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July 01, 2004
No Digital Ink for PDFs
About a month ago I bought a Tablet PC (HP T1100). Mostly I wanted to see how it worked, play with the form factor and so on. Tuesday I'm flying to DC for and NSF Review panel. I have about 15 proposals to comment on before I get there and they're in PDF format. I thought "The tablet is the perfect form factor for working on an airplane, especially since all I have to do is read and comment on the documents." How natural it would be to view the PDF document and write notes on it. Unfortunately, it can't be done as far as I can tell. This floors me. The Tablet's been out for two years and you still can't do digital ink on PDF documents. Wow!
07:56 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Web Services Disproportionately Benefit Small Business
Esther Dyson says that small businesses have a higher surface to volume ratio than large businesses. What she means is that small businesses are much more dependent on interacting with the outside world than large business are. Does this mean that small businesses will disproportionately benefit from Web services and easier integration? I think that's just another way of looking at what's happening to large businesses as they outsource more and more of their support structure. They're becoming "smaller" and increasing their surface to volume ratio. There's a tie-in to what Tom Malone was saying at Supernova last week.
11:03 AM | Recommend This | Print This
Marketecture
I heard the word "marketecture" used in an interesting way today. Traditionally, its been used as a synonym for slideware but my friend, who's the CEO of a software applications company, used it in connection with situations where he goes on a sales call to a large company and they'll only accept his product if it meets their preconceived notions about architectural purity. He called J2EE his marketecture since his architectural decisions are being driven, in part, by what his customer want to hear.
10:57 AM | Recommend This | Print This
VMs as the Dominant Software Platform
Jon Udell describes how virtual machines have become the dominant software platform and some of its implications:
At that point something clicked in my head, and I proposed a software taxonomy based entirely on virtual machines -- the VB runtime, the CLR, the JVM, the Perl and Python VMs. Some of these are bound more tightly to operating systems than others, some are bound more tightly to programming languages than others, but they all share a set of common characteristics. The definition of a modern "software platform," I would say, is a VM and its associated class libraries. And a bunch of implications flow from that.From Jon's Radio
Referenced Thu Jul 01 2004 07:33:39 GMT-0600
He goes on to describe how VM-based software platforms have enabled whole new ways of doing software testing.
I was noticing this from another angle the other day. I was having a discussion with some engineers about what languages to use in various portions of a project. There was a core piece that really needs to be optimized for performance to the greatest extent possible and other parts where cross-platform and user interface issues dominate. I began to realize that almost no recent development in programming languages helps with the former. We're probably still going to write it in C++, with all its warts, so that we can compile it. Will people still be using C and C++ to write operating systems and other core software 20 years from now? Doesn't seem right, but it is likely.
07:41 AM | Recommend This | Print This
Computer Repairs by UPS
This Business 2.0 article reports that Toshiba and UPS have entered a deal whereby UPS will provide computer repair services for Toshiba computers under warranty. This is an interesting idea by itself, but think of the extension of this. We typically think of retail being about lots of specialty shops providing their service with the logistics infrastructure bringing their goods to them. This turns that inside out so that there's just one shop that takes to goods to the service providers.
07:30 AM | Recommend This | Print This
Mono 1 is Released
Novell's Mono project, the open source C#/CLR runtime, has released verion 1.0.
07:11 AM | Recommend This | Print This
Bye, Bye Mr. CIO Guy
Scoble points to one of the funniest things I've seen in a long time: Pat Helland singing Bye, Bye Mr. CIO Guy with Don Box on guitar and David Chappell on piano. There's six verses!. Here's a sample:
And the men that I admire least,
The MBAs trained in the East
Made sure their salaries were increased
The day that IT died
So Bye, Bye Mr. CIO Guy
Gonna outsource every resource till the business goes dry
And MBAs watch the beans flowing by
Singing "this will make the P-E go high!"
"this will make the P-E go high!"