Wednesday, June 29, 2005

Here's a note from David Winer relative to attitudes toward a couple of big players in computing. The reason for the post is that I think that sometimes there is a parallel in the automation business. That is, everyone likes to pick on Rockwell Automation. I've just returned to my daughter's place in suburban Chicago after a visit with CTO Sujeet Chand and software marketing director Joe Bartolomeo. The discussion was off the record meant for my annual planning purposes, but the sense I got is that there are still a lot of cool things going on at Rockwell. It remains a player to be reckoned with. The other sense I felt was that this is not a company that will bring out a new technology just to have something cool in the market. It will bring out things that it believes will sell. This is a "good news, bad news" attitude in my opinion. It seems to make business sense on first blush, but it also opens the company to potential lost opportunities that can be grabbed by smaller, more agile competitors. At any rate, food for thought. Dare is worried, but it seems to me he can ignore Apple's extensions when processing podcast feeds. Same with Yahoo's. He's concerned that Slashdot goes too far in its criticism of Microsoft, and I agree -- but he's gone too far in his criticism of Apple. Net-net, the bigco's should adopt the philosophy of interop and avoid funky extensions of RSS where ever possible. The same logic that applied when RSS was the exclusive domain of the little fry still works in the age of the 100-ton dinosaur. [Scripting News] 4:17:43 PM    comment []

I can't figure out if I like these new Infoworld feeds or not. It's nice to be able to read the whole article without hitting the link. The ads are a definite distraction. Anyway, any of you OMAC wonks reading this now? Here's a story about what may be the last Microsoft update of Win2K. Trouble is, an awful lot of manufacturing apps are running this OS and "upgrading" to XP or the coming Longhorn would be a very painful situation. Last week at the ARC Forum I was chatting with ARC's Dennis Daniels--the chap who had been shepherding the OMAC users group for the past 7+ years until its recent merger into ISA. We were discussing the future of the Microsoft Manufacturing Users Group (MSMUG) and the idea popped up that perhaps a good project for it would be to support Win2K after Microsoft is finished with it. Perhaps the Redmond giant could give the code to the group (after all, it would be finished with all new OSs based on a different platform) and it could maintain support, perhaps a la open source community like Source Forge? What do you think? Should I start something here? As support fades, Microsoft offers Win2000 update. As the clock ticks on support for mainstream Windows 2000 users, Microsoft has released a "high priority" update rollup of over 50 security fixes. Rollup 1 for Windows 2000 SP4 was released Tuesday, just two days before mainstream support expires on June 30. The rollup contains fixes that were issued between the release of Windows 2000 SP4 and April 30, 2005. It contains a variety of fixes for files that have not been part of previous updates, so it should be applied even on systems that have been kept up-to-date, Microsoft said. The rollup is listed as a "high priority" update on the Windows Update Web site, and will be placed under the "critical and service pack" categories. But Microsoft is transitioning Windows 2000 users to a new Windows Update site over the next few months, and the rollup will be listed there under the "critical and service packs" category, it said. While Thursday marks the end of support for so-called mainstream Windows 2000 customers, the software maker also offers extended support until June 30, 2010 for a fee. All customers will receive free security hotfix support through March 31, 2010, however. More information on the rollup is available on the company's Web site at: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/891861. ADVERTISEMENT IBM Discover a better way to manage the business of IT with IBM(R) Tivoli(TM) solutions. [InfoWorld: Top News] 3:55:34 PM    comment []

I see a lot of new products. Unfortunately most don't have much beyond the hype. Having worked with a lot of products in manufacturing, I can usually tell right away if there's some substance--and I just saw one. Ron Monday, president of Online Development stopped by the Automation World offices yesterday and showed off his new "xCoupler" module. This module is in the Rockwell Automation ControlLogix form factor. The beauty is that it taps into the wealth of information in the controller without in any way messing with the control program. What this easily configured "appliance" does is supply data in the format that IT needs directly from manufacturing. They have drivers for Oracle, IBM db2, Microsoft SQL Server and IBM's Websphere MQ. With no programming, a natural conduit of real-time manufacturing information is established directly to the enterprise database. Benson Hougland of Opto 22 explained this concept to me at least four years ago. In that case, Opto was selling some of its intelligent I/O products in a similar application--that is, bypassing control in order to send crucial information to IT. In this case, Online Development takes advantage of the ControlLogix use of one set of tag names that are stored in the controller accessible via a multiprocessor backplane. This makes configuration exceedingly easy. In future products, Online Development will have other modules that will connect to other controllers, but the old re-write the tag name situation will apply. 7:50:24 AM    comment []