Tag: Technology

Red Gate Software is giving away a tool called SQL Prompt until September 1, 2006.  If you work with SQL Server at all, definitely visit Red Gate and grab this.

According to this article, Amazon’s patent is being reviewed because it looks like the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office granted a similar one 18 months before Amazon’s filing.  It will be interesting to see what fallout there would be from a decision invalidating Amazon’s patent.

That aside, this brief story does a nice job of pointing out how profoundly broken the patent system is.  The prior patent wasn’t found by a USPTO employee, but an actor from New Zealand who was angry about a slow book delivery and wanted to get back at Amazon.  If Amazon hadn’t made one of their customers upset, who knows if this would have ever been found.  The patent review will probably revisit these requirements:

• is 1-click new
• is 1-click useful
• is 1-click nonobvious

At the time Amazon got the patent, I felt it clearly failed the nonobvious requirement.  The existence of an 18-month-old patent on the same idea only confirms that.

So says Walt Mossberg, the man with the job I envy most in technology.

I agree with what he says for the most part on the advantages of the end-to-end model versus the component model. One thing I would say that’s slightly different is that Apple is winning not merely because of the tight linkages, but because of the quality of the end product, and their huge market share.

Having lost what Mossberg describes as “the first war” in the personal computing space, Apple took a look at the MP3 player market and delivered a product significantly ahead of the competition in quality and ease of use. Even when connected to a PC (as I did with my first iPod), using MusicMatch for the music software, I liked the experience better than other players I’d considered. Once iTunes came to the PC, it made things even easier.

Part of what helped Apple get its current marketshare in the digital music market is their refusal to inflict the subscription model on their customers. They understood that people want to own music instead of renting it and delivered just that. Between that, their great per-track price point, and the minimum necessary DRM, there are plenty of reasons to choose Apple over the competition.

According to this eWeek article pay premiums for skills that don’t have a certification grew three times faster than pay premiums for certified skills.

I never really bothered with certifications for any of my skills because I was usually too busy working to set aside the time to study for and pass the exams.  I was more motivated to do that for things like grad school.  I always felt that experience was more valuable than a certification, but the counter-argument of “if you have the experience, certification should be no problem” is still a reasonable one.

Still, I hope the pay premium changes mean employers are choosing experience in favor of those who’ve passed an exam but have little or no hands-on experience.

According to this article in MIT Technology Review, the Apple operating system got it’s very first virus this year.  I suppose the “virus-free” label wasn’t going to last forever, but we should still be extremely impressed that it took about five years for a serious vulnerability to be found.

Even with the latest vulnerability announced, I’ve still found the Mac mini I bought last year to be incredibly stable and easy to use when compared to any of the Windows machines I currently use.  The only fallout from this announcement I see is that anti-virus software makers will be able to sell more to Mac users.

Awhile back, I read a blog entry (probably from Robert Scoble) about a venture called Ether. If memory serves about how he described their goal, they’re trying to be the eBay of services. I figured I’d sign up and see if they’d add me to their beta test list. Today I got their e-mail saying I’d been added.

Here’s the business card I generated after signing up:

Scott Lawrence (IT Advisor) 1-888-MY-ETHER ext. 01568799

A lot of family and friends call me for advice on computer-related things. It seems to come with the territory when you’ve got a degree in computer science. If I make a little pocket change from this during the beta test, I’ll consider the experiment a success.

I’ll post more as the beta test proceeds.

I came across the article today in Advertising Age (via a Wall Street Journal link).  The article hints that this is the first step toward advertising showing up on iPods.

I’m not surprised.  It was inevitable that advertising would show up on iTunes.  I’d been hearing it in some of the podcasts I listen to already.  I wouldn’t expect Apple to turn down that revenue stream forever.  It’s still a little sad that there’s one more place we can now expect to see ads.