June 2008 - Posts

Silverlight Summertime

Two new Silverlight Contests

Got some free time this summer, then check-out the Silverlight Control Builder Contest
If you have some Silverlight experience you could try your hand at writing and enter the Silverlight Article Competition with the prize of an e-book copy of the new Silverlight 2 in Action book.
posted Monday, June 30, 2008 5:56 PM by paul with 0 Comments

Clay Shirky

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Clay Shirky at the Personal Democracy Forum 2008 in NYC. He called this talk Politics As If Everybody Can Participate. I recall when Clay was on panels at conferences on blogging, but he never really was a blogger. He has a new book, Here Comes Everybody and it too is about revolutionizing the social order through this Internet.
posted Friday, June 27, 2008 9:18 AM by paul with 0 Comments

Bill Gates the Hacker

Bill Gates and the Greatest Tech Hack Ever

Bill Gates has pulled off one of the greatest hacks in technology and business history, by turning Microsoft's success into a force for social responsibility. Imagine imposing a tax on every corporation in the developed world, collecting $100 per white-collar worker per year, and then directing one third of the proceeds to curing AIDS and malaria. That, effectively, is what Bill Gates has done.

This is the legacy Bill Gates wants people to remember and we wish him the best in his next adventure.
posted Thursday, June 26, 2008 4:35 PM by paul with 0 Comments

Intel Don't Know Graphics

Et Tu, Intel? Chip Giant Won’t Embrace Microsoft’s Windows Vista

Intel has at last conceded that their integrated graphics solutions suck, but any young gamer could have told you that. Windows Vista requires a good GPU to shine and Intel despite it's innovation on the CPU can't find a way to create a capable graphics processing unit.

Intel has partnered with nVidia for some graphics solutions, but they are not on speaking terms at the moment. The inability to write software drivers has held nVidia back since the launch of Windows Vista and this could have been their time to shine.
posted Thursday, June 26, 2008 10:28 AM by paul with 0 Comments

Social Media Analysis

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Matthew Hurst from Microsoft Live Labs talks about his work in social media analysis at the Personal Democracy Forum 2008 in NYC.
posted Thursday, June 26, 2008 9:02 AM by paul with 0 Comments

Internet for Everyone

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At the Personal Democracy Forum on June 24, 2008 the Internet for Everyone initiative was Launched.
posted Wednesday, June 25, 2008 11:43 AM by paul with 0 Comments

Personal Democracy Forum

Watch This Space For PdF2008 Live!

The Web is changing everything and the American political experience is no exception. I'll be in New York City for the next two days joining the conversation on the potential of technology to engage citizens in the democratic process.

I work for the Board of Elections in my town two days a year. The reality is that only half the people eligible to vote are registered to vote and just half of them participate in our democracy by voting.

I've lived in other countries with many political parties, but after each election coalitions are formed behind closed doors and a government emerges with an opposition. In our two party system we have Primary elections so the people can shape their party.
posted Sunday, June 22, 2008 8:33 PM by paul with 0 Comments

Let the Chips Fall

A.M.D. and Its War With Intel

Poor Joe Nocera failed to disclose that he wrote today's story in the NYTimes Business section with an Intel powered laptop. Biased Joe is not the least concerned about the SEC looking into all the advertising dollars Intel lavishes on the NYTimes, because we know the SEC has been on an eight year vacation.

Does Joe know business? Every company makes missteps, but missteps in the micro processor game can cost billions of dollars. Joe don't want to know about Itanium, but proves a partisan by regurgitating old Barcelona FUD while the Quad-Core AMD Opteron is pushing the envelop.

I was at the Intel ICC just last week and the official Intel PR line about AMD echos exactly with what Joe wrote.

The Korean, Japanese and EU governments have prosecuted and fined Intel while the FTC has been on an eight year vacation that's going to come to an end soon.

I began my career in Tech as a System Builder, Partnering with Intel for ten years and AMD for six. This blog post was written on a Phenom Quad-core system with two ATI Radeon HD GPU's running in CrossFireX. Intel don't know graphics and Joe don't know Tech.
posted Saturday, June 21, 2008 9:22 AM by paul with 0 Comments

Yahoo's Not 404 Yet

Yahoo The Failure: Myth Versus Reality

The rumors of Yahoo's demise have been greatly exaggerated on Techcrunch, BoomTown and Silicon Alley Insider. Yahoo is a public company and if we had a diligent SEC we might learn why these three blogs have been singing from the same hymn sheet for months.

Yahoo was mismanaged over the past five years, so a YHOO shareholder may see it is a good thing that all these VP's are going.

I've met Joshua Schacter several times at conferences and airports and wish him luck living his dream.

I've encountered Jeremy Zawodny many times on the Web 2.0 trail and could never figure out what he did at Yahoo. At Yahoo Hack Day he just made an appearance and now that he's gone maybe they'll finally fix MyYahoo.
posted Friday, June 20, 2008 11:42 AM by paul with 0 Comments

Software Factories

NYCDOTNETDEV Meeting tonight
Software Factories, Why Should I Care?

Tonight Gunther Lenz will provide valuable insight into issues such as how and when to use tools like Visual Studio, MS DSL Toolkit, and the Guidance and Automation Toolkit and how they fit into the context of a large enterprise development project.

We will also discuss the do’s and don’ts of using the Software Factories approach that we learned the hard way. This talk mainly aims at making system architects and application developers aware of advantages and pitfalls of implementing the Software Factories approach in a product development environment. We’ll also review quantitative results we collected during the project to show the business case. The presentation concludes with a look into the crystal ball to see where the Software Factory paradigm is heading and what tool support to expect in the near future.

You must register to get into the building.
posted Thursday, June 19, 2008 7:20 AM by paul with 0 Comments

The Smear of the Blogosphere

Two days after Saul Hansell criticized Hotheaded Blogs, a page one story in today's New York Times cites a blogger in the second paragraph. This questionable noquarter blogger Larry Johnson, is used as a source when he only referenced hearsay - I have not seen it but I have heard from five separate sources who have spoken directly with people who have seen the tape.

So Hansell writes that anger in the blogosphere is giving blogs a bad name, but it's journalism when Michael Powell and Jodi Kantor grab what they need to say what they want.
posted Wednesday, June 18, 2008 10:30 AM by paul with 0 Comments

CodeStock

CodeStock - (cool name huh?) August 9 - Knoxville, TN

Registration for CodeStock is NOW OPEN! CodeStock will be the place to be for the software development community on the weekend of August 9 - 10. There will be world class speakers at the event, with Jeff Prosise delivering the keynote. The grand prize giveaway will be an MSDN Premium Subscription with Team Suite!

I learned about the event last night on Twitter and you can Follow Codstock for all the latest news.
posted Tuesday, June 17, 2008 11:41 AM by paul with 0 Comments

AMD for Speed

AMD Stream Processor First to Break 1 Teraflop Barrier

AMD FireStream 9250 breaks the one teraflop barrier for single precision performance at the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, Germany.

AMD FireStream occupies a single PCI slot with power consumption of less than 150 watts, delivering an unprecedented rate of performance per watt efficiency of up to eight gigaflops per watt.

Just last week IBM announced the Roadrunner Project the worlds fastest computer with 1,000 trillion operations per second. Roadrunner is powered by 6,562 dual-core AMD Opteron processors networked with 12,240 Cell chips.

Can you even begin to imagine the speed capabilities of leveraging AMD’s latest FireStream offering with third generation Quad-Core AMD Opteron Processors..?
posted Monday, June 16, 2008 12:21 PM by paul with 0 Comments

Fractured Attention

Lost in E-Mail, Tech Firms Face Self-Made Beast

In the United States, more than $650 billion a year in productivity is lost because of unnecessary interruptions, predominately mundane matters...

It took a consultant firm six months to come to that conclusion and I'll bet their billing invoice was eighteen pages long.

If they had contacted me and I would have told them of my experiences communicating with corporations. Meetings about meetings, emails about phone calls, efficiency tools and methodologies that nobody can figure out, it's no wonder burnout is so prevalent.

I don't carry a cell phone and never have, when they ring they demand attention, my precious attention. I avoid IM for the same reason, that intrusive urgency. Email is there when I'm ready to read it and respond.

RSS enables us to view many blogs quickly and Twitter has taught me more about the people who publish feeds.

I eat well and exercise because the best way to work better and be more creative is to feel good.
posted Saturday, June 14, 2008 9:35 AM by paul with 0 Comments

SharePoint Podcasting Kit

Podcasting Kit for SharePoint

If your interested in podcasting and have SharePoint Server 2007 deployed and are looking for a podcasting solution you'll find on codeplex a vibrant community of people, organizations and partners who are available to help you and share their own experiences.
posted Friday, June 13, 2008 12:44 PM by paul with 0 Comments

Open XML SDK

Open XML SDK Version 1 released

Version 1 of the Open XML SDK is now available for free download from MSDN. Here are the links.

Open XML Formats Resource Center.
posted Wednesday, June 11, 2008 3:30 PM by paul with 0 Comments

SQL Server 2008 RC0

SQL Server 2008 Release Candidate 0

I think this is the first ever RC Zero, but it's nice to have an upgrade from the Feb CTP.

SQL Server 2008 provides a comprehensive data platform that is secure, reliable, manageable, and scalable for your mission critical applications. With it, developers can create new applications that can store and consume any type of data on any device, enabling your users to make informed decisions with relevant insights.
SQL Server 2008 RC0 will automatically expire after 180 days.

SQL Server Developer Center
posted Tuesday, June 10, 2008 7:56 PM by paul with 0 Comments

Deploying Visual Studio Team System 2008

Using Visual Studio 2008 to Improve Software Development

A Technical White Paper from Microsoft IT.

Microsoft IT implemented the Program Delivery Engineering Excellence strategic initiative. The goal of this initiative is to improve code quality, developer productivity, and the accuracy of the programming schedule and the programming budget for software development at Microsoft IT.
posted Tuesday, June 10, 2008 5:43 AM by paul with 0 Comments

Software Productivity

AMD Senior Fellow Chuck Moore gave a talk on The Role of Accelerated Computing in the Multi-Core Era to computer science students at Stanford University where they now have a Pervasive Parallelism Laboratory

You can view the video from Chuck's talk and learn about Throughput Computing and the realities of Amdahl's law.
The question we should all be asking ourselves: How do we continue increasing customer value?
posted Saturday, June 07, 2008 11:14 AM by paul with 0 Comments

Silverlight 2 Beta 2

Silverlight 2 Beta2 Released
Silverlight 2 Beta 2 Launches

You've heard the rumors, but now it has arrived - Install Silverlight 2 Beta 2 to get the latest improvements in Silverlight 2. Get started building Silverlight applications, watch the 7 new videos and download the samples.
posted Friday, June 06, 2008 10:38 PM by paul with 0 Comments