| Mauro 的个人资料Taming the Jungle照片日志列表 |  工具  帮助 |
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5月29日 Why Microsoft makes such boring components?Since the old days of Visual Basic, Microsoft supplied some very simple components – basic I dare say. It’s up to the market to supply the nice stuff. Is this a good or a bad thing? On the one hand, you could argue that this component writing stuff is better suited for small teams, preferably one person for each component set. That person would know one set of components from inside out and can keep the components light, slick and bug free. This is not how a big company like Microsoft develops software, with large teams, administrative overhead and long cycles. So it makes sense for Microsoft to delegate this specialization to third parties while it focuses on the infrastructure part of the equation like the OS, IIS, ASP.NET etc. On the other hand, this is also selling their stuff short. Most people don’t use third party components – even the free ones. There’s a big gulf between the components in Visual Studio and some third parties, take a look for instance at http://www.devexpress.com. ASP.NET becomes do much better with third part components! Take for instance just the DataGrid and the report generator. I think Microsoft should be more like Borland used to be in the good Borland Delphi days (say 1997). They should let third parties do components, but their “basic stuff” should be a decent set, even if that means acquiring components from other companies – or acquiring the whole company. 5月27日 Food to be consumed during TechEd - OfficialAfter irresistible insistence, the lawyers at Microsoft now let us spread this very sensitive information.
In two weeks I and some 15000 other people will be in Boston, MA for Microsoft’s TechEd (http://www.microsoft.com/events/teched2006/default.mspx). I just got wind on the amount of food that will be consumed during the event:
5月26日 Alcohol to be consumed during TechEd – UnofficialMicrosoft told us the amount of food to be consumed during TechEd, the biggest Microsoft convention to take place in Boston in two weeks. I cannot tell it now because it’s still a close guarded secret and under “NDA”.
A German friend who now works at Microsoft noticed that no alcoholic beverage is listed, although it’s also consumed also in copious quantities, especially beer. In most countries that sort of information would be a plus, would show that we not only work, we party as well.
So let me make some “unofficial” calculations on the beer consumption based on a typical attendant, a Microsoft Regional Director.
15 000 people times 3 bottles of beer per night. Not that we Regional Directors drink so little, but we have to balance Kevin, our manager that doesn’t drink and that RD from Lancaster county in Pennsylvania that insists on showing up driving a horse drawn carriage.
For four days = 180000 bottles of beer = 64k liters. If each bottle + packaging weights 0.5 kg, that’s 90 tons of beer. I suppose you would need 4 semis to carry it all.
UPDATE: Now I can comment on the amount of food to be consumed. Check at http://spaces.msn.com/maurosjungle/blog/cns!F3CEB0849B03B6CC!175.entry. 5月25日 Microsoft to dogfood security practice“News spread quickly that the director of Microsoft's internal security told a reporter at the AusCERT conference May 23 that Microsoft is considering limiting employees' full admin rights to their desktop PCs.
Microsoft has always given the majority of its employees full admin rights on their desktop PCs, though this is unusual; most companies' IT departments limit access in order to more easily manage the workstations under their jurisdiction.”
It is a good thing that Microsoft itself starts dogfooding this security practice, even under a limited scenario – I doubt developers will have to comply. Well, even it’s just the janitorial and food services people, this is a step forward from the security point of view. It looks like it is a preparation for the Vista roolout.
Of course, they cannot go completely overboard because if they forced everyone not to be administrator, then people would not install beta software (no software at all, really) and the dogfooding would decrease, as a whole.
5月24日 Running a car on waterThere’s a video all over the web about a guy that “discovered a way to make cheap hydrogen” that you can use to run your car. You can check at the inventor’s web site at http://hytechapps.com in case you missed it. Given the current oil prices, this seems to be too good to be true. And it is.
Not only did Fox News fall for it (so what, they are an ignorant bunch anyway), but the more respectable CNN also gave him air time.
When I was a kid (circa early 1970s) there used to be this guy in Brazil that did many TV appearances in what is now called the “talk show circuit”.
He had this “secret device” under the hood of his car, a 1950s Chevrolet – it seems that these inventors are always in a tight budget, see that Gentleman’s old Ford Escort. He would then fill the car’s fuel tank with water. The car would run around the block to everybody’s astonishment. I never heard of him since. To this day some people still believe that he was “silenced” by the oil companies instead of the Second Principle of Thermodynamics – or by somebody that found that his “device” was actually a small gas tank.
Generating hydrogen and oxygen with electrolysis is no big deal, of course. The “little problem” is that after burning the gas in an Otto engine makes the whole process terribly inefficient – it’s much better to run a fuel cell or charge batteries, not to mention the problem of transporting the volumous and leaky hydrogen.
This gentleman however seems to claim that he has cheated on the Second Principle (See at http://hytechapps.com/presentation/#page=24): “Typically the energy requirement was too great to produce an economical and efficient hydrogen source”. The “scientific paper” on the site goes even further. It’s entitled “A new gaseous and combustible form of water”. You can only go downhill from there :-).
Maybe it’s the same guy that I once knew as a kid in Brazil in a more sophisticated incarnation. I wonder if the main product he is selling is gas generators or shares of his company. If it is “gas generator”, he will rot in jail for deceiving the innocent public. However, if he manages to get a good contact on Wall Street and decides to sell shares of his company instead, he will become a millionaire. After all, stock fraud is a time honored tradition of America capitalism since the railway days. 5月17日 AJAX versus GWTGoogle has released its AJAX Framework called Google Web Toolkit (GWT). (http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/). It’s a counterpart to Microsoft’s Atlas (http://atlas.asp.net/) and uses Java on the server side components.
Like Atlas, it includes both a framework and a few lame sample components.
I don’t think Atlas will be affected due to its good integration with Microsoft’s technologies like Visual Studio and the .NET Framework; GWT will never get there. However, GWT may well become the de facto standard on the Java side.
I think it’s good news, for now Google and Microsoft will compete on the web client component space, witch is good for all of us developers.
GWT has an interesting twist, which I have not been able to test: it includes a “Java to JavaScript” translation compiler soon “you develop in Java and it generates client JavaScript”. This sounds too good to be true – and probably is. In my experience, those “translation technologies” tend to deal well with simple, demo applications and fail miserably on the field. Still, I am curious. 5月15日 C# 3.0 is comingMicrosoft has just released a public preview of C# 3.0 (project LINQ) called the May CTP. It’s a plug-in for Visual Studio 2005 that replaces the C# VB.NET compilers with newer ones, plus some environment enhancements.
The basic idea behind the language enhancements is to make it easier to develop database-enabled applications. If you came think of it, all those “third generation” languages like C/C++, Pascal, Ada, Modula-X, Java and C# were developed by system software people – compiler writes to be more precise. You might say “Daahhh – who else?” But this people may have a bias to things that solve their own system-software needs.
However, I would bet that most developers in the world are working with line-of-business applications that access a database (usually SQL these days) back-end. We had twenty years ago all that fuss over “revolutionary fourth generation languages” like xBase and Natural/ADABAS but it seems that they fizzled and we are back to third generation stuff. Let’s see how this evolutionary approach plays out. At least, if this fizzles as well you don’t have to learn a new language so as to move backwards.
You can check at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=66144. 5月13日 Microsoft’s search considered fairMicrosoft’s search considered fair Well, that was fast. Government officials threw away Google’s allegations against MSN search integration with Vista. http://news.com.com/Vista+search+seems+fair%2C+regulators+say/2100-1014_3-6071851.html?tag=nefd.top. On a related note: Google is starting to be considered as part of “the dark side”. The Register, not famous for liking Microsoft is now full steam onto Google. This is a very interesting article on the interests of a good, accurate search against advertising: “The worse Google gets, the more money it makes?” http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/05/10/google_microsoft_redux/. More links about Google in the bottom. BTW, they don’t pamper Microsoft either. 5月4日 Why does Google have to say “don’t be evil”?Picture yourself in a cocktail party. An acquaintance of you comes up and says: “This is Bill, he wanted to meet you”. Then, out of the blue, Bill says: “you know, I am an extremely honest guy”. What will you think? I would react by checking if my wallet is still in my pocket. I would think the guy is a crook and probably will try to con me into giving him money. Why else on Earth would somebody “volunteer” this sort of information?
I always became extremely cautions when somebody volunteers information that doesn’t seem to fit. It usually means the very opposite. It rarely fails.
I used to have a positive impression about Google Inc when they really developed this “better mousetrap” of search engine. Then they came with this “don’t be evil” thing. I swallowed it like a brick. It didn’t fit. 5月1日 Google complaining about Microsoft’s IE7Google is complaining that Microsoft is promoting MSN Search and MSN homepage with Internet Explorer 7 (IE7): http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/01/technology/01google.html
That’s strange, because Firefox, the main competition to IE, does the same with Google: http://www.2signals.com/2006/05/01/GoogleBellyachingAboutIE7.aspx
I am interested on what will come of this. The situation is quite different from the one a few years ago when Netscape complained about Microsoft:
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