Navigation

You are here: Home › MSCD › 2003 › April

Archive | April, 2003

Microsoft gags MVP and ‘Lifetime Achievement Award’ winner

By on April 10, 2003 in Home Page

Whil Hentzen, Microsoft Support Most Valuable Professional and the first winner of the FoxPro Lifetime Achievement Award, traveled to the West Coast to present “Expanding your VFP Skillset with Linux” to the Bay Area Association of Database Developers, which included a demonstration of Visual FoxPro running under Wine on Linux. He was prevented from making the presentation. Here’s what happened:

—–Original Message—–
From: Chet Gardiner
Sent: Thursday, April 10, 2003 2:47 AM
To: profox@leafe.com; prolinux@leafe.com
Subject: VFP under Linux – Not

FYI:

I attended the BAADD (Bay Area Association of Database Developers) VFP sig meeting this evening. It was to be something very special since Whil Hentzen was coming in to talk to us about developing with the Fox under Linux.

Whil made some very good points about the growth of Linux and the fact that it soon will be a very viable solution for the desktop for people who don’t (or can’t afford) microsoft’s extortionate policies, practices and prices. I’d have to agree. I had very little problem installing a workable version on one of the machines on my network. For instance, Red Hat 8.0 comes
with a complete office suite, email clients and servers, web server, samba network file service, etc, etc. You can download the images for free and try it out.

The most interesting point Whil made was that there was a group of people who really knows database applications (us) who could fit right into the Linux world if we got VFP running under it. They don’t need the apps now but soon and there’s no other viable 4GL language for Linux and Windows on the near horizon.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the forum. Whil got a call this afternoon from a semi-highly placed person from M$ who warned him that he would be in violation of the EULA for VFP if he demonstrated (or ran) VFP on a Linux OS. that he might run into some trouble from their huge stable of lawyers. There has been some discussion of letting M$ know how we feel about this attack on our potential livelihood. I intend to do just that.

I’ve seen this before, back in the late 70s/early 80s when IBM had 85% of the computing market share.

Chet

If not you, who?

By on April 10, 2003 in Home Page
In Germany they first came for the Communists,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist.

Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew.

Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant.

Then they came for me –
and by that time no one was left to speak up.

A paraphrase of the testimony of Pastor Martin Niemšller.

Is it time yet for you to speak out?

Thoughts on Social Software

By on April 9, 2003 in Home Page

Different needs and modes require different structures:

  • Chat rooms / IM – instant feedback, good for quick answers, no memory, though.
  • Email lists – good for current participation, arhives can be difficult to search, thread drift (or mobs) increase signal/noise
  • Forums – quick feedback, give-and-take discussion, scrolls off forum (perhaps into archives), searching haphazard
  • Blogs – Linking as feedback, organic structure, shallow, chronological structure good for *now*, weak for a thread through time
  • Wiki – web structure, deep links in and out, good searching, structure builds over time, poor feedback mechanisms (although email notifications and RSS can enhance)

I’ve started to discover that too many RSS subscriptions mean that I have to spend too much time reading and sorting, and not enough time left to blog, or even to read everything as it scrolls by. What’s needed is better filters to help screen interesting from not, perhaps a rating system to establish the esteem in which various posts are placed, so the news aggregator doesn’t just present a single stream of RSS feeds as they happen, but a richer, rated list, weighted either with my preferences or perhaps the Whuffie of Technorati or a similar service. What’s popular isn’t always of interest to me, but keeping up on what is popular might be.

Social Software on Meatball Wiki

By on April 9, 2003 in Home Page

There’s also this very interesting, heavy-cross-linked wiki posting on Meatball Wiki.

One of the key differentiators that many Social Software advocates are arguing about is the question of the number of participants vs. the value. We have all seen forums “turn nasty” and communities go sour. I’ve also had the priviledge to belong to long-lasting groups that had decorum as well as numbers CompuServe’s FoxForum 1990-1995 hosted as many a 500 messages per day and yet threads were maintained, order was enforced (not by SysOps as much as community activists) and a really powerful social as well as business network was formed. I am not convinced that the software features are as enabling as a few skilled people who serve as Connectors, as Malcolm Gladwell described them in “The Tipping Point.”

More Social Software Posts…

By on April 9, 2003 in Home Page

New Social Software Products. Social Software Making Progress Dan Gillmor: “The smaller the group, the more immediate value in the relationship. That’s one notion behind an emerging phenomenon called “social software”


 

Jeremy Allaire writes: “Dan’s got some thoughts on the emerging category of “social software”, a phrase Clay Shirky has been promoting.  Another interesting company solving similar problems — and one who was just on a panel moderated by Clay, also including SocialText — is Providence, RI-based Traction Software, who’s “enterrprise weblog” software is really a powerful distributed communication and publishing tool for information professionals.”
[via Jeremy Allaire’s Radio]

Phone Booth

By on April 9, 2003 in Home Page

Steve and I saw Phone Booth yesterday afternoon. Great flick. While the move is short (80 minutes), you don’t want to hang on the edge of your chair any longer than that. Colin Farrell has a riveting performance. Great suspense, little blood, no gore.

So, how’s about you sign up for a little protection?

By on April 8, 2003 in Home Page

Ed Foster has another of his always informative Gripe Line columns on InfoWorld. In this one, he points out that the Software Assurance portion of the Licensing 6.0 contract most large companies own can be a killer if a division is split off: all future payments (for the life of the contract) come due, and there is no further obligation for upgrades. Ouch!. Microsoft might be open to reducing the cost if you re-up, of course. Read the gory details at the link above.

Whither Novell?

By on April 7, 2003 in Home Page

An interesting article in IT Week titled “Novell Takes Linux Exit; To Drop NetWare?” I was a Novell CNA (Admin not CNE, Engineer) for Novell 3.x, and it was a powerful, scalable network OS. It was absolutely swamped by Windows, though, and seemed to muddle through a number of initiatives that were unclear. Their directory services, though, I hear, are the crown jewel of the company at this point. Not connected with the news in that part of the world, I missed the Cambridge Technology Partners acquisition – those are sharp guys. It will be interesting to see which direction the company takes from here. Thanks to the post on OSNews

SharePoint Portal Server a part of the "Microsoft Office System?"

By on April 7, 2003 in Home Page

SharePoint shacks up with Office. “Microsoft plans to add its SharePoint business portal software to its Office bundle, as the company looks to broaden the appeal of its desktop software.” according to CNET News.com

Intriguing. As I noted some time ago, many developers have been delivering systems using portions of Office for many years. With the Sharepoint services (formerly Microsoft SharePoint Team Services) built into Microsoft (formerly .NET) Server 2003 (formerly 2002), Microsoft may have hit upon a winning combination for ease of enterprise-wide distribution, versioning and tracking. Or, like the Exchange extensions last time and the previous versions of SharePoint, they may be flailing for a problem to fit their solution. I’m having a really hard time figuring out if Microsoft is really coming up with a coordinated plan to provide enterprise-wide services (the new decade of the 2000s, turning-over-the-leaf plan) (vs. the workgroup and desktop applications thay have been shipping) or whether they are just throwing everything against the wall and seeing what sticks, the plan that got them through the nineties.

Older posts Newer posts

Powered by WordPress. Designed by Woo Themes

This work by Ted Roche is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.