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Massimo Morelli's Weblog
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venerdì 28 giugno 2002
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giovedì 27 giugno 2002
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Kimbro Staken: oracle and xml, it dismiss Tamino, which had some enthusiastical reviews some time ago:
Oracle 9i Release 2 XML DB
[..] I've spent a fair amount of time in the last couple weeks studying the new Oracle XML features and I have to say I'm very impressed. [..] Oracle 9i is now by every definition that I know of, a native XML database. And in my opinion is also the most complete and powerful native XML database around. [..] enables XMLType as a type within the relational model and opens the full richness of relational manipulation to XML data. They've provided some extension functions to SQL to enable accessing data within XMLType instances and then using that data within SQL queries. [..] At this point I have to say there's little reason for products like Software AG Tamino to exist anymore. Even if there is some speed advantage to Tamino and brethren, it's simply lacking in almost every other regard.[..] there's really no reason now to go away from the existing relational databases. I expect IBM and Microsoft to be coming out with products of similar power in the near future. [Kimbro Staken: XML Database JuJu]
3:07:46 PM 
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mercoledì 26 giugno 2002
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Do not tell to my daughter:
Contraband Kinder Suprise Eggs sales booming online. Kinder Suprise Eggs -- chocolate eggs with tiny do-it-yourself toys inside -- are banned in the US as a choking hazard. Kinder-fans have therefore had to rely on smuggled eggs retailed in "ethnic" grocery stores or on friends returning from abraod. The Internet, though, has managed to put Kinderfetishists in direct touch with supplier abroad, letting them score their sweet sweet contraband without leaving their seats.
Jim MacKenzie began selling the eggs here six months ago via his kinder-eggs .com site and says he lives "comfortably" off his U.S. profits. He won't say what those are but says he has 3,600 customers in his e-mail address book, and has sent as many as 100 cases a day -- 2,400 eggs a day -- in cases priced at $22.95. (Fundraisers get a break: $19 a case). Mr. MacKenzie, a Canadian from Delta, British Columbia, hires extra help at Christmas and Easter to do packing.
In Heidelberg, Germany, where the eggs are known as Kinder Uberraschung, or children's surprise, Linda Oldaker began shipping to the U.S. a year ago, taking orders via her Web site. Ms. Oldaker won't disclose U.S. sales, but she says she had five e-mail orders from the U.S. over a recent two-day period, including one for eight dozen. One day recently, the eBay auction site listed 74 people offering Kinder items, including 200 eggs available for shipping from "our video and convenience store just north of the New York State border." Link Discuss (via Oblomovka) [Boing Boing Blog]
5:08:26 PM
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Jon Udell, writing about convergence:
Sigh. This isn't going to be the year of paper/screen convergence. Maybe not even the decade. Sitting next to Steve Gillmor, I dropped my yellow legal pad onto the floor and said: "Oops. There goes $2500." Absent a digital surface that has the qualities of paper that matter -- including being cheap and disposable -- I see digital ink as sometimes useful but not revolutionary.
10:13:04 AM
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I should absolutely open an italian weblog. For now I am posting in both language, and I understand that I am doing a mess. However I lack the time, so I will continue in this way, for now.
9:17:14 AM
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domenica 23 giugno 2002
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Comments added. Let's see if they works. Ok.
8:07:37 PM
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sabato 22 giugno 2002
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From Kuroh5hin, .net, the why, not the what:
So, what does Web Services and .NET do to the enterprise integration business? It commoditizes it. Microsoft's vision is that if all the applications offer Web Service access then they are easy to plug together, and the obvious vendor to supply the plumbing is Microsoft. With enterprise integration reduced to a commodity Microsoft's chances of getting into the Enterprise space improve, with no TIBCO or webMethods to buy there's now more money available for Microsoft. If they can position themselves as the integration leader, with good support built into the OS they control and the tools they provide then it's much more likely they'll be chosen instead of IBM, SUN or HP to provide the OS, and possibly also the consulting work that goes along with the implementation.
11:29:50 PM
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I know I am a week late, but I want to comment on the last Schneier newsletter:
Most interesting of the two articles above is the second eWeek article, where Microsoft's Allchin mentions "at least one protocol and two APIs that it plans to withhold from public disclosure under the security carve-out." The protocol is Message Queuing. Apparently, Microsoft has discovered a security flaw in the Message Queuing protocol so bad that can't be fixed without breaking existing applications. So, until such time as they can field a backwards-compatible fix, they're going to hope no one else discovers it. (This is not a wholly unreasonable decision; security researchers have made the same decision in the past.) Of course, Allchin has undermined this decision by publicly naming the protocol. That's more than enough for someone sufficiently motivated to find the flaw. In the classified world, you can get your clearance pulled for blabbing like that.
Jim Allchin's testimony:
<http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/trial/mswitness/2002/allchin.asp>
At the same time, Microsoft tries to convince the Pentagon that open source software threatens security, and using proprietary Microsoft software is much safer (and better for the economy, to boot). This article is hilarious in light of the above.
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A60050-2002May22.html>
This remind me too much of Italy.
1:09:04 PM
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venerdì 21 giugno 2002
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John Robb Wise as always:
Wired. Radical price/performance improvements in combination with decentralization creeps into the airline industry.
>>>"There's a paradigm shift coming in the per-mile transportation cost on jet aircraft that will replicate the personal computing phenomenon," Raburn says. "Remember in the mainframe era how everyone said that individuals would never want computers in their homes? Well, every other aspect of society over the past five decades has been going toward individual choice - think about cars, PCs, your cell phone. But here's the one big component of our economy - air transport - where everybody has decided that it's OK to go Greyhound." <<< [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
11:03:26 AM
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When something is in the air, it happens, even if it is stupid:
Want to Read This? Ask First. So, National Public Radio wants to control who links to their pages, just as a Dallas newspaper tried earlier this year. What is this, the Iron Curtain Wide Web? Commentary by Jon Rochmis. [Wired News]
10:56:06 AM
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mercoledì 19 giugno 2002
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From Drew:
More SVG.NET Details.
More SVG.NET Details
Answer to Drew, in a future verison it should certainly support the subset of SMIL that is part of SVG 1.0. For support for other SMIL elements, I guess we'll just to wait and see if someone will be interested in joining the project and add that :-) [protocol7]
That's good to hear, can't wait for more details and v0.1. [Drew's Blog]
11:02:04 PM
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martedì 18 giugno 2002
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Today John's weblog is a source of very good articles. Do not miss this one.
Forbes. Patent Nonsense. Gary Reback.
>>>An awkward silence ensued. The blue suits did not even confer among themselves. They just sat there, stonelike. Finally, the chief suit responded. "OK," he said, "maybe you don't infringe these seven patents. But we have 10,000 U.S. patents. Do you really want us to go back to Armonk [IBM headquarters in New York] and find seven patents you do infringe? Or do you want to make this easy and just pay us $20 million?"
After a modest bit of negotiation, Sun cut IBM a check, and the blue suits went to the next company on their hit list. <<<
[John Robb's Radio Weblog]
8:46:53 PM
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lunedì 17 giugno 2002
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EBI My best wishes to Dave. Good Idea, Paolo.
Now if only I could write English....
5:06:03 PM
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sabato 15 giugno 2002
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From John Robb a good point.
KnowledgeFarm. Bottoms up knowledge management. K-Logs....
>>>Knowledge management has been, up to now, largely a top-down enterprise. Driven by a concern that corporate knowledge repositories would quickly fill up with inaccurate, useless junk without rigid quality review, organizations have created small priesthoods of knowledge administrators responsible for virtually all authoring. Unfortunately, the result often has been massive bottlenecks as content generated in this centralized way sits for weeks or months awaiting review. By the time knowledge reaches its intended users, much of it has aged to the point of irrelevance.
Top-down knowledge management has had limited success. KM will begin to show significant ROIs when the process is inverted. Centralized knowledge administration clearly produces higher-value knowledge -- but centralized authoring retards growth. In the coming decade, the hard dollar value of knowledge will be recognized, and everyone -- not just a small elite -- will be responsible for generating the raw materials for corporate KM.
Bottom-up knowledge generation will have significant impacts on the way work, and workers, are perceived by corporations. Management will have to develop new incentives for knowledge workers to contribute high-quality content. For more traditional firms now adopting KM practices, decentralization of knowledge generation will be difficult, as it is antithetical to some ingrained management principles and habits.<<< [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
3:36:09 PM
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We are not alone?
Found: Solar System Like Our Own. Researchers discover, for the first time ever, a planetary system similar to our own. And it's right next door, only 41 light years away. By Noah Shachtman. [Wired News]
3:29:39 PM
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mercoledì 12 giugno 2002
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From Paolo Valdemarin:
[Phil Wolff in a comment] Plumtree and others defined the intranet portal. Maybe [Radio] starts moving that portal to the desktop.
This is exactly what I meant. While corporate portals tend to centralize information and to create the need for some kind of editorial process, using tools like Radio lets users not only produce but also decide how to aggregate contents on their own desktops. This make the whole system highly scalable and lets users have a very high degree of customization in terms of how and when the access their information. I'm not saying that corporate portals are dead, I believe that there's a need for a set of centralized resources and contents. Applications like scheduling, document distribution, manuals, instructions, and similar still belong to a central server. Everything that does not need to be distributed to every single users of an Intranet can be decentralized. At the end of the last century we all believed that portals needed personalized GUIs and we were developing them on servers instead of where they belong: clients. Radio and applications like Radio are the ultimate GUI customization tool. I can decide how I access my contents because the interface is actually sitting on my own desktop, I don't need to change anything on the server, I can build the tools (or use others' tools) to decide how I want to interact with all these contents. Of course, given this approach, news aggregators as we know them today will need to evolve, but a journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step, and this is definetly the first very important step. [Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog]
(emphasys mine).
9:49:10 AM
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martedì 11 giugno 2002
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An experiment (you need the adobe svg plugin). Try to hover with the mouse on the logo:
10:19:13 PM
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From http://jrobb.userland.com . Emphasys mine.
Hey. Stock options. I think I hit a hot spot with stock options. My view is that they are great for pre-public companies. It's a way for start-ups to incentivize people that work extraordinary hours for little compensation. However, when it comes to a public company, stock options should be and are an expense against earnings. Companies that disagree are lying. Don't think that is a big deal? It is. If Microsoft expensed exercised stock options as wages, it wouldn't have earned any money since going public. That is a sobering thought.
It's funny, most commentators and companies always try to hide behind employees on this. They would call this a democratization of stock ownership. That's BS. The cruel fact of the matter is that management gets the lion share of stock options and not employees. This is not about a democratization of stock ownership. It is about how much money Larry Ellison or Michael Eisner can stuff in their pockets before they run their companies into the ground. What's worse, if you read the recent sad tale in the NYTimese magazine, copycats in the regulated monopolies, like SBC, have jumped in. They can claim "marketplace compensation" based on revenue -- even though the equivalent compensation is a farce -- to get their deals. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
11:17:14 AM
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domenica 9 giugno 2002
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The recension of the long awaited book of Stephen Wolfram is on the economist. Not much positive. How do you say "stroncatura" in english? But I am planning to read it (but 1200 pages!)
4:16:02 PM
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sabato 8 giugno 2002
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mercoledì 5 giugno 2002
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lunedì 3 giugno 2002
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Jacob Nielsen, usability guru, on Navision & Microsoft
[...] No matter what happens to this deal, we probably have to expect Microsoft to take over the market for small-and-medium sized business software. Most other software vendors are blinded by the opportunities for big-iron "enterprise" software and its associated big-ticket sales. Scaling down a high-end solution may turn out to be difficult, especially if Microsoft ends up establishing itself as the dominant vendor of business solutions for the sub-billion space. I note the importance of usability for these solutions since smaller companies rarely have an army of IT staff and a second army of IT consultants available to install and maintain their business software.
Could be very true.
5:23:16 PM
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sabato 1 giugno 2002
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Ultima di campionato, e forse ultima delle ultime: Funo vs DM
2:49:05 PM
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© Copyright
2006
Massimo Morelli.
Last update:
19/02/2006; 19.44.38. |
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