Articles to appear on the home page (nearly all)
Tom Yager’s weekly column at InfoWorld, timed well to land during MacWorld week, is titled “Try as I might, I can’t wreck a Mac” — a switcher endorsement, not from a blurry-eyed preteen or a a hip DJ, but from the guy who runs the testing labs at a IT publication. The best line: “I expect the iMac G5 will prove comparable to other 64-bit, zero-footprint Unix RISC desktops with integrated 20-inch LCD displays. (That’s a joke, son.)”
For those of you not in on the joke. there are no competitors.
Cringely writes in his weekly I, Cringely that Microsoft getting into the anti-malware business is a bad idea, both from their motivations and history:
Microsoft has always hated firms that sell products that enhance their operating systems. They hate sharing revenue with others. Microsoft has to be envious and annoyed by the fact Symantec and others get more recurring revenue from Windows than Microsoft does.
Time will tell.
I don’t think Microsoft will be offering a version for OS X or Linux.
The FoxProWiki maintains a page called BlogWatch to point to FoxPro-related Blogs. Most recently added: http://www.rickborup.com/blog
The protests from Redmond just keep getting weirder. While the rest of the industry – IBM, HP, Oracle – seems to be catching on that Open Source and commercial software form powerful counterparts in a lively and healthy IT ecosystem, Bill Gates calls free culture advocates communists – Joi (jito-mt2@bee.puberteny.com)
C’mon, Bill. How is this serving your customers?
Andrew Binstock writes about the remarkable success of FoxFire in taking market share away from Internet Explorer in his Integration Watch column.
I’m setting up a machine in the server room to duplicate the configuration I’ll be installing at a client next month. The machine had been my desktop computer last year, running WinXP Pro, until it developed a terminal case of the Windows Blues and would not let anyone log on, locally, remotely, via Samba shares, nothing. I booted it up with the Knoppix CD in the SCSI CD-ROM and Knoppix dealt with the oddball hardware, booted the machine, and acted as a Samba server so I could copy off the old files over the network before blowiing it away. Pretty amazing.
Joi Ito’s Web notes “Dan Gillmor who recently left the Merc has a new blog called Dan Gillmor on Grassroots Journalism. Go Dan!”
Hope you made it through to 2005. I’ve made some significant changes in the Radio Userland software. I’m now running it on the iMac. Transfer seemed to go very smoothly, but if I disappear, you’ll understand why.
There are a few web sites I like to keep track of that don’t yet have RSS feeds. Check out FeedFire.com, a web site and service that will generate an RSS feed from a web page for free. There are options to sponser the RSS feed and add in some editorial control, at pretty reasonable prices.
Jon Udell cites 2004 as the Year of the Enterprise Wiki.
Alan Zeichick thinks “The enterprise software acronym of the year must be SOA (service-oriented architecture).”
Mary Jo Foley points out that Friday Is D-Day for NT 4.0 Server. Now really. NT 4.0 is no longer going to be supported by Microsoft. How will we be able to tell? Most businesses are served by consultants who will continue to support it as long as the client pays Since it’s closed software, bugs won’t get fixed, and the platform needs to be abandoned. But which platform do you migrate to? The one from the vendor that just stranded you? MJF points to a Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols that suggests (what else?) Linux is a good alternative.
Whatever comes next, it’s always proven to be a fun business. Hope you’re enjoying it as much as I am.