Windows is Here to Stay 1
According to Pankaj Ghemawat and Ramon Casadesus-Masanell of Harvard Business School free isn’t good enough to destroy Windows . I found this piece pretty fascinating as it is the first formal model of the Microsoft vs. Open Source debate that I’ve seen and there was plenty in there that was outside of the current zeitgeist. I had heard that Microsoft secretly loved piracy but I hadn’t really thought about what that would mean for Linux making inroads into China (implicitly referred to in the article). China is the biggest battleground for the Microsoft vs. Linux battle and pretty much the last one of any consequence in the operating system wars (barring a new kind of computational model, of course). It is pretty telling, though, that only two of the biggest Internet success stories of today are running Windows: eBay and Myspace. Shows where today’s developers heads are. Definitely give the article a good read.
Junk Fax 2.0 1
Having just come off of 5 years in anti-spam, an idea like this one strikes me as hilariously dumb. Here’s how I see this one playing out:
Printing noise from the kitchen during Grandma’s weekly bridge game…
Grandma: Ooh, I must be getting some new pictures from my daughter of the grandkids on their vacation to DisneyWorld!
Four women cozy into the kitchen to see a piece of porn image spam printing out…
Grandma’s friend: DisneyWorld sure has changed since last time I was there…
Economics, people. Economics.
Planning Fallacy 1
Apparently, its not just software engineers that can’t estimate how long a project will take . I thought maybe we were alone in that, given all of the high-tower thinkers spouting off about how other engineering disciplines always succeed in their endeavors and software rarely does. Looks like maybe no one’s got it all figured out just yet, eh?
This article was especially pertinent to me now since I am responsible for coming up with these kinds of schedules at work these days. I’m not too far along in my EBS implementation but I’m hoping that can offset some of the pain of project estimation.
