After Microsoft Stacks Vote - IBM Wants to Take its Ball and go Home

IBM May Quit Technology Standards Bodies - WSJ.com

"IBM and open-source groups that support collaborative software development said Microsoft had stacked the national committees that make up the ISO with employees and sympathetic voters. They also said Open XML is so complicated and obscure that only Microsoft could fully exploit it, cementing the software company's already-considerable lead in office-document software. IBM backed a rival format called Open Document that was already certified as an ISO standard."

Twitter Entering the Mainstream or "Jumping the Shark"

Ping - Technology Doesn’t Dumb Us Down. It Frees Our Minds. - NYTimes.com:

"...why when people who aren’t familiar with Twitter are told about it, they are “uncomprehending or angry.” His response (The co-founder of Twitter, Jack Dorsey) was brief and unsatisfying: “People have to discover value for themselves. Especially w/ something as simple & subtle as Twitter. It’s what you make of it.”"

Adding Simplicity - An Engineering Mantra: Are Data Warehouses Dinosaurs?

Adding Simplicity - An Engineering Mantra: Are Data Warehouses Dinosaurs?:

"As anybody that follows my blog knows, I am not a fan of vertical scaling. I don't like solutions that can only be implemented in a single address and storage space. Unfortunately, there are analytical problems that need a holistic view of data. This is very typical of data warehousing applications. As a result, data warehouses are expensive, often out of the reach of smaller organizations. But there may be an alternative that is less expensive and horizontally scalable. What is this great revelation? Processing streams of events using an Event Stream Processor (ESP) solution."

Enterprise Architecture - A Perspective

Service Oriented Enterprise: Why Enterprise Architecture is a Joke:

 "Anyone who has been in our industry for any period of time has heard the jokes about EA... 'EA's are the guys who program in PowerPoint.' Despite valiant efforts to mature the discipline by groups like IASA, the OMB, The Open Group, The Zachman Institute as well as individuals like Ambler, the discipline remains fragmented and often unproductive."

As Text Messages Fly, Danger Lurks - NYTimes.com

"“The act of texting automatically removes 10 I.Q. points,” said Paul Saffo, a technology trend forecaster in Silicon Valley. “The truth of the matter is there are hobbies that are incompatible. You don’t want to do mushroom-hunting and bird-watching at the same time, and it is the same with texting and other activities. We have all seen people walk into parking meters or walk into traffic and seem startled by oncoming cars.”"

Polyglot Programmer Meme

"There is a 'polyglot programmer' meme going around which roughly says that future systems will be built on a statically typed library foundation (e.g. BCL in .Net) with a dynamically typed language used in a dual role to both script those static types as well as define a domain-specific language (DSL) which will be used to implement the high level app logic."

Real artists ship, dabblers create concept products

"Pretenders don't quite understand that design is born of constraints. Real-life constraints, be they tangible or cognitive: Battery-life impacts every other aspect of the iPhone design - hardware and software alike. Screen resolution affects font, icon and UI design. The thickness of a fingertip limits direct, gestural manipulation of on-screen objects. Lack of a physical keyboard and WIMP controls create an unfamiliar mental map of the device. The iPhone design is a bet that solutions to constraints like these can be seamlessly molded into a unified product that will sell. Not a concept. Not a vision. A product that sells."

From "Why Apple doesn’t do “Concept Products"