Mark DiGiovanni

July 2004 - Posts

• Labor group: Microsoft offshoring work on Longhorn

  “Microsoft denied that work on key pieces of Longhorn is being done by third-party companies but declined to comment on the number of workers assigned to the company through contractors in India. "The development of our core technologies, our intellectual property, is done by Microsoft employees," Microsoft spokeswoman Stacy Drake said. Drake also emphasized that most of the company's "core" development work is done by U.S. employees.” Read on here. --Mark Posted Jul 29 2004, 06:38 AM by mdigiovanni with 2 comment(s)

• An Emotional Computer

  Maybe someday in the future, my computer will show emotion.  Perhaps it will make sad faces when I write bad code, smile when I tell it a joke, shine with glee when I install a new version of Visual Studio.NET....  The possibilities are endless. Toyota seems to be one step ahead of me: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/26/technology/26patent.html?ex=1091419200&en=d20cb5eca1169d24&ei=5006&partner=ALTAVISTA1 --Mark Posted Jul 26 2004, 07:39 AM by mdigiovanni with no comments

• The blah, blah blog trap

  David Hornik writes:  “...I attended yet another social-networking panel. This time it was an event sponsored by Silicon Valley's Churchill Club on the subject of "Blogging and Social Networking: Who Cares?"...  Unfortunately, I have seen enough of these panels to conclude with certainty that they are all the same. To save you the time (and aggravation), the following transcription of the evening's event condenses the essential content of any past and future social-software panels. Read it, and you'll get a sense of what these events inevitably turn int "Welcome blah blah blah relationship capital blah blah blah social contracts blah blah blah media businesses blah blah blah identify the rabid fans of the iPod blah blah blah utility media blah blah blah this is the future of the Web blah blah blah RSS blah blah blah spam blah blah blah killer app blah blah blah business model blah blah blah advertising model blah blah blah Is this a product or a feature? blah blah blah A feature doesn't make a business blah blah blah leveraging relationships blah blah blah decentralized system blah blah blah privacy concerns blah blah blah profiling people blah blah blah....“ Read on: http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1107_2-5281148.html?tag=zdfd.newsfeed --Mark Posted Jul 23 2004, 07:35 AM by mdigiovanni with 1 comment(s)

• What does knowing XML really mean?

  Darrell Norton emailed this diagram to me from this website. When a person lists XML as a recent skill on their resume, does it mean they know all of this? Just a thought. --Mark Posted Jul 16 2004, 07:22 AM by mdigiovanni with 10 comment(s)

• BPL: Broadband over Powerline

  “Called Broadband over Powerline or BPL, the technology uses the power grid to deliver data along with electricity. Just as phone and cable wires have excess capacity not needed to carry voice or TV, power lines have enough headroom to deliver data as well.“ “... the companies say, can not only provide up to 54 megabits of data to the home (20 times the speed of most cable or DSL services) but also greatly improve the sound quality of phone calls.“ http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/07/14/scitech/pcanswer/main629747.shtml --Mark Posted Jul 15 2004, 01:04 PM by mdigiovanni with 2 comment(s)

• Mono bringing .Net to Linux

  Martin LaMonica interviews Miguel de  Icaza, VP of development at Novell.  He has some very interesting comments about ASP.NET, J2EE, Mono 1.0, and the future of Mono. “ People always talk about the battle for the hearts and minds of developers, who choose between Microsoft's .Net and Java. Do you think Mono will attract Java developers to the .Net fold? Today what's happening is that ASP.Net (Microsoft's system for building Web applications) is replacing, it's basically pushing J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) aside. We did a study at Ximian when we were trying to find customers for Mono. We found that people said that it was 25 percent more efficient to build in ASP.Net, because they have to do all this academic crap (with J2EE). Microsoft later funded a similar study and they came up with 30 percent. We interviewed about 25 customers about why would you buy Mono, why not J2EE, and we came up with that. “ --Mark Posted Jul 15 2004, 12:49 PM by mdigiovanni with 2 comment(s)

• SCOP: Overcoming the limitations of OOP

  Darrell Norton, in this post,  recently blogged on the limitations of object-oriented solutions.  I think Darrell has overlooked the benefits of a very prevalent pattern in use since the dawn of software development.  SCOP (Spaghetti Code Oriented Programming), pronounced “ess-cop“, has several benefits: Developers will achieve code completion in half the time. Zero chance of over architecting the application. Beginners can implement this pattern immediately.  No spin-up time required. All coding is directed at adding new features that the customer can see.  No development effort is wasted on “behind the scenes” code. Unit testing is a simple process.  Simply press F5 (the little green play triangle) or whatever button your Debug command is associated with.  Who needs TDD anyways? Encourages “heads down” programming.  Some may even fall asleep!  No need for needlessly long requirements gathering sessions where the churn never ends. Yes, you and your development team can achieve these results by simply implementing the principles of SCOP. --Mark Posted Jul 14 2004, 07:37 AM by mdigiovanni with 1 comment(s)

• Offshoring backlash spreads

  "...we asked the silicon.com CIO Jury this week whether customer backlash now figures in the overall business equation for offshoring. Overwhelmingly the panel voted 'yes', with only one out of 12 respondents disagreeing." Article: http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1107_2-5259663.html?tag=zdfd.newsfeed Additional: http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104_2-5259796.html?tag=zdfd.newsfeed --Mark Posted Jul 07 2004, 10:36 AM by mdigiovanni with no comments