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Warcraft inspires management philosophy
The massive multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG) World of Warcraft has made its first real contribution to society by offering a geeky management philosophy: Leeroy Jenkins.
The term apparently dates back to 2005 or earlier, but somehow escaped my attention. World of Worldcraft lets gamers team up with other player and scavenge for virtual goodies, and I'm the first to admit that I've never played it.
In the famous episode, a team of players spends minutes cooking up a plan to enter a room full of bad guys over audio an teleconference. As some boring management type is inquiring about the cost-benefit analysis, Leeroy yells his own name, rushes into the room, alerts the bad guys and gets himself and all his team mates killed.
"Leeroy, you are just stupid as hell," one gamer complains when the ordeal is over
"At least I have chicken," responds Leeroy, who left the boring meeting to heat up some chicken in his mom's microwave.
The management philosophy in this is that you have to cut through the bull and shouldn't over-scrutinize business decisions. Some times you have to go with your gut feeling.
Let's just hope that the right people in [enter your employer's name] read this. Chicken is better than sitting in meetings where no decisions are made.
October 31, 2007 at 06:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (18) | TrackBack
Happy Halloween
So cute - and so embarrassed if she ever sees the pictures in 20 years :)
October 31, 2007 at 04:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack
Microsoft puts SOA on the Redmond diet
What do you get if you take an architecture for creating componentized applications that works across departments, companies and infrastructure vendors, and strip it from open interfaces and force customers to buy only your components?
Microsoft claims that you get an easy to deploy service oriented architecture. But it's more like buying a car that can only drive on Microsoft's toll roads and that has to be loaded onto a flatbed truck to be transported between those closed toll roads.
Welcome to the world of the Redmond diet. Just like the perceived benefits of Atkin's and other hype-of-the-day the totally illogical is spun into offering great benefits.
The facts: Microsoft today released "Oslo" and opened the flood gates of PR spin: Oslo is an "effort [that] utilizes the company's top engineering talent to build on the model-driven and service-enabled principles of Microsoft Dynamic IT and extend the benefits of service-oriented architecture (SOA) beyond the firewall."
We could go on quoting the press release, but you would get none the wiser. The "effort" that is Oslo is limited to minor enhancements in future versions of Microsoft middleware portfolio. Companies that have been completely sucked into the Microsoft sales machine will be able to use it to share componentized applications.
Most companie today live in the 21st century and therefore will want to work with partners, do mergers and buy technology based on its merits. Those will want to build a SOA that actually delivers on the promise of being open standards based. Somebody in Redmond must have forgotten to take their reality medication.
October 31, 2007 at 12:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBack
Amazon Mechanical Turk gets an evil twin
Would you perform a simple 2-second task in exchange for free porn?
Online criminals are betting that you will. In a clever variation on Amazon's Mechanical Turk, they are asking the public to enter captcha code to unlock the gates to nudie pictures (see picture below the fold), researchers at Panda Labs found.
The so-called captcha human verification codes in this instance was streamed directly from Yahoo, and allows the gang to amass tons of email addresses. But it could also be used to leave spam comments on blogs and news websites.
Amazon Mechanical Turk already has demonstrated that people will perform tasks for seemingly ridiculous sums as low as 1 cent. A certain news website once experimented with paying 2 cents for people to submit news stories to Digg.com – not to rig the system but simply to put it in there. The test resulted in a temporary ban by Digg.com.
But the point is that people will do legitimate things for 1 or 2 cents. People will download nefarious applications such as Zango because they are promised porn. One day they will help break into ecommerce stores for some freebie.
pixelation added by me
October 30, 2007 at 12:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (11) | TrackBack
Apple battles iPhone lock-in failure
Apple has started requiring credit card payments for iPhone purchases in an apparent bid to stop commercial unlocking operations.
About a quarter of all iPhones have been unlocked, allowing owners to use devices without the pricy AT&T subscription in and outside the US. In some countries vendors have started selling unlocked iPhones months before the official release.
You can therefore safely assume that there are professional operations that buy large numbers of iPhones, unlock the devices and resell them on the secondary market. Apple for one can't prevent the practice: removing the iPhone's SIM-lock is fully legal because the iPhone is sold without subsidy.
Apple however can't be happy. The iPod maker requires AT&T to cough up a share of the subscription revenues. No activation, no dough.
Apple tried to change the rules for an established market, where users expect to pick a provider that delivers the best value – not one that squeezes them for the most money. iPhone unlockers for now have to demonstrate that they are worthy of Apple, by showing that they can continue operating by thinking different.
October 29, 2007 at 09:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (11) | TrackBack
BEA's fairy tale: over and out?
BEA today told Oracle to go to hell, telling the database vendor that it would let the $17 per share acquisition offer expire.
Together with Oracle's refusal to raise its offer yesterday afternoon, investors now seem to have lost faith in on Oracle takeover. BEA stock closed at $16.50 today. A $17 dollar price would indicate that investors expected BEA to accept the deal. If they anticipated Oracle to raise its offer, you'd expect BEA stock to trade at more than $17.
What will be left on Sunday is a wounded BEA. The company can not reliably tell its customers that it is a viable long term investment. If its shareholders don't see that, they will likely receive a wake-up call in future earnings releases.
October 26, 2007 at 11:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBack
NetApp vs. Sun patent fight becomes the new SCO vs. humanity
Sun has made true on its chief executive's promise and today filed a lawsuit against storage vendor NetApp for infringing on 12 of its patents. The case is a retaliation for a legal complaint that NetApp filed against Sun in September.
In his colorful, Wednesday blog posting, Schwartz declared an all-out war against NetApp. Sun will demand that NetApp ceases sales of many of its products and demands monetary damages.
More importantly, Schwartz succeeds at positioning his company as the undisputed "good guy" by promising to donate half the proceeds to the free software movement. Secondly, the case revolves around ZFS, technology that Sun developed and then released under an open source license. NetApp isn't just suing Sun, but threatens mankind.
Sun's strategy is working. The company already has Groklaw on its side, which kept the world privy of all details small and large of the SCO case. Growlaw has already called upon the public to hunt for prior art against NetApp patents.
This juicy patent conflict started 5 years ago, when NetApp approached StorageTek with the request to purchase a patent of them. StorageTek declined, but realised that NetApp probably was violating the patent and started licensing negotiations. Sun acquired NetApp in 2005, when the licensing talks were still going on.
Sun at one point asked $37m as part of a patent cross licensing deal. Talks broke down and last September NetApp sued Sun for alleged patent infringement.
NetApp always has claimed that it is not the aggressor in this case. Sun demanded royalty payments, which NetApp took as a legal threat that warranted a pre-emptive strike. It now also argues that the Sun patents are bad and should be retracted.
NetApp clearly lacks credibility. It fired the first shot by filing its lawsuit. It coveted a patent that it now claims to be invalid. And you can never win by suing open source.
In antoher patent war, pro-patent lobbyists hired a yacht in July 2005 to call upon the European Parliament to vote for software patents. The initiative was met by canoes holding up a sign that reads: "software patents kill innovation". The image perfectly depicts that parties in the patent debate: big money vs the common man. The patent directive was turned down with near unanimous votes btw.
October 26, 2007 at 12:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (16) | TrackBack
BEA will sleep with anyone for the right price
BEA isn't against whoring itself out, it's just that it will only degrade itself for the right price.
That is, in summary, the middleware vendor's latest move in the takeover battle with Oracle. BEA has reached the conclusion that it has no future as an independent vendor. Al that is left is getting a good price. Oracle is offering $17, BEA is asking $21.
Investors clearly don't believe that BEA will get away with a 23 per cent price hike. The company's stock is currently trading around $17.5-$17.6.
Now that BEA has put out the for sale sign, the company has to sell as soon as possible. No sensible CIO can tell his boss that they are betting their SOA or integration strategy on a company that will undergo major changes soon.
Especially because a major part of BEA's business is 'keeping the preferred vendor honest'. Many clients buy BEA because want to prevent a vendor lock-in from (usually) Oracle or SAP. Oracle customers will loose their leverage, but SAP customer will loose confidence in the vendor.
open for business
October 25, 2007 at 10:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBack
Google maps tracks SoCal fires
As Silicon Valley is enjoying a quite nice Indian Summer, Southern California (SoCal) is getting hit by a series of wild fires. Thousands of homes have been destroyed and people have been evacuated on a massive scale.
If your geographic comprehension of SoCal doesn't go beyond Disneyland and Los Angeles, Google Maps is coming to the rescue (no pun intended).
A series of individuals as well as news organizations are maintaining maps that closely track the position of fires and evacuation zones.
All of this is possible because Google opened the Google Maps application programming interfaces. yes, previously people could create similar maps, but today they can do so without much effort, allowing stay at home consumers to create maps that are just as informative as those done by the pros.
October 24, 2007 at 10:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (10) | TrackBack
Time travel with Windows start screens
October 24, 2007 at 01:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBack
Spanish
