I had to shake my head when I read this Accenture survey on the demands of the Millennial Generation. The usual ‘demands’ of wanting to choose their technology, insisting on state-of-the-art technology, not wanting to seek corporate approval, requiring new communication channels, etc all came up. It seemed odd that a survey like this would appear after all the economic changes of late. Turns...
Malcolm Gladwell is a great story-teller, no doubt about it. I loved his latest book Outliers. And whilst I agree with Joel Spolksy that the book is little more than cleverly strung together anecdotes, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have value. For example, Gladwell’s chapter on the necessity of hard work (you must do your 10,000 hours) to achieve success is a good motivator. Yes, it might be...
Thanks be to A-Patch! The awesomeness that is A-Patch is now out with a version for Windows Live Messenger 9 (the Wave 3 RC version released last week). It’s actually a cut down list of options this time, in order to get it out quickly. But I’m not complaining. I’m really happy. Here’s why: As well as the usual option for getting rid of the advertisements, it also enables Multi-MSN. ...
Adobe has been experimenting with it’s own image navigation & stitching together technology, and Infinite Images is the latest demonstration of it (see here for the ReadWriteWeb article). You, me and every other Microsoft watcher will immediately see shades of Deep Zoom and perhaps a little Photosynth in this. What’s cool about the the Adobe system is how it uses tagging (based on...
In a word: Thanks. A shame that Sarah’s tips on Visual Studio finished up last Friday. But hey, great things can’t go on for ever (she says, deferring to the wisdom of Axl). I’m really interested to see how she applies all those spare cycles now :-) to CodePlex. There’s going to be some cool stuff to keep an eye on. Sarah has been a wonderful example of sharing (her book profits...
I think it’s interesting that the Live Mesh team decided to put their upcoming release on hold (as announced at the start of this month). Here’s their reasoning: UPDATE: In the world of services, we have blackout periods where no updates are allowed. This is to ensure stability during, e.g., the holiday season when use of a product goes up and the availability of employees to fix issues goes...
Amazon’s CTO – Werner Vogels – has been awarded the Information Week Chief of the Year title. He’s quickly given the credit to his team of course, legend that he is. Now, it’s easy to be cynical of awards – it seems that sometimes companies/twitter abusers/magazines/etc just create them as a marketing device – but regardless, it’d be hard to disagree with the decision in this case...
You know, I think I read Sarah Perez’s blog before just about anyone’s these days. She’s even ahead of Mary-Jo, Long Zheng, Steve Clayton, and *gasp*, TechCrunch. Why? Take today’s post on Live Sync for example. Informative (she explains that Windows Live Sync is the new FolderShare), clarifying (she explains the difference between Live Sync and Live Mesh), pithy (with a simple list of...
Should we be surprised by this Gartner report outlining the second year on year decline in PC chip sales (they’re predicting a 16.3% decline). Intel and AMD must be doing it hard, like, ahem, just about everyone in the IT industry. Well, not quite. At least games are doing well, with sales of game hardware and software in the US up by 10% over last year’s figures (that’s a nice little $3B...
OMG, panic! But don’t be distracted by that other zero day exploit (you know, the Internet Explorer one), here’s where your security gaze should be firmly focused: WordPad. It turns out that WordPad has a significant exploit. And by significant, I mean it affects at least one person. I strongly recommend WordPad users (both of you) stay glued to your browser screens (here) in anticipation of...