monday by the National Venture Capital Association and Thomson Reuters.
name: MAGPIE