Last week I mentioned that “dog bites man” is not news; the opposite is. Well, this is not “man bites dog” but it’s quite close:

 

This guy found a way to get his 15 minutes of fame not by *doing* something, but by *not doing* it: http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/09/13/bin.laden.beard.ap/index.html.

 

He stopped shaving 5 years ago on 9/11 and says he will keep his beard “until Bin Laden is caught”.

 

I hope he either votes Democrat or likes his beard a whole lot.

The Harvard Business School published a paper called “Dynamic Mixed Duopoly: A Model Motivated by Linux vs. Windows”. Its authors were interviewed in an article called “Microsoft vs. Open Source: Who Will Win?” at http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/4834.html. The interview was about a complex economic model that analyzed the dynamics of Windows vs. Linux competition. En passant, they came to other conclusions about pricing, “natural monopoly” and piracy.

 

The good people of “INFO Online”, one of the largest IT news bulletin in Brazil picked up this and published a clipping at http://info.abril.com.br/aberto/infonews/092006/12092006-1.shl.

 

However, the title is “Study says piracy benefits Windows”. That reminds me of that old publishing saying “Dog bites man is not news; man bites dog is news”. “Windows vs. Linux” is not news; “Piracy helps Microsoft” is.

Since VMWare (http://www.vmware.com/) came up with their virtualization software, I was hooked. I can’t stop saying nice things about this sort of technology. If you don’t know what I am talking about, please go to http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtualpc/.

 

Then Microsoft bought Conectix, a VMWare competitor and came up with its own product, Virtual PC. To be precise, VMWare did provide a few more features like virtualizing USB ports, but they were not all that important to me. I then switched to Virtual PC, especially because Microsoft starter shipping virtual machines for demos and training.

 

Now Microsoft made Virtual PC 2004 free (check link above). And the promise extends to the future Virtual PC 2007. The “server consolidation product”, Virtual Server, is not free but that’s a whole different thing anyway.

 

If you start using VMs heavily, you will learn that their hard disks are actually files on the host machine. And those files grow and grow and grow. The products do come with some utilities to reduce the size of those files, but they are not as good as this software: http://www.invirtus.com/. Using Invirtus software I was able to further reduce the size of Virtual Machine files from 15% to 50%. I recommend it.

I just got this link from a Microsoft UK site about the “The ten worst presentation moments”:

 

I can say that I’ve almost done #3.

 

As to #5, a fried of mine was presenting with his Messenger on. While he was facing the public, his wife sent him a message telling him she was pregnant They say that husbands are the last to know…how true.

 

As to seeing presenters offending the audience for lack of knowledge (#1), I’ve seen it many times. The worst of all was a guy presenting to an audience consisting of professors and manages of third-tier private colleges. Not only did he emphasized how his company made alliances with the most prestigious government-owned colleges, he added insult to injury by praising his company’s certification program, without realizing that it was seen as major competition by the audience.