G-Man

I am lost as to why Yahoo would not want to merge with Microsoft, why are they trying to form an alliances with Google when Google is the company that crippled their business. Yahoo definitely needs help and I don't think anybody out there can help them but Microsoft. But for 44 Billion, those big boys from redmond should focus on re-visiting their aging financial application that they've acquired 5 years ago (Great Plains) start building an enterprise class, more robust financial application that can compete with SAP and Oracle (only player in this field), Forget Yahoo and get back to what your company is know for, which is software development and not web advertising.

From our friendly FCC:

On February 17, 2009, federal law requires that all full-power television broadcast stations stop broadcasting in analog format and broadcast only in digital format.

From a consumer standpoint, every conventional analog TV will become obsolete, In order to be compliant with this regulation we urge all the wives to buy Plasma or LCD TV for their husbands with the minimum recommended size of 52". Listed below are the recommeded products.

Vizio VM60P 60" Plasma HDTV TV

Samsung LN-T5271F 52" LCD HDTV

Sharp AQUOS LC-52D92U 52" High Definition LCD Television

This is not a joke....

Last year, Daylight Savings Time (DST) has changed in accordance with the Energy Policy Act of 2005. In 2007, DST began on March 11 and will end on the first Sunday in November instead of the last Sunday in October.

While it appears to be minor, we learned every day about more systems being affected. The impact in the change was bigger than most people realize (bigger than Y2k). We found more issues than we did with Y2K because:
 
1. IT shops have had less notice in dealing with the time change than we did for Y2K.

2. there is no visibility at the board and the CEO level, yet it's a similar risk to the business.

We go out there, discovering every single devices that will be affected and verifying that the appropriate patch level is applied, we inspect configuration parameters against a DST template. Then we inspect all the servers, identify all the JDKs and test each of them for the DST patch.

Now study concludes that DST is a bust, what the fudge!!! all that work for nothing. I'm so glad that I don't have to deal with it when congress decide to roll it back.

S2000 may go down in history as the car with the most wasted potential. Owning your own "supercar" and then tearing around city streets at 160 mph sounds like a gear head’s wet dream come true. With this car it's not going to happen, it just falls flat as far as execution is concerned.

Driving this car is really cool for the first five minutes. After that time, you will realized that you have just made the worst decision in your life. Your design choices are severely limited and tweaking your car’s performance consists of pretty much changing the whole car.

When altering the look of your car, you are stuck with only changing the entire front section and the entire back section, choosing from a handful of styles for each end and then determining how much the new piece influences your car. It is too bad that this is the only real draw of an otherwise average car.

The worst part however, is that the car moves very slowly. You have no sense of speed whatsoever because the car seems to crawl by despite your "tach" reaching the 9000 RPM.

I thought the idea of owning this car and then racing it alongside all of the great supercars of today was great. I followed it’s development up until it’s release and read all of the reviews and hoped that it would be better than they all said but sadly, it is just as bad as everyone had warned. It is incredibly average on all fronts and pales in comparison to similar racing titles. S2 had a lot of potential, but wasted it. Hopefully, the idea of owning a so called "supercar" will be attempted again and executed better. Until then, keep away from buying it.

P.S. No offense....hahahaha

AppleTV started delivering movies in HD format downloadable to your living room.  

Maybe in other countries where high-speed or even fiber Internet connections are everywhere, downloadable forms of HD video have a chance of overtaking Blu-Ray, or any media form for that matter. However, the current state of high-speed Internet in the United States is still a nightmare compared to countries like Japan.

Furthermore, I for one would also rather be free of DRM (Digital Rights Management) restrictions, more specifically, those that limit which machines I should be allowed to watch my media on. Formats like the Blu-Ray disc can be taken to any compliant player, while DRM-burdened digital downloads will most likely tie you to one or a few devices.

There is also the concept of compression; that was one of the key factors allowing Napster to take off. More than likely HD video will have to be compressed to great lengths to make them appealing to downloaders. "How much quality can I get in a reasonable amount of time?" Once again, Internet speeds will play a major role in this decision.

So why did iTunes work out? The song is tied to your computer and your iPod, but you can take your iPod anywhere, easily. The same can't be said for a computer; even laptops are a pain to carry around. But more importantly, the quality vs. portability tradeoff doesn't apply here.

So while it may be forward-thinking to believe that digital downloads will largely replace tangible media, the video industry will most likely be an exception for the near-future.

I'm talking about about the new MACBook Air notebook.

Now, I’m not really an Apple guy.  I’ve got nothing against them, I just haven’t really ended up as one of the Apple disciples.  But nearly everything they put out looks amazing, specially the MACBook Air. I want one....

I think so......I can’t say the same for Windows Vista - yet. And that is my qualifier here. Windows Vista is better than XP was when it was first released to the public. With XP, it really wasn’t until after SP2 that it became as solid as it is. So, good effort by Microsoft. But, the thing is that as it sits now, Windows XP SP2 is a more stable and faster operating system than Windows Vista.

Is Windows bloated? Yes. Is it too internally complicated? Yes. Windows is now a core OS that is buried so deep in little features, utilities, and system specific features that it now requires a full DVD just to fit in. Logic usually tells you that power comes with simplicity. And as Windows moves further from it’s simplicity, my gut tells me that it will only become less powerful.

Windows Vista is a good operating system that will get better over time, despite it being on bloated ground. Yes, at this point, I’m happy with XP. XP works. Vista to me is a big, beefier version of Windows OS that doesn’t really do anything new, but looks good.

I hope that Vista represents the last beast version of Microsoft Windows. We don’t need a car with more bells and whistles. We need a car that just works - every time you use it. Sometimes a Nissan S13 is just more reliable than the fanciest Honda. With the next version of Windows after Vista (Windows 7) coming soon, let’s hope they give us a Nissan S13 and not an S2000.

 I recently spoke with the CIO of this company discussing their network infrastructure plans while trying to convince them to let me handle the optimization and administration of their backend business process . As I started asking questions about their racks of servers, their storage area network (SAN), their plans for routing, load-balancing and network security, the CIO of the company stopped me and made a bold statement.

He said, “The Internet is like electricity. We plug into it and all of the things that you mention are already there for us. We don’t spend any time at all on network or server infrastructure plans.”

To this CIO, knowing the details of his network and server infrastructure was like knowing the details of the local utility electricity grid – not required. Is this a bad thing, or proof that networking technologies have succeeded?

I guess I am old school, as I recall it, in the not-so-distant past that every company needed a plan for their network and server infrastructure and even knew the details of their service providers network – are they using OSPF and BGP? What is the latency across the local peering point? Who are their upstream network peers? How are their firewalls and load-balancers configured? What blocks of IP addresses have I been assigned and how are they routed?

My roots are in network engineering and I have spent a good part of my career building network devices and global IP-based networks and services. I’ve spent years studying and applying routing protocols, quality of service algorithms, security mechanisms to prevent attacks and have every field of the IPv4 packet header memorized.

When the CIO of a company does not know how a router or switch works (or even what layer of the OSI model they even operate on), I tend to cringe a bit.

I guess I’m reluctant to admit that my technical depth in networking has been abstracted to not being relevant in the Business world of social networking, mash-ups, RSS and AJAX. I know that a well-architected network can have a dramatic affect on application performance – but maybe on today’s high-speed Internet it does not matter. It might be that network engineers are not relevant for today’s Internet in the same way that software optimization engineers are seemingly not relevant for Microsoft applications.

On the other hand, I see the current state of the Internet as the ultimate success of these networking technologies. You can deploy a wildly successful Web application (e.g Multiply and MySpace) that serves millions of users and never know how a router, switch or load-balancer works. The success of these networking devices and technologies has enabled them to become part of the technology landscape that exists for all to use as they see fit, similar to the microprocessor or electricity.