What's that giant sucking sound? Another Wi-Fi operator into the cell telco maw: Another sign of things to come (or, rather, things coming) - Australian cell telephone company Telstra purchased SkyNetGlobal's Wi-Fi assets, which comprise about 50 hotel and airport hot spots. SkyNetGlobal was in the cash spiral, although they had had some better news lately, while Telstra had a $4 billion profit last year, according to the article. Back in the days when talk was bigger than action, MobileStar was proud of their roaming agreement with SkyNetGlobal (and vice versa: SkyNetGlobal has a press release on their site still about how they suddenly increased to 500 hot spots worldwide through the partnership). There's no trace on either T-Mobile Wireless Broadband's site or SkyNetGlobal about that partnership now. [via Alan Reiter]

7:00:22 PM    comment   

>>>After the preliminary diagnosis in April, an endocscope which had been used on the man was taken out of service. Confirmation of vCJD (prion related illness), which cannot be made until after death, came on Monday, officials said. They say they have now warned 71 people in Saskatchewan that they may have been cross-infected.<<<

This is like a Hollywood script.  At the dawn of nanotechnology, a nanodisease barges onto the scene.  It's a virtually undetectable non-biological nano-particle that merely folds proteins, terminator style in a self-replication sequence that increases exponentially until it turns the brains of its victims into gray goo.  There is no immunilogical response.  There is no cure.  There is no sterilization possible.  The vectors of its transmission are changing in unknown ways. 

My suggestion:  take some sane precautions now or face hysteria later. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
6:57:26 PM    comment   

>>>They say this early success could lead to a way to sprout healthy new blood vessels in patients with artery disease affecting the limbs and, possibly, the heart. The technique has been tried in two patients with heart disease, and looks promising, the researchers report.<<< [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
6:53:19 PM    comment   

Just one developer's opinion:  I am very much into two things: 1) building software that people actually use, and 2) leverage - that is, making the most of my time and money. 

In terms of building software that people actually use, I strictly prioritize my platform investments and always have based upon "where the users are".  No religion.  Obviously that means Windows first.  But we didn't know what to make of the Linux phenomenon when we were building Groove, so we covered our bases by funding a company (Macadamian) to enhance Wine so that Groove would run.  We eventually gave up: nobody gave a hoot about Linux on the desktop.  Regarding the Mac, two factoids - take them for what you will: a) the top personal request on the Groove website is currently "when will there be a Mac version?", and b) no major enterprise customer has yet asked to purchase a Mac version.  Quite perplexed.

On "leverage", let the facts stand on their own merit:

My job for two years at Software Arts (VisiCalc) was dealing with porting the code to many, many OS and PC environments.  A huge cost to the organization, which had to develop its own cross-compilers and linkers, etc.  (Those of you who were there at the time know that PC-DOS wasn't, for example, known a priori to be a slam-dunk against CP/M-86.)  In the meantime, Lotus developed a program called 1-2-3 for a single platform - the IBM PC and PC-DOS, using Lattice C - and took off like a rocket while we were still cross-compiling VC on the Prime mainframe, with a multi-platform chain around our necks.

In the first five years of Notes, we built about a half million lines of (C) code, having to write a ton of junk from scratch e.g. custom memory managers, code component managers that did all sorts of trickery for memory conservation, multi-byte character handling, rich text editing, MDI window handling, and all sorts of grunge - because it was early, and we were based on a fairly basic OS, there was little code around to re-use.  We then ultimately spent years and millions of dollars porting Notes to the Mac, to OS/2, to Open Look and Motif, to Solaris, to the AS/400 and the 370, to ... well, you name it.  Yes - it was worth it at the time - but the "drag" that this porting effort had on our organization was ultimately staggering; there was no way that we could do releases in anything less than two-to-three years.  It contributed significantly to slower innovation.

In the first (nearly) five years of Groove, by concentrating for the present on a single platform, and by leveraging everything that we can possibly get our hands on, by embracing new processes that wouldn't have been possible without a sophisticated development environment, we've built about four and a half million lines of (C++) code and continue to deliver new feature releases quarterly, leveraging powerful tools, componentry bundled with the rich layers of code beneath us sometimes referred to as an OS, having both leveraged (the reasonably licensed IBM unicode libraries) and contributed (crypto++) open source code - again, purely for leverage and to help others leverage what we've done.  From where I've come, it's truly breathtaking in so many dimensions, and the product could never be where it is without standing on the shoulders of giants - particularly Microsoft.

Bottom line: if you care about getting software out to your users as quickly and as broadly as possible, the code beneath you that you can leverage makes a world of difference.  When it comes to time and money, leverage counts.  It's not a commoditized environment: things like the choices of OS, tools, and environments like .NET do indeed matter. 

But that's just my opinion. [Ray Ozzie's Weblog]
11:23:07 AM    comment   

In fact, this is largely the picture painted by John Stenbit (from whom I learned the term OHIO, btw), whose vision is to migrate the DoD to a world of more effective information sharing by giving power to the edge, as opposed to leaving it locked up within the stovepipe where the originating entity might potentially keep it from being acted upon by someone else.  Publish, notify ... discover, collaboratively analyze, decide, act.

Which is why I'm such a big believer in client-side tools that work the way that people want them to work.  If you work on your documents naturally in a personal environment tailored to a certain natural workstyle - e.g. Radio, or the "shared canvas" of the Groove transceiver - a 'bot' in that space can move or stream it automatically to the Web, SharePoint, to Siebel or SAP, or to your repository of choice.  If someone had to "post" the information as a separate step, they won't. [Ray Ozzie's Weblog]
11:19:27 AM    comment   

Yes, we sell to enterprise customers who have either the desire or the need to control, and yes, we'll make sure that they have what they need.  Yes, there are some control freaks out there.  But there's really also a valid issue of accountability, e.g. FDA requirements in pharma and similar SEC requirements in financial services, or the Federal Records Act in the government.  Don't know about anyone else, but I think that we want things to be FOIA-discoverable, even if they're using dynamic collaboration tools such as Groove.

But we also sell to independent users (change agents within enterprises, individual freelancers, small business people ... you name it) who are blown away by the freedom and empowerment.  No third party control, no dot com website to rely upon, no digital restriction management, nada.

I've seen enough change in this industry that I won't speculate about what the future holds.  I can tell you that I will do what it takes to ensure that Groove has a chance to have a very broad, ubiquitous impact, that there are many potential users and customers out there with varying platform and feature needs, that I'm very pragmatic in achieving desired outcomes, and that the only "grand plan" is to create something of substantive value for customers.

Somewhere therein the future lies. [Ray Ozzie's Weblog]
10:57:13 AM    comment